Hei TheFootMan!
Vi selger ikke bitcoins, det er kundene som selger bitcoins. Det er rimelig umulig å levere bitcoins man ikke har....
Vi deler heller ingen kundeinformasjon uten videre. At en person skriver sin bitcoins adresse i denne tråden, betyr ikke at vår informasjon om kunden blir delt.
Synd du synes vår tjeneste ikke er god nok, håper du kan komme med konstruktiv tilbakemelding istede for din generelle formening. :-)
Hei Lazerlab
Ja, vi kan overføre til utlandet.
Mvh Bitcoinsnorway.com
To anyone wanting to use Bitcoinsnorway.com. Their business ethics is very questionable. Nothing is ever their fault. Always blame a problem on someone else, someone having a legitimate concern, blame it on a 3rd party. Never address the real problem.
They appear as an opportunistic player in the market, without any substance or support for the community and the involved technology. Either they're severely incompetent, or they actually do think that other people having legitimate concerns are stupid, and that those very people cannot even wrap their head around the simplest concepts.
First off. BitcoinsNorway has posed as a fixed rate exchanger in Norway for a long time. There's been numerous complaints, and delivery delays. Look at the link in my previous post. Them quoting in the response that 'it's not possible to deliver bitcoins they don't have' either points to them being completely dumb, or trying to make me appear dumb. What the real answer here is, only they know.
It's very apparent from the context in the link that it was referred to their previous business as a fixed rate exchanger, and not their current business. While business plan might've changed, the people behind it haven't. Draw your own conclusions.
It's quite obvious to any observer that what was referred to was the fact that previously when they acted as a fixed rate exchanger between NOK<>BTC they did sell bitcoins they did not have, and delays by a 3rd party caused delayment of bitcoin transfer to the client.
To spoonfeed anyone still not understanding this:
1. Client enters into a buying agreement with BitcoinsNorway. The rate is looked, and the client sends money to BitcoinsNorway.
2. Client receives bitcoins from BitcoinsNorway, however if BitcoinsNorway does not have bitcoins in stock, they need to buy it from somewhere else, and thus imposes a delay.
This is akin to someone picking out a TV in an electronics store, being told by the sales man that it is in stock, then proceeding to the pickup-point only to be told that the TV is not in right now, but will be 'shortly'. That's a breach of the agreement, and the customer will be rightfully upset, no matter if it was the sales man, the computer system, the warehouse guy or whatever that caused the error.
Even worse would it be if the electronics store agreed to deliver it to the customers house the same evening, and then nothing happens and then the customer calls the store the next day to complain, and the store says 'they're sorry' because the delivery guy did not show up to work, the delivery van got into a minor accident or whatever. The store never called the customer, explaining the delay - and the customer has every right to be upset.
Point blank: When doing any kind of business were customers are involved, be honest at all times, and any delays or deviations from the agreement must always be promptly communicated to the customer. Anything else is blatantly disrespectful towards the customer.
To continue the spood-feeding, several customers have been very dissatisfied with BitcoinsNorway acting as a fixed-rate exchanger. The lack of ethics and proper customer treatment will unquestionably leak into everything they're involved in.
As an example of their questionable ethics and lack of standing behind what they've said and done, please look at
this post.
Sturle made a post at
May 19, 2013, 07:18:17 PM quoting a post made by bitcoinsnorge.no at May 19, 2013, 06:23:20 PM. If you check
the complete thread you will notice that the user bitcoinsnorge.no has deliberately deleted all of their posts, except the very last post in that thread.
The reason why bitcoinsnorge.no has deleted all their posts in this thread? Simple. It is because they did not like what took place in this thread. There was direct complaints regarding their business. Here's one
such complaint.
Det skjer selvfølgelig ikke.
Det står i salgsbetingelsene det kan ta litt tid før du får dine bestilte bitcoins. Fint om du heller kontakter oss enn her...
Mvh Bitcoinsnorge.no
Her har kjøperen opplevd urimelig leveringstid på en vare i tillegg til at dere ikke har svart på hans henvendelse på epost.
At kjøperen da bruker forum for å få klarhet i saken er absolutt ikke urimelig. Det er snakk om åpenhet.
Moralen her må bli - svar på mail ;-)
They also wrote in that post that they did not appreciate the customer writing in this very thread. So, they give shitty service, and then in addition try to dicatate where the customer is to leave feedback when they did not even have the courtesy to answer said customer on e-mail.
This is handled is an very unprofessional manner. And if we look at history, we can look at the red signs for various exchanges that went awol. Poor ethics and poor customer service and subpar technical solutions are red flags that are common for such services.
There's been a legitimate customer complaint
here. If they let such trivial errors exist in a production system in the front-end, God knows what goes on in the backend. At least running the service in beta mode in the beginning to eliminate simple coding errors like that should be expected.
To my understanding bitcoinsnorway.com does not have the required technical and sysadmin skills, and do not have inhouse tech knowledge, and is thus depending on external consulting for all changes to their system. While it's not uncommon to outsource such tasks in various companies, a bitcoin service needs to have tech people available at all times to be able to respond to emergencies. Possibly operating in different time zones can make this worse.
As for security - who knows - when the ethics and honesty of bitcoinsnorway.com aka bitcoinsnorge.no can be questioned, I would not trust them outright on security.
For instance, they state
here that they're operating completely legally:
Innlegg av: oleandre (10.06.13 16:46 ), lest 479 ganger
RE^1: bitcoinsnorge.no driver disse lovlig?
Vi driver helt lovlig, har aldri kanselert handler pga. prisen går opp. Grunnen til vi må ta forbehold om kansellering er dersom markedet ikke har bitcoins til salgs innen rimelig tid etter bestilling.
Vi driver helt lovlig, har regnskapsfører, revisor og sjekket alt med skatte-etaten og finanstilsynet.
Velkommen til handel.
Hilsen Bitcoinsnorge.no
I will quote from their original purchase agreement as existing previously on bitcoinsnorge.no:
5. Avtaleinngåelse
Avtalen er bindende for kjøper, men ikke for selger. Bitcoins Norge AS kan til enhver tid velge å kansellere/terminere/avlyse handelen, og dette kan skje uten at Bitcoins Norge AS har plikt til å underrette kunden om hverken kanselleringen eller forholdene rundt dette. Selger vil likevel forsøke å underrette kunden via e-post. Kundens ytelser vil bli tilbakeført innen 10 virkedager, fratrukket eventuelle kostnader knyttet til transaksjoner.
8. Levering m.v.
...
Kjøper kan ikke under noen omstendigheter kreve selger for følgetap/konsekvenstap i form av tapt fortjeneste på grunn av kursendring ved manglende levering eller for sen levering av Bitcoins.
Draw your own conclusions. Any fixed rate exchanger of bitcoins should imo only sell bitcoins that they control and can dispatch to the customer immediately. Anything else is fishy. Either you have the bitcoins or you don't. If you have them, there should be no delay once payment has been received from the customer.
Their previous business bitcoinsnorge.no had one
fixed bitcoin address.This means that everyone can see the amount of business that they did, and that every customer transaction can be easily tracked by anyone.
Customer privacy out the window. While a bitcoin address cannot easily be tied to a bitcoin address, datamining tools/forensic can establish connections between addresses by using public available sources.
I'm not sure if bitcoinsnorway representatives understand this fact at all and that the recommended way to deal with bitcoin addresses in regards to customers is to generate custom addresses for every interaction with the service, and not publicize those addresses.
Further adding to their total negligence of customer privacy is the fact that they asked a customer to
leave his address in this very thread.
The user akaman happily gave his bitcoin address, which immediately can be
tracked.
What can any adversary find out from this. It currently holds 10 BTC. It's been involved in 239 transactions, totalling about 829 BTC since the autumn 2013.
Further block chain analysis may reveal more, and perhaps there will even be a link to a username on a forum, a blog or anything else that can make anyone tie his bitcoin activity to his real identity. Also, any hacker wanting to hack this person could now get him to reveal his ip by simply initiate a private pm conversation on this forum, and then causally dropping in an innocent link to some article residing on a server that the adversary control, revealing his ip. The adversary could then proceed to portscan the victim's machine and possibly exploit any security holes to gain access and steal coins. Yes, there are plenty of active hackers in the community that continually are on the search of victims, and if you a vulernable OS, most Windows variants are, do not find it surprising if a theft of bitcoins find place.
There are a number of people who run bitcoin-qt or other wallets on Windows machine not having them secured properly, and no matter your OS, if there's any way to get in, an attacker may succeed in stealing bitcoins, even if the wallet is encrypted with a password, an attacker could use a key logger.
Also, there are governmental organizations who mine data for various purposes. And every time you leave a bitcoin address somewhere, it's linked to your e-mail, your username on a forum, your e-commerce account or otherwise. Law enforcement also has the power to query any service provider for user data using a subpoena, court order or a valid legal process. Some providers are also known to give up data to anyone that simply asks for various reasons, for instance out of fear, or because they're being bribed.
While most such tidbits of 'personal information' probably never will bite the user in the ass, there are examples where it has happened. For example, out of deliberate purpose, a government organization, be it the IRS in the US, or any other similar organization in any other country may be very interested in looking more closely into the flow of bitcoins conducted by a certain individual, I'm sure you can use your imagination as to why such an interest may exist.
Therefore - do not divulge bitcoin adresses belonging to a customer, or ask for a bitcoin adress belonging to a customer on any public forum. In principle any customer reimbursement or giveaway must be considered being a business strictly between the business in question, and the customer.
The professional way to handle this would be to ask the customer to provide his service handle (username) to the provider out of public view, and then the service provider would handle the issue outside public view, for instance on internal messaging system on their service, or over e-mail. And for any larger amounts, the exchange of bitcoin adresses should be done in a secure way. Over SSL or encrypted with PGP.
It's startling that a service like this does not even provide a valid PGP-key. If the service at one point is hacked, how can we know that it's the service operator communicating with the customers and not someone else. While most people won't bother with PGP, it's a nice option for those who will use it, and it's a way to verify that the communicator of a message is in possession of the private PGP-key.
Bitcoinsnorge.no further states:
Vi deler heller ingen kundeinformasjon uten videre. At en person skriver sin bitcoins adresse i denne tråden, betyr ikke at vår informasjon om kunden blir delt.
Their
privacy statement states:
Personvern
Ved å registrere deg og bruke BitcoinsNorway.com (BTCN) aksepterer du at BTCN vil spørre deg om personlig informasjon, for eksempel, men ikke begrenset til:
Fullt navn
Adresse
Fødselsdato
Personnummer
Telefonnumre
E-post adresser
Pass eller andre identifikasjonspapirer
Du aksepterer at BTCN etter eget forgodtbefinnende kan utlevere for informasjon som nevnt i (1) ovenfor til offentlige myndigheter. BTCN bestemmer selv om forespørsel om utlevering av informasjon skal etterkommes i de tilfeller hvor vi ikke er juridisk forpliktet til det i form av rettslig anmodning eller etter lov.
Du aksepterer at informasjon som nevnt i (1) kan bli delt med alle involverte i en eventuell omstruktureringsprosess, for eksempel fusjon/salg av virksomheten.
If I understand the Norwegian statements here correctly, bitcoinsnorge.no runs no principles and will bow to any request for customer data if they see fit. They don't even require there be a legitimate request from law enforcement to give out condidental customer data.
And how's all this customer data handled? They collect information that can easily be used for identity theft. Is customer data stored offline, on systems that's not accessible online? Why's their server ip resolving to
a US server.
Do they have the proper licenses to run a bitcoin business on US soil? Running this service on a US server makes it fairly easy for the NSA to gain
100% control of all traffic on this server.
Are BitcoinsNorway aware of the new
Side Channel Attacks that's a security risk when running on a VPS?
Synd du synes vår tjeneste ikke er god nok, håper du kan komme med konstruktiv tilbakemelding istede for din generelle formening. :-)
If I understand your comment correctly is there anything of the above criticism that you do not find legitimate and constructive?
There are most likely many other issues I could look into as well, but I'll leave security audits and financial audits to someone else.
As a customer, do your due diligence and decide wether you're willing to trust BitcoinsNorway with documents sufficient to conduct identity theft (this goes for any bitcoin exchange), or if you'd rather like to trade p2p with less information bout you being revealed.
I'm not sure if BitcoinsNorway learned anything from this post, or if they're still thinking that everybody else is the problem, and that they have everything under control.
To condone any service, I'm looking for professional conduct, respect for customer privacy and an overall professional way of running the service. Deleting posting history on this forum, dictating where users should leave feedback, delaying bitcoin payments, claiming they run legally without showing proof, and blaming problems on others and attempting to make others look dumb without recognizing legitimate concerns, is in my opinion not something that builds trust in their service.
