Dear Crypto-Trade user,
We're aware that the past days have been very stressful and nerve-racking for those of you who haven't been able to withdraw their Bitcoins and especially for those who still have "old" pending withdrawals from February, 10th. Please let us hereby explain what happened the past days, because it's important for us, that you - as beeing the most important part of Crypto-Trade - understand that we're not solely responsible for the current (unsatisfactory) situation and that we're standing on the same site fighting against an attack that hit the Bitcoin protocol.
Back in February, 6th we were thrilled and highly motivated to bring Crypto-Trade to a new level (don't worry, we still are) by adding new coins, improving support, PR and communication with our community. Remember that we were fully prepared for the launch of Ultracoin days before the initial start and that we were happily expecting every new user for our small but feature-rich exchange. But then something unforeseen happened which is now known as 'Bitcoin malleability attack'.
At this point allow us to quote a short passage from Coindesk about what this malleability is all about:
(below you can find the link to the article for those of you who want to read more about this exploit)
"It's an attack that lets someone change the unique ID of a bitcoin transaction before it is confirmed on the bitcoin network. The change makes it possible for someone to pretend that a transaction didn't happen, if all the right conditions are in place."
To sum it up, we were confronted with the following issues that all happened at once:
- A lot of new users (maybe users who were completely new to digital currencies at all) came to our site with high expectations
- Bitcoin malleability attack generated lots of false Bitcoin withdrawals and created thereby many many many support tickets we are still working on
- We had a glitch that postponed the proper configuration of new servers and caused issues with the site (lag)
You can imagine that the last weeks were a hell for our developers and that the whole Crypto-Trade team is still suffering from this attack as much as you.
But remember: this issue affected all exchanges, MtGox, Bitstamp, BTC-E and many more. Some of them went completely down during the attack, some of them even stopped their withdrawals, but all of them are still working on the backlog that was caused by this - like we do.
Status quo:
We're nearly finished of reviewing all Bitcoin transactions that were stuck since February, 10th and we are thankful for your patience and understanding.
Crypto-Trade never lost or stole a coin from its users, so please don't worry if some withdrawals seem to last longer than others.
That's just because we need to take a deeper look into a few withdrawals that got flagged as a double spending in our software and we just want to make sure, everything went right here.
If everything is sorted out, we will continue with the implementation of new features, increasing the general trade volume, add new coins to the trading page and start some really nice giveaways! Until then, please give us some time to complete the backlog and only report the most urgent issues.
But to fulfill a feature request that many of you wanted to see on Crypto-Trade and that was easy to do, we added UTC/LTC to our trading page.
It can be found here:
https://www.crypto-trade.com/trade/utc_ltcTo those of you who came to Bitcoin as the shit started to hit the fan and who are now concerned about their coins and the greater meaning of digital currencies in general:
Bitcoin is still a very young technology, but it has already successfully overcome several challanges, i.e. the Silk Road Crash, the "Chinese ban" and now a DoS attack on its transaction ID protocol. With every of those challenges, Bitcoin became stronger afterwards and so will it be this time.
Best regards,
Crypto-Trade team
Links:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-bug-guide-transaction-malleability/http://www.righto.com/2014/02/the-bitcoin-malleability-attack-hour-by.html
