Coins-E fail - dodgy, consider staying away

[lishbtc]

Hey guys, just a quick note to share my experience with Coins-E.

Deposited ~300 XPM there to trade with, nowhere to be found (large num of confirmations).  Talking to others in the chatbox seems lots of people have lost XPM they have deposited.

Hoping it's a delay but starting to get nervous  

What is it with exchanges - they all suck (waiting on 5 figure withdrawals from Gox for months) - actually that's not fair MCXnow has always been good to me...

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[bitwarrior]

Same issue here, lots of confirmations already and still no XPM on my account there at coins-e.
Admin or any representative of the exchange please make a reply to our assistance request on your mailing system.
This is really frustrating.

[lishbtc]

Just had a thought, the daemon crashes every now and then (known issue) - I sincerely hope the devs there aren't incapable of a simple daemon restart script in cron

[fran2k]

Same here, 10's of confirms on XPM deposit.

[lishbtc]

Just got this from support:

We are very sorry for the trouble. The primecoin daemon seems to be stuck. We are looking into the issue, give us a few minutes.

Cheers

Hint:
#killall -9 primecoind
#pathtobinary/primecoind -server -daemon
 

[lishbtc]

FYI, got my coins in the end.  Not confidence inspiring, but at least they resolved.

[fluffypony]

This has happened on Cryptsy to me - they end up on a fork and have to reload the blockchain, or the daemon crashes and they have to restart it. To say that it's dodgy because of this relatively common issue is just silly, and shows a gross ignorance as to the fact that these situations are easily resolved. Scam warnings where scams are due, not where your own ignorance causes you to misread a situation.

[lishbtc]

Lol @ some of the notions expressed there...

"the daemon crashes and they have to restart it" - any sysadmin with 5 seconds experience could write a cron script to check a process each minute and restart them when they crash - ignorance is a two-way street buddy.

[fluffypony]

Lol @ some of the notions expressed there...

"the daemon crashes and they have to restart it" - any sysadmin with 5 seconds experience could write a cron script to check a process each minute and restart them when they crash - ignorance is a two-way street buddy.

*sigh*

Just because it crashes doesn't mean the process ends.

Megacoin, for example, has a tendency to freeze under certain conditions. The process is still running, and it will even accept RPC requests, but it never responds. A watchdog would have a tough time realising that the daemon needs to be restarted.

Similarly, how would a watchdog know that the local chain is a fork and not the correct blockchain? These issues require manual intervention.

Finally, no sysadmin in their right mind would "write a cron script" (whatever that is, you're mixing technical terms that have nothing to do with each other) to poll ps and restart a process when all of the major init systems already support this functionality. The vast majority of major Linux distros nowadays use Upstart as their init system, and Upstart bakes in auto restart functionality, respawn limits, etc. A sysadmin may write a custom watchdog to poll RPC calls, or he may choose to write this functionality into an Upstart script.

You're right - ignorance *is* a two-way street.

[smscotten]

I had a "stuck" XPM transaction too. Sent a message to support and had the issue resolved in minutes. First I saw the balance change, then I received the email telling me it had been fixed.

Shiznit happens. Everywhere. I don't expect anyone to be perfect, just that they recognize and fix problems when called to their attention. Doing it quickly is very appreciated too. I've got no beef with Coins-E.

[lishbtc]

</sigh> indeed.

It's an exchange.  It's handling thousands (and no doubt hopes to grow into the millions) of dollars.  Users have a right (and in some peoples opinion a social obligation) to share their experiences.

What's considered tolerable is subjective, especially in a forum such as this.  If you read my very first statement you'll see it reads "Hey guys, just a quick note to share my experience with Coins-E" - I'm not sure where you're seeing my 'scam' accusations.

As to the technical points, you seem to have some knowledge here so I struggle a little to understand why you don't seem to have applied practical experience to basic logic - cryptocurrencies are an imperfect entity, thus the surrounding infrastructure must inherently be, imperfect.  Grouping diverse issues together (such as daemon crash vs chain fork - two vastly different scenarios in terms of risk and likelihood) makes no sense.  Daemon issues (local) should be handled automatically in ANY kind of system that is considered production (and don't tell me it's beta, it's handling peoples money live, right now - end of debate) - if RPC is still up what's to stop from simply grepping for the block number via getinfo and bouncing the daemon if it hasn't changed in x mins? 

Personally, for me to have confidence in something, I want to feel that there is some serious effort being employed to make things viable - low hanging fruit left hanging (and apparently - I have no authority on this - but a certain someone has just told me they ran the exchange plain text up until recently!?!? lol) it simply does not inspire me.  Again my subjective opinion, nothing more.

Forks (non-local) that are significant enough to require manual intervention are far rarer than something like primecoind which is known by anyone who's run more than a few instances to crash regularly (ie multiple times a day).

Having just realized I've lost ten minutes to this reply, I now realize I really don't care and have nothing to achieve from this debate. 

[usahero]

</sigh> indeed.

What's considered tolerable is subjective, especially in a forum such as this.  If you read my very first statement you'll see it reads
"Hey guys, just a quick note to share my experience with Coins-E" - I'm not sure where you're seeing my 'scam' accusations.

In the topic?

Let me bold it for you:

Coins-E fail - dodgy, consider staying away

[lishbtc]

Seriously?

Dodgy:
Unsound, unstable, and unreliable

Not sure how that = scam but once more for the record.  My.  Subjective.  Opinion.

[usahero]

Seriously?

Dodgy:
Unsound, unstable, and unreliable

Not sure how that = scam but once more for the record.  My.  Subjective.  Opinion.

It maybe does not qualify for scam accusations, but it does qualify for 'scam' accusations. So I just pointed you to where people could subjectively understand that you are accusing coins-e of 'scam'.




In my opinion, you overreacted while giving bad public image to a company that tries hard, has improved much and it is timely with support. I had the problem of not receiving or not having funds withdrawn, and they solved the problem in 2 minutes after sending them message.

[sumantso]

I have used them, but don't keep my money lying there. Learned my lesson after my Bter account got hacked.

[minus]

I wish to personally apologize for the issues with the XPM deposits that happened yesterday. This is not the kind of service we are known for or wish to provide. We had a major update to the deposit script and a few accounts did get affected with deposits not confirming properly, we cleared all the issues within 8 hours. We know 8 hours is not a good very turn around time, but this is not something that happens everyday.

We have re-instated a "Refresh" button in the Manage Funds https://www.coins-e.com/exchange/wallet/manage/ section, This button directly triggers our deposit script to look out for any pending deposits in your account.

Please try using the 'Refresh' button if you don't see your deposits, if in rare cases that the account Refresh button does not work please contact support at https://www.coins-e.com/contactus/ we clear issues as soon as possible.

We are young and are working really hard in the middle of a very rough climate. You guys know how it is with blockchains being forked and new coin client having several issues we do face a very hard time. In spite of all this we have constantly grown, we are now supporting over 50 coins. We are here to build a robust crypto currency exchange. We are incorporating new features almost every day.

I once again apologize for the trouble we put you through, no reason is good reason to have held your funds unusable for such a long time. I assure that we are taking this issue very seriously and that such issues would not occur in the future.

We hope that you will continue to support coins-e and inspire us to innovate.

Cheers
-Minus

[TheSwede75]

Hey guys, just a quick note to share my experience with Coins-E.

Deposited ~300 XPM there to trade with, nowhere to be found (large num of confirmations).  Talking to others in the chatbox seems lots of people have lost XPM they have deposited.

Hoping it's a delay but starting to get nervous  

What is it with exchanges - they all suck (waiting on 5 figure withdrawals from Gox for months) - actually that's not fair MCXnow has always been good to me...

Ha ha,
Yeah MCXnow is a 'reliable' trading site.. I hope this is some form of failed joke.

[achillez]

Hey guys, just a quick note to share my experience with Coins-E.

Deposited ~300 XPM there to trade with, nowhere to be found (large num of confirmations).  Talking to others in the chatbox seems lots of people have lost XPM they have deposited.

Hoping it's a delay but starting to get nervous  

What is it with exchanges - they all suck (waiting on 5 figure withdrawals from Gox for months) - actually that's not fair MCXnow has always been good to me...

Ha ha,
Yeah MCXnow is a 'reliable' trading site.. I hope this is some form of failed joke.

I *would not* leave substantial funds in MTGox. There is some questionable practices there, they only allow BTC withdrawals and are stalling on any $$$ withdrawals. I had my withdrawal stuck for months as well.

[auctioneeeeer]

Coins-E is fine, they'll get it fixed. I've moved a lot of coins through them.

[solracx]

Lol @ some of the notions expressed there...

"the daemon crashes and they have to restart it" - any sysadmin with 5 seconds experience could write a cron script to check a process each minute and restart them when they crash - ignorance is a two-way street buddy.

*sigh*

Just because it crashes doesn't mean the process ends.

Megacoin, for example, has a tendency to freeze under certain conditions. The process is still running, and it will even accept RPC requests, but it never responds. A watchdog would have a tough time realising that the daemon needs to be restarted.

Similarly, how would a watchdog know that the local chain is a fork and not the correct blockchain? These issues require manual intervention.

Finally, no sysadmin in their right mind would "write a cron script" (whatever that is, you're mixing technical terms that have nothing to do with each other) to poll ps and restart a process when all of the major init systems already support this functionality. The vast majority of major Linux distros nowadays use Upstart as their init system, and Upstart bakes in auto restart functionality, respawn limits, etc. A sysadmin may write a custom watchdog to poll RPC calls, or he may choose to write this functionality into an Upstart script.

You're right - ignorance *is* a two-way street.

Very interesting!!!!

Megacoin and Primecoin are both based on Bitcoin 0.8.3 code base.

Is there something about this code that causing stability issues?