I'm going to make a public reply to this about the issue. I'm the main developer and owner of Crypto Rush. I'd like to point people to the public statement I made about the issues we had with Zeitcoin.
https://cryptorush.in/documents/ZeitcoinPublicStatement-March6th2014.pdfThis document states that an update we did caused the daemon to malfunction and all users trades in a period of 24 hours were reversed. This means that everyones coins that they sold that day they got back while keeping the BTC, and everyone who bought coins lost them, while still losing the BTC. This is what caused us to lose over 1.6 billion coins because people like to withdraw what they know does not belong to them.
Zeitcoin then issued a public statement of their own in reply to it.
https://cryptorush.in/documents/ZEITofficialstatement.pdf and if you don't trust our servers you can find it on the Zeitcoin site too
http://zeit-coin.com/ZEITofficialstatement.pdfThey instructed users who had lost out to email them at
zeitloss@zeit-coin.com. After people did this they reported that they heard no reply. I don't know how much Zeitcoin they refunded people. We also left Zeitcoin open for a long time to allow people to withdraw as much as possible, until we ran out. We also refunded people who bought coins that were not able to be reversed from our own pockets, costing us about 30 BTC in losses. 24-30 hours is a lot of time for trades to happen on a coin that just launched.
This is the statement we've been issuing via our Support System for people asking about Zeitcoin
http://pastebin.com/wDfPWxp7So why did this problem happen in the first place, it's because the Zeitcoin developers pushed an immature update to their public github which required a fork because of it made a change to the TX fee for all transactions. The person running the coin at launch was someone called Darren. I dont know how many people knew of him or his name but this is the person who we collaborated with for the launch of Zeitcoin. Either way, he is the one that instructed us to update the coin so we did. Everything appeared to run fine until 24 hours later we discovered that none of the withdrawals were making it onto the blockchain. So we immediately put the coin into maintenance mode to figure out what was wrong. This is when the second update was released which apparently "fixed" the bug with the TX fees, so we updated to this one again at the instruction of Darren. This is what messed up the whole thing, and every internal wallet transaction that was done during this time was lost; we use internal transactions for user trades because it has a much higher integrity rate than a global wallet + database. The daemons don't lie about transactions and neither does the blockchain. Either way, that's what screwed us over.
I tried my hardest to think what we did wrong in this situation, and I can't think of what. We were following instructions from the main figure behind the coin at the time, who was certain this would be ok. We are supposed to trust the coin developers right? Obviously not.
Let's fast forward to now where people still blame us for the troubles, and it seems the natural thing to do. you sent coins to us, so it looks like our responsibility. I just wish people saw it from our side of the table as well, and that we're not in a position to refund people any more Zeitcoin that have been lost. It cost us way more than we earned from Zeitcoin to refund the users we did refund. I'm sorry to every one of the users that we didn't refund.
3 days ago the @Zeitcoin twitter handle sent us an @ reply that they would contact us within 24 hours. You can see the tweet + a couple of replies here
https://twitter.com/ZEITCOIN/status/446785670531383296 We heard nothing from them after 24 hours so we tweeted at them again that we're still waiting
https://twitter.com/TheCryptoRush/status/447148468956844032. It's now been over 3 days and we have not heard from anyone on skype or any potenital contact from the Zeitcoin team. So I decided to reach out myself to the #zeitcoin channel on freenode.
Here's the long unfiltered log I had with a couple of OPs and users, one of which appears to be the new developer or at least involved with current development.
http://pastebin.com/Fbw0kraP there may be some irrelevant conversation but most people will know the relevant conversation.
This also brings about another piece of information: all the attempted withdraws during this 24-30 hour period of time, the coins never returned to us when we removed the transactions/performed the upgrade. We collectively decided not to put this information into our statements because announcing the reason people couldn't withdraw is because the coins literally "vanished" would not go well for anyone and would make us look like a joke, even though that's what actually happened.
TL;DR version: they seem to think it's the exchanges job to audit their github pushes and their code, as well as testing it fully to make sure it actually works. They also seem to think that I should be auditing their coins code and should be able to recognise code that would break something. I don't know about you guys, but I never coded a coin or looked at the source code. We simply compile the coins that people release, and if they don't work we contact the developer: the person responsible for creating the code. The most shocking thing about this is, because we're an 'exchange' we're not classed as an end user to them like everyone else, although as someone pointed out in the chat that we all use the same piece of software in the exact same way. I hope people agree with me here that this is no way to treat an end user such as myself when dealing with a large sum of lost coins. We test every one of our daemons to make sure they find the correct blockchain and respond to RPC calls and work with our system of managing user balances and trades. We don't check outbound transactions and, but we do check inbound transactions when a bounty is involved, in this case we received a 15 million Zeitcoin bounty. What we don't do is check inbound/outbound transactions on wallet daemon upgrades. We hope that the coin developer has enough sense to make sure this basic functionality is working. It would be pretty useless if you couldn't do transactions properly don't you think? This is why we take this for granted on incremental updates. They are also all mostly forks of a working coin (Bitcoin/Litecoin based) so the coin would be pretty bad if basic functions were broken (and believe me we've seen that too).
After this conversation with the people in #zeitcoin I searched my skype logs for the contact of the original developer hired to work on Zeitcoin. Here's the log of that conversation which his name changed to "Old Zeitcoin Dev"
http://pastebin.com/XMtcuH2CHe seemed to understand the issues that Crypto Rush is going through.
Anyway, this post is long so I'll bring it to a close with the following point: I really want to restore the faith people have in Crypto Rush as an exchange and also restore the respect we had with the Zeitcoin community. If I had the coins to refund people then I would do it right away. I'm considering re-opening the Zeitcoin trading on Crypto Rush with the long term plan to use the fees generated to pay back affected users who lost their coins. At this point, unless the Zeitcoin devs step up with another solution it's all I'm in a position to offer. What do people think about this idea? I'm interested on peoples thoughts on the matter.
Regards,
LaZ
Crypto Rush
