Freicoin (FRC) Issues - Global or local to that exchange?

[No_2]

cryptonit.net is having issues with Freicoin (FRC) but it is not clear from the administrator if this is peculiar to that exchange or if this is a global issues with FRC.

Can someone point me at some information on this or fill me in?

If it is a local exchange issue I may just move my coins elsewhere.

[galambo]

Cryptonit directly uses the bitcoin "move" RPC function to manage his user accounts.

What does this mean for you?

mugen isn't keeping any accounting records of what his customers are doing. So if one of his exchanges has a bug, like his Freicoin exchange did, he cannot determine what amounts all of his accounts should have. Mugen's exchange had a bug where he lost customer funds when the site was in beta. Actually, this is the same bug his site had to shut down for recently. He was advised to implement his exchange using external accounting & logs.

Had mugen built his exchange so that it kept accounting records and logs he wouldn't have had any problems trading Freicoin and other coins. Unfortunately, even if someone wanted to make all of his depositors whole they couldn't do it because he doesn't keep the records necessary to pay people back.

I strongly recommend you stay very far away from cryptonit for ANY coin.

[No_2]

Cryptonit directly uses the bitcoin "move" RPC function to manage his user accounts.

What does this mean for you?

mugen isn't keeping any accounting records of what his customers are doing. So if one of his exchanges has a bug, like his Freicoin exchange did, he cannot determine what amounts all of his accounts should have. Mugen's exchange had a bug where he lost customer funds when the site was in beta. Actually, this is the same bug his site had to shut down for recently. He was advised to implement his exchange using external accounting & logs.

Had mugen built his exchange so that it kept accounting records and logs he wouldn't have had any problems trading Freicoin and other coins. Unfortunately, even if someone wanted to make all of his depositors whole they couldn't do it because he doesn't keep the records necessary to pay people back.

I strongly recommend you stay very far away from cryptonit for ANY coin.

Thanks for this.

The logs were sort-of stored in the on system emails - but I had to delete them to get technical support :/. So now there is no record of my original balance.

Luckily I started logging it after a week or two. I may have lost about 2,000 - 3,000 FRC. (About 2BTC)

Are there any other exchanges that support FRC? Or is it local wallets only?

[bushstar]

If you go to your account on Cryptonit you can see a full history of all your trades.

CryptoCoin -> Exchange -> Order Details -> Select currency pair -> History

Using the wallet to move money does not mean that you cannot log it. Cryptonit says that they would like to release correspondence with maaku but has not gotten permission yet. This should mean that maaku can clarify what the issue is here.

Go talk to maaku to help Cryptonit or at least get him to explain what the issue is so perhaps the community can come up with a solution. Freicoin is open source and I'm sure maaku would appreciate any contributions.

I would be interested to know what the issue is and if there are any fixes.

[galambo]

Thanks for this.

The logs were sort-of stored in the on system emails - but I had to delete them to get technical support :/. So now there is no record of my original balance.

Luckily I started logging it after a week or two. I may have lost about 2,000 - 3,000 FRC. (About 2BTC)

Are there any other exchanges that support FRC? Or is it local wallets only?

We have two new exchanges that have sprung up from cryptonit's fumble.


bter.com

and

dgex.com


I'm not sure which of those will end up being the "mtgox" of Freicoin. May the best exchange win.

[galambo]

If you go to your account on Cryptonit you can see a full history of all your trades.

CryptoCoin -> Exchange -> Order Details -> Select currency pair -> History

Using the wallet to move money does not mean that you cannot log it. Cryptonit says that they would like to release correspondence with maaku but has not gotten permission yet. This should mean that maaku can clarify what the issue is here.

Go talk to maaku to help Cryptonit or at least get him to explain what the issue is so perhaps the community can come up with a solution. Freicoin is open source and I'm sure maaku would appreciate any contributions.

I would be interested to know what the issue is and is there are any fixes.

Mugen lost customer coins during cryptonit FRC beta. I know because I covered his losses at this time from my own pocket. He released his FRC exchange knowing it was broken against advice.

[No_2]

Ok,

bter.com report the following:

"FRC user please note: Due to FRC's "demurrage" and as instructed by the Official Freicoin Website, we will charge 0.017% (including our maintaining fee of 0.001%) every day from your FRC balance as well as the locked in funds for pending orders. Please also note we charge 0.2% on FRC withdrawals."

Is this the correct level of demurrage?

dgex.com:

"no demurrage on FRC!"

Any ideas why this is - are they just covering the cost?

[galambo]

Ok,

bter.com report the following:

"FRC user please note: Due to FRC's "demurrage" and as instructed by the Official Freicoin Website, we will charge 0.017% (including our maintaining fee of 0.001%) every day from your FRC balance as well as the locked in funds for pending orders. Please also note we charge 0.2% on FRC withdrawals."

Is this the correct level of demurrage?

Yes. This is an appropriate level to cover their demurrage fee costs.

dgex.com:

"no demurrage on FRC!"

Any ideas why this is - are they just covering the cost?

The operator of dgex is hoping that people will cycle their coin through the exchange, giving him the withdraw fee (1%), fast enough to cover the demurrage.

Two equally valid solutions to the same problem. Let's see which one is best.

[Bicknellski]

https://bter.com/trade/frc_btc

FRC user please note: Due to FRC's "demurrage" and as instructed by the Official Freicoin Website, we will charge 0.017% (including our maintaining fee of 0.001%) every day from your FRC balance as well as the locked in funds for pending orders. Please also note we charge 0.2% on FRC withdrawals.

BTER Admin: I do understand the demurrage is calculated by the new block hight and the old block height. We can do the same calculation as the Freicoin's client do. But by considering the large amount of potential users and operations of the exchange platform, we prefer a simpler way to guarantee a low load of the hosting server and low rate of potential mistakes. Yes, we charge a flat rate every day. We charge 0.017% a day which means accumulatively 6% per year. It's only 1% higher than Frecoin's one year demurrage  5% in case you put your coins on our platform for a year. We are still not sure if this small over-charge can cover our costs or not. Let's see.

Very simple way to handle the demurrage... this exchange will not have the same issues that Cryptonit had with FRC. They seem to be much more competent programmers.

[GCInc.]

Very simple way to handle the demurrage... this exchange will not have the same issues that Cryptonit had with FRC. They seem to be much more competent programmers.

As the operator of DGEX.com I would like to chime in on this controversial topic of exchange demurrage. It's rather simple to implement daily demurrage of FRC in your database. The little I know, I wouldn't think that has much to with the failure of Cryptonit. Other technical / competence issues, yes perhaps.

The 5% yearly decline is, if not trivial, at least not a great obstacle to any business. It can be easily subsidized from the profit margin of any venture that is considered feasible with or without the demurrage. Whether the subsidy is worth it, remains to be decided by market dynamics. The initial impression, surprisingly, is that the audience actually prefers paying the demurrage over someone else paying it for them... (the prime psychological reason being it's considered suspicious if you pay something for a person you don't know).

[Bicknellski]

Very simple way to handle the demurrage... this exchange will not have the same issues that Cryptonit had with FRC. They seem to be much more competent programmers.

As the operator of DGEX.com I would like to chime in on this controversial topic of exchange demurrage. It's rather simple to implement daily demurrage of FRC in your database. The little I know, I wouldn't think that has much to with the failure of Cryptonit. Other technical / competence issues, yes perhaps.

The 5% yearly decline is, if not trivial, at least not a great obstacle to any business. It can be easily subsidized from the profit margin of any venture that is considered feasible with or without the demurrage. Whether the subsidy is worth it, remains to be decided by market dynamics. The initial impression, surprisingly, is that the audience actually prefers paying the demurrage over someone else paying it for them... (the prime psychological reason being it's considered suspicious if you pay something for a person you don't know).

+1 CGinc... thanks for that but if it is EASY to implement why was there even an issue at Cryptonit and even when it was clearly a problem why did the exchange continue to operate? That to me was telling. I personally exploited the bug on his site by accident and returned the 200 FRC that I had gained when I click on the trade button 2 or 3 times. As soon as I noted the problem I can't understand why he let people continue trading for many days after that? Either incompetence or maybe something more nefarious. Either way. BTER does not have that problem and they completely avoided the issue by implementing their own solution as you say SIMPLE. Why couldn't Cryptonit do it? Your guess is as good as mine.

[GCInc.]

Why couldn't Cryptonit do it? Your guess is as good as mine.

Yeah I was fortunate to not be involved in FRC when the issue was ongoing thus missed seeing what exactly it was about. From what I hear I can deduce Cryptonit would have been just fine this time had he not tried to implement demurrage at all or mess with the wallets. Just keep stable balances in the database and orderbook and rely on the fees. But maybe he would have failed another way one day then.

It's easy to find an immediate reason for an unexpected failure outside yourself (there often truly is one) when you have scarce resources. However the bottom line is that if you are unable to obsess over a incomplete public commercial web project hour by hour, you risk losing out in an exploit. And should that fall on you as it at some point does, you better swallow it on your own without making such a noise. Some of us learn that too late.

Like I wouldn't like to open up about the majorly pissed off odds of how these exchange dynamics have sorted themselves for now... I saw the immediate need for a FRC exchange, and when planning it for the next few days it came up that BTER do have a low traffic one in Chinese.

Decided to act immediately and nearly whipped my brains out in the most intense 24 hours to put a realtime exchange from a well working code base online. Despite regretting the waste of a few days, still drooled about a decent market share (not just talking about profit, "drooling" used as a metaphor for the concretization of motivation for doing anything) as you see not all of us like to use a Chinese language web site for trading.

Well there the next morning they have actually come up with an English translation to grab 99% of the FRC volume before our very eyes! That's exceptional speed, talk about some serious oriental black magic as if they had known what I was doing at the same time.

Losing thus the first mover advantage, can't now allocate my busy resources to a project that blazing fast against expectations became a miniscule marginal market, nobody else to blame there but myself and need to take the hit and move on. Whining a bit to ease my heart yep, but that's an interesting story to share anyway!

The lesson from the story is that as long as you don't exaggerate unfortunate incidents to tear down your reputation altogether, you should be fine to strike again when it suits you. Rep gone when you have spread the mess over all the people involved and their cousin, rebuilding the whole show takes insane amount of work and you'll never be intact again.

[Bicknellski]

There are different niches in the FRC market. Your site actually has the market cornered it is just the users don't get that yet. Your site has a few things that BTER and VCX do not have and that is a potential for "savings" and "trade". Cryptonit definitely made mistakes, didn't listen then turned on the devs of FRC for no other reason that to save face. Unfortunately the FTC and LTC users also lost some coins so maybe it wasn't the demurrage after all but a seriously flawed coding of the way trades are being made. Anyhow I am grateful for dgex.com and bter.com as well as vcx we are certainly flush with exchanges we can SAVE demurrage at your exchange, we can trade in fiat EUR, USD and CNY in the other two although the cost of trades makes you wonder why you wouldn't check out every alternative.

https://cryptonit.net/comment/414#comment-414

[gabbynot]

Vircurex isn't charging demurrage at all during this month, actually.

[Wilderness]

Why couldn't Cryptonit do it? Your guess is as good as mine.

Well there the next morning they have actually come up with an English translation to grab 99% of the FRC volume before our very eyes! That's exceptional speed, talk about some serious oriental black magic as if they had known what I was doing at the same time.

do you mean they created an exchange that took 99% of the trading traffic? Or that overseas sources bought up all of the FRC?

thanks,

[GCInc.]

do you mean they created an exchange that took 99% of the trading traffic? Or that overseas sources bought up all of the FRC?

Last week, when there were only two FRC exchanges - BTER and DGEX - BTER was trading 100x (and still is, even more) more volume than DGEX.

This happened because of the swift translation of their website to English, concurrently with the launch of DGEX. Had they not done the translation immediately (as I estimated would not happen for at least a few days / weeks), DGEX would as the practical western language first mover likely have received 25% to 50% of the market volume, with 10% upwards concurrently. That opposed to the current situation of average 0.5% (1/500) the DGEX's trading volume of either BTER or Vircurex now.

It's difficult to estimate the % of Chinese clients buying BTC, probably it's currently at least 25%.