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April 23, 2013, 12:24:46 PM |
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Just trying to post the facts here and hope no one else looses money/bitcoin from these guys. Wish there was a return function in BTC, but unfortunately I may have to chalk this up as a loss. Not trying to troll or anything, this is one of my first posts, but I've been using bitcoin now for the past year or so and really like trying to find companies to buy stuff from.
April 10th I placed an order for 1.5 Ounces of Gold.
Here is the transaction. BTC was somewhere around 210-220 USD around that time. It was sold as a spot price:
Status: 1289 confirmations
Date: 4/10/2013 12:50
To: 1LLzsLuGTLLuGLs575XH2bx5rw8nU78mVT
Debit: -11.7128 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.0005 BTC
Net amount: -11.7133 BTC
Transaction ID: 462f100a61ac5cf06e863a40d22b1665319c9bab7e10bf2f16ef68d913b3fa30
After several days (April 18th), I get this email from Jay at Coinabul:
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On April 10th-11th we were hit with a 'perfect storm' situation which caused us to have a major issue with transaction processing.
Due to a previously undiscovered bug in Bitcoin 0.8.1 we experienced an issue where bitcoind corrupted our hotwallet, along with our blockchain, but did so in such a way that for a few hours it was still rendering payment addresses to customers but unable to sync to the network, or even see unconfirmed transactions coming in. This is the kind of one-in-a-million occurance that happens when using cutting edge systems like Bitcoin, and we're glad it happened to us instead of a normal user who would have likely been unable to salvage any bitcoins from the mess. We immediately shut down our daemon and proceeded to begin repairing and salvaging, as well as deploying a hot-patch to enable us to extract the remaining BTC from the wallet in question.
In the short time it took us to salvage our hotwallet, bitcoin price plummetted at minor exchanges as most of the major ones suddenly went offline. At that point, we'd already initiated a few major transfers to exchanges which weren't even able to show up in our balances for another day or so, let alone be sold at anything even resembling the spot price you spent them for. At that point we were left with the crucial decision of whether to sell any remaining coins at a much lower rate than expected, and do our best to lock in a higher spot price before the market crashed further, or hold on to your coins and return them to you. We opted to do the former which is a good thing, considering bitcoin price proceeded to hit less than half of the value at which we sold.
Now we are left with two choices on how to resolve the situation that affected your purchase: 1. I can send you the gold value your coins were eventually able to net(0.83 ounces); 2. I can return the dollar-value of your coins by repurchasing that dollar-value's worth of BTC and send it to you.
Let me know which is preferred, and I'll do that.
Thanks, and I appreciate your understanding in this issue.
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My response on April 19th (and I know it is slightly harsh, but sometimes the truth hurts):
Jay-
I'm sorry that situation happened to you and clearly this was not an easy decision or situation for your business.
Since you made the decision to do this without consulting with me first, I would much rather prefer you send the exact amount of bitcoin that I spent back to me. Since bitcoin was not at fault during this event and also I did not have anything to do with the markets crashing nor code bugs I think this is much more appropriate. Essentially what I read below in your email is, to be blunt "We made some mistakes in our code, sold your bitcoin at a spot price much lower than what the contract price we agreed on, and would like you to pay for our mistakes". I know this sounds harsh but this is what you're asking me to do.
Please let me know and I'll send you my bitcoin address in which you can send that 11.7133 BTC back.
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My followup on April 20th (at this point I'm slightly upset...even though I should get Gold or BTC at the spot value I purchased them at, at this point I would just like what I spent back):
Jay,
Please send refund of at least what I spent of BTC 11.7133 back to my bitcoin address:
1NnnqcA69aUhLh4kzgLtkfoi8UzVD8BP62
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Anyone else have an opinion? Or am I just out of luck? Kinda crappy...wish I had my bitcoins back.... His code bug and the bitcoin DDoS on MtGox was not my fault. I just wanted to buy gold with my bitcoin.
Thank you.
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