Bitcoin-24.com matching engine seems broken, site down.

[Beutelschneider]

Thinking about it, the most annoying thing about this is that it prevented me from buying at yesterdays low. Today the price is almost double... bah, that would have been a nice profit margin! Boo. Anyway, hopefully it will be back up tomorrow

  I suggest you switch to a well known FOREX broker, IMHO oanda has a very good reputation! If you want a nice client interface, try FXCM! And their platforms are much more reliable than the systems run by a handfull of ppl or one-man-bands like Simon! 


By this point, i won't consider any legal action against him as (i hope  ) he is working to fix that giant pile of shit that occurred. Calling the authorities on him would be the last option if he would try and run away or giving a shit on us and our money/BTC in.
 

[1713584108]

1713584108

[Puppet]

Thinking about it, the most annoying thing about this is that it prevented me from buying at yesterdays low. Today the price is almost double... bah, that would have been a nice profit margin! Boo. Anyway, hopefully it will be back up tomorrow

I wish I shared your optimism. A zero fee exchange with huge bug in trading engine, site closed, change of banks, talk of lawyers,..
Getting just half my coins/euros back at some point, is more then Im willing to bet on right now.

[realme]

Could you stop small talk please. This is an important topic an should be the place for exchange of relevant information.
Thanks

If you want know something about Simon and his business:
http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46

[Arlog]

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

[wuala]

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

I suggest:

What about sending all funds in bitcoins?

1) Instant
2) No wait to the bank account problem to solve

[GreekGeek]

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

That is exactly my question !
I never made a trade on btc24 either
I just "parked" my bitcoins there

[alexh]

Do you guys think we will ever see our money again?

[glub0x]

Do you guys think we will ever see our money again?

this.

[GreekGeek]

Do you guys think we will ever see our money again?

the word "lawyers" is worrying

[xyz]

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

I suggest:

What about sending all funds in bitcoins?

1) Instant
2) No wait to the bank account problem to solve

You seem to forget that bitcoin-24 was a trading center! There you could buy and sell btc to or from those who want to sell or buy. From where should Simon take btc for your Euro or Dollars? He can only pay back what you have there!
let us hope he will do it finally...
MY BIG problem with him is that he never comes here and tells us what really happened and what he will do to solve the problems!

And for the btc: there have been problems too, as you know. Some where sold twice or more. He have to figure out what happened! Till he really know how much btc every client have he cannot pay SOME back!

[anon24]

i suspect the reason he is holding BTC is because of the trading engine glitches causing people to get free coins. if everyone cashes out he can't rollback the trades and undo the damage. i imagine a lot of people transferred their funds out as soon as they realised what was happening so he might already be down.

then again i've seen no acknowledgement from him at all that there was any problem with the trading engine, so who knows... a bit of communication would go a long way here!

[Delicieuxz]

Seems like the next big pile of shit is gonna hit the fan in 20 minutes...

Coppers will only laugh at you if you bring this shit up with no fraud evidence at all.

exactly! it's just a piece of paper, nothing more

Arrest warrants, court orders, court judgments... they're all just pieces of paper, but they will screw up peoples' life.

[robix]

The situation is, we are absolutely blind at the moment.

First of all, anyone here who knows Simon personally. Try to get in contact and retrieve information. Has anyone any form of communication with him?

Second. The information policy is absolutely unsatisfying. What's the reason. Too much problems to solve, advice of lawyer, or just with intent to defraud? I don't know. What can we do. He should know, that lag of information doesn't make things better.

I suppose there are a lot of people, more or less involved in this matter. Give your thoughts.

[moni3z]

Could you stop small talk please. This is an important topic an should be the place for exchange of relevant information.
Thanks

If you want know something about Simon and his business:
http://www.reddit.com/user/TAiS46

Lol look that name up in stackexchange/overflow "how does I float calculations?" that is why there's trading engine problems. never use float when money is involved http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15165559/how-to-round-amounts-correct-update-1

[MegaBrutal]

----- RANT -----
How can I be so unfortunate that I send a deposit hours before the site goes down? I was so upset on Mt.Gox that I lost my trust in it - when their service went down like the 5th time after they promised they made huge improvements those I haven't seen; I immediately transferred all my funds to Bitcoin-24 when Mt.Gox came back online, in the hope that I get better service there. Went to sleep, woke up, saw my transaction was confirmed, was glad; then saw Bitcoin-24: "Our Service is momentarily not available." - no worries, they must be doing some maintenance, all trading sites have problems these days - Vircurex was also down like a week ago.

But now I'm getting worried that maybe I never see my money again, which would mean the end of the Bitcoin business for me: since I'm poor like hell, I don't have more money to invest. It was a huge luck that I ever got here, since I got in half a year ago when BTC was at ~9-10 EUR. Those times it was affordable for me, and anyway, my original investment has already returned, nevertheless I would have liked to see my profits grow larger - it would help a lot in my financial situation, I found it possible that some day it would end my poverty.
----- End Of Rant -----

(Why this forum doesn't have spoiler tags?)

Nah, to be more constructive; my highly optimistic guess is that Simon doesn't communicate more because he's hell busy fixing the site. As an IT person, he would probably prefer to solve the problem at hand and then do the communication. When you're really into something, communication might be distractive. Either he's working on the problem or communicate; probably he doesn't have time or energy to do both at once. (The case of Mt.Gox was different, however: since they are a huge business, I'd expect much more professionalism from them in the field of communication - they are even able to hire people just for the sole purpose of communication.)

Well, I sent a kind e-mail to Simon, asking my BTC back - no reply since then, but note I just sent it less than a day ago, so patience is a virtue. Likely that the trade engine was shut down before it could pick up my deposit: it's still sitting on my deposit address, and I think my transaction wasn't even confirmed when the site closed. I guess my deposit wasn't even registered in the system - all he needs to do is to transfer my money from the deposit address to my address, no database hacking or anything is necessary. Since my money didn't took part of the chaos caused by the trade engine bug, I'm hoping he's gonna send it back to me.

Why he hold btc if the problem is bank account?

I guess he's just too busy to do that at the moment, it would be a lengthy and complicated task - probably he's better off fixing the site soon and then let people to withdraw their funds on their own.

I know I might sound naively optimistic, actually I'm also worried (as you can see in my above rant), but as for now, I'd like to exercise some more understanding and trust what he wrote: "All funds (EUR, USD, PLN, GBP & Bitcoins) are safe.".

The situation is, we are absolutely blind at the moment.

True. Hope we'll get some more enlightenment soon.

[bitbadger]

To open up full trading again the account balance would need to be able to be released and transferred to the other bank account.

My suspicion is that alongside the database engine issue there could be problems with the funds in the closed Polish account being frozen.

Why do I think this? Looking at the way this exchange was run. Plus the announcement on the website "our lawyers are working on a solution".

You do not need solutions from lawyers simply when a bank account is closed. The balance is simply transferred to another account. There is some other reason.

Why would bank account funds be frozen? Banks and other institutions are required to take preventative action if they suspect their facilities may be being used for money laundering or other illegal activity. With the customer being a Bitcoin exchange, there could be issues concerning AML/KYC compliance (or possibly as seems the case here, the lack of it).

This suggests to me it could be more than a simple account closure and move to another bank account involved here. These AML/KYC regulations will most likely apply to both accounts: Poland and Germany.  

Lawyers working on a solution. We know how fast lawyers work (paid by the hour and they dont work weekends).

footnote: I do not know for sure if the above is 100% the case, it's just conjecture. I hope things are not that involved.


EDIT: Note to moderators. There are at least 3 threads on this topic currently active, wouldnt it make sense to merge them into one?

[Amitabh S]

Simon has been uncommunicative in the past as well, so nothing new here. What is disturbing is the type of questions he has asked on Stackoverflow. These and the fact that he is the sole person running the show should have been more public. I blame the people on this forum for not disbursing this information well enough. They should be held responsible for our loss, apart from Simon. (those that knew these two facts and still kept quiet). 

I did the same mistake and transferred bitcoins there hours before this happening.
Its all our mistake for not doing due-diligence in the matter. Basically bitcoin-24 is a "one-man-show". How an exchange run by a single guy (a single point of failure, if you may) can be called "the biggest European exchange" is beyond me.

In the future, NEVER put your money where only one person is in charge of it... I would say at least two people need to be in control of the funds.

[jonytk]

boys boys, is anyone in contact with MTGOX and the other exchanges? they should know about this.
I mean, really,
the "panic" selling 3 days ago, may very well just been due to this,
See:
People make funny money on bitcoin-24, then started transfered to mtgox or other exchanges
 some cashed out for $ but others "see the ones doing the pump and dump" just pumped the price until the crash
rinse, repeat, until btcoin-24 hot wallet was out of coins.


Or i was the only one at 180Eur doing arbitrage with the exchanges, buy gox 180 sell bitcoin-central 190... etc?
and i didn't know anything about the bug, i just knew: damn prices are higher in European exchanges.

How many people saw that video? And how many people knew it before! you don't need to be a hacker to use this to "steal"

Now, i never transferred money there, just 0.5 btc, it thought it was fishy that they didn't have trading fees, this is not good,
it's impossible, any real forex always has a margin even small but some, and it protects against any rounding error.

Another indication, his VouchX was ALWAYS empty in the last week! so people, So i knew there was some kind of huge arbitrage going on.
when was the last time anyone did a "real" sepa order and transfered money out?

Now if i had money there i will be concerned if he can really roll back everything. i guess he will try to honor the monies of the people that make deposits
you can say bye bye to your coins there. Since he didn't have trading fee he has no assets! And be sure people siphoned money out of there via vouchx and btc.

That's why he have to contact big exchanges and ask them to freeze accounts of people that used the bug to siphoned btc out changed for money and is at their withdrawal limits!

[Amitabh S]

It is possible that only very little funds have actually been taken off btc24.  They all seem to be stuck

[arlekyn13]

I remember people in bitcoin-24 website chat were complaining about extremely long delays with bitcoin withdrawals, up to 12h. Maybe larger amounts were manually checked to make sure they were not a result of the trading bug? When my SEPA deposit was finally credited, I just bought the bitcoins and withdrew them and the transfer was on the network within 15mins or so, at the same time someone was complaining about a half a day delay with his btc withdrawal. That would mean that maybe the loss caused by the trading system is actually limited, but since the website was pretty much profitless, might be just enough for the website owner to not be able to cover it.