BitMarket.Eu has closed down

[Stemby]

Great idea, HostFat! I like it very much.

[M4v3R]

The idea is good, but it doesn't play well with listing offers. Currently you see at a glance which payment types are supported because of the icons. Maybe if tags would be an additional feature for offers instead of replacing the payment type icons, it would work better. We'll consider this, thanks for your suggestion .

[Clipse]

Can someone please look at the verification requests of accounts, just send a request again.

[Michael_S]

I just logged in to BitMarket.eu and did not place a buy order because limit buy orders are no more possible :-(

• I think the idea of an earlier poster for limit buy orders with deposit is good. It would mean:
  Those who do have Bitcoins in their BitMarket.eu account, and only those, can place limit buy orders, and a certain amount of their BTCs are held back as deposit. If they are not willing to pay a matched sell order, they have to pay the penalty.
  
• Another idea (complementory to the previous one, or in isolation) is to observe the MtGox price, and if the difference between limit buy oder and MtGox price grows too large, the order is automatically canceled by the BitMarket.eu system.
• The simplest idea that could be implemented straight away is that each limit buy order always expires nn hours after placing, where nn is fixed and cannot be changed by the user (or the user can only specify an earlier expiration time, but not a later one). E.g. nn = 24 h could be reasonable. Optionally, 3 hours before expiry the user gets an email (nowadays most have email client on their smartphone whereever they are) with the expiration info, also informing about the current MtGox price, and providing the possibility to extend the limit order by another [24] h by simply replying to that email.

An incentive system with green/yellow/red rating, or similarly (similar to ebay) is also a good idea.

So a pool of ideas exists, and some of them, or a combination, could be implemented to enable limit buy orders again without the problems that formerly occurred. Note that formerly EVERYBODY could place UNLIMITED "buy" limit-orders, which was obviously too much of an invitation for fraudulent behavior to some users.

Cheers,
Michael

[Mahkul]

Hi all,

During the last few months I have come to realise that I do not have enough time anymore to remain involved in running the BitMarket.eu website efficiently. Some of you probably noticed that some of the emails waited for at least few days (sometimes weeks) to be answered, not to mention verifying of new users (and not for the first time). I don't want to ruin all the hard work we have put into this project.

I have been co-running BitMarket for nearly two years now, free of charge and dedicating a lot of my spare time into it. Unfortunately I have no time anymore to provide an acceptable level of support and service. I got real busy with my full time job and also my wife is now expecting a child so I will even be busier. I would also like to focus on promoting Bitcoin in Ireland. Therefore I have decided to step-down and transfer the ownership of the bitmarket.eu domain, hosting, SSL certs and all other associated services onto my trusted partner M4v3r (who has always been a co-owner of BitMarket anyway and is responsible for its robust code).  Thus, from this very moment M4v3r becomes the sole owner of BitMarket.eu and also becomes responsible for the maintenance, support and security of the site. I know for a fact that M4v3r will be able to dedicate far more time into development of the site from now on and some new features are coming up soon.

It has been an amazing journey for me and I am proud that we have provided a robust and trustworthy service and unlike most of our competition, never experienced a break-in. Your coins have always remained safe with us and that’s all thanks to M4v3r’s coding skills. I would like to thank all the people who decided to use the site and put their trust in us. I myself have been and will keep on using BitMarket as my main BitCoin trading platform.

Please note that I no longer have access to the BitMarket admin email or the admin panel, so please do not contact me anymore regarding any BitMarket issues.

Regards,
Mahkul

[Michael_S]

[...]
Your coins have always remained safe with us and that’s all thanks to M4v3r’s coding skills.
I would like to thank all the people who decided to use the site and put their trust in us.
[...]

Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled" in the transaction list, although I have never cancelled it myself!! So the BTCs got unblocked to the seller without my agreement. Now I have neither EUROs nor BITCOINS, and the seller seems to run away with it and does not answer my emails any more.

Note: This would not have happened if the system had not erroneously returned the blocked bitcoins to the seller, i.e. the main protection mechanism failed!

I have sent the incident already to M4v3R and to admin@bitmarket.eu, and I hope it will all have a good end for me.
I will keep the community informed about this incident!

UPDATE: The seller sent me the bitcoins today (one day after writing this posting). I was lucky that he was honest.
The admin also helped me by also sending a reminder to the seller by email.

Sincerely,
Michael

[ancow]

Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled"

That doesn't just happen. The seller will have to press a cancel button, which causes an email to be sent to you. Then, IIRC, there is a minimum of 3 days wait until the cancellation is accepted.
At the very least, you must have ignored the cancel message you got - that, or your mail provider failed to deliver it.

[fydel]

@Mahkul: Thank you very much for the good work! I was always happy with trading on bitmarket.eu.

BTW...If your child is a boy, you could name him "Satoshi"! 

[oxident]

Unfortunately, Bitmarket.eu is unreachable since midnight (August 30th). I hope, my wallet is still valid 

[cjp]

Unfortunately, Bitmarket.eu is unreachable since midnight (August 30th). I hope, my wallet is still valid 

Same problem here too.

[Michael_S]

Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled"

That doesn't just happen. The seller will have to press a cancel button, which causes an email to be sent to you. Then, IIRC, there is a minimum of 3 days wait until the cancellation is accepted.
At the very least, you must have ignored the cancel message you got - that, or your mail provider failed to deliver it.

Obviously it does just happen! If both sides, buyer and seller, are idle for two weeks or so, such unfinished transactions are cancelled by the bitmarket.eu system automatically, even if the buyer has already transferred the Euros, like it was the case for me. I did not even receive any warning email about this, and my mailbox is well organized with a separate folder for all buy orders at bitmarket.eu, so I have certainly not missed any email. This "auto-cancelling" of open transactions is apparently the normal behaviour in the bitmarket.eu system, as I learned from the seller who got this information from the bitmarket.eu admin.
(The seller transferred the Bitcoins to me today, so he is an honest fellow - luckily for me.)

[...]
Your coins have always remained safe with us and that’s all thanks to M4v3r’s coding skills.
I would like to thank all the people who decided to use the site and put their trust in us.
[...]

Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled" in the transaction list, although I have never cancelled it myself!! So the BTCs got unblocked to the seller without my agreement. Now I have neither EUROs nor BITCOINS, and the seller seems to run away with it and does not answer my emails any more.

Note: This would not have happened if the system had not erroneously returned the blocked bitcoins to the seller, i.e. the main protection mechanism failed!
[...]

As said, this "auto-cancelling" of the bitmarket.eu system opens up all doors for easy fraud. The seller just needs to wait for his Euros and then do nothing, and after a few weeks his Bitcoins get unblocked again and he has both Bitcoins and Euros. This is definitely a BIG CONCEPTIONAL FLAW in the way bitmarket.eu works, and I am wondering how the admins could have designed this behaviour into the system in full awareness of the possible consequences. This hardly sheds any good light on their conceptual capabilities.

There is also a lack of transparency at bitmarket.eu, because things like that are not explained anywhere to the user.

I hope that the new admin of bitmarket.eu is going to improve this platform and I have two most important advises for him:

• Remove this "automatic transaction cancelling" procedure from the system (I will certainly not do any transaction there any more unless this gets fixed).
• Get yourself an account at bitcoin.de and make your own experiences from the user's perspective to see how things can be set up (much) better compared to bitmarket.eu

Moreover, more information should be provided about how the system works. For example, the criteria about when the personal transaction limit is reached is absolutely intransparent and not explained anywhere.

Finally, I hope that at least some of the goodies of bitcoin.de are taken over to BitMarket.eu, because I think it is important to have more than just one major peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange in the European market, and currently bitmarket.eu is way behind bitcoin.de.

Despite my well-founded criticism expressed here, I appreciate a lot the work that has been done at bitmarket.eu, and it hurts me to see that it lacks further development and improvements, contains conceptual flaws to the danger of its users and falls behind other, similarly designed, peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange markets in the European area.

[Michael_S]

Unfortunately, Bitmarket.eu is unreachable since midnight (August 30th). I hope, my wallet is still valid 

Same problem here too.

Fortunately, I have retrieved all my 80 BTCs from my BitMarket.eu account to my private bitcoin address two days ago. Otherwise, I would have difficulties to sleep now...

[cjp]

Fortunately, I have retrieved all my 80 BTCs from my BitMarket.eu account to my private bitcoin address two days ago. Otherwise, I would have difficulties to sleep now...

I wanted to post a complaint that my withdrawal wasn't working, but it just arrived.
Apparently it took them 50 minutes to do a Bitcoin transaction.

Looks like their server was down for some time and they had trouble bringing up all the services again?

[oxident]

Whew, up and running again. Glad to see my wallet is still alive and my offers are on schedule...

[M4v3R]

We have had server problems (server was restarted due to problem and mysql daemon didn't start automatically), which were unnoticed, because they started when I was asleep. All is fixed though!

Sorry to everyone for the inconvenience.

I wanted to post a complaint that my withdrawal wasn't working, but it just arrived.
Apparently it took them 50 minutes to do a Bitcoin transaction.

It was probably due to bitcoin client catching up with the network after the downtime. Also keep in mind that Bitcoin transfers usually take up to an hour to process, it's not only a Bitmarket thing.

[SebastianJu]

Hm... i thought about using bitmarket.eu but when i only can buy for prices that sellers ask then i go elsewhere. Only with ask-prices the real value of a currency cant be determined. Plus buyers cant make a good price at your platform even when the bitcoinprice is going down over the day at other platforms.

I liked the idea of not having to pay fees but its useless when i only have the chance to buy at the highest possible prices.

[M4v3R]

In last few days some of BitMarket accounts were compromised. Because it's not just one case, I decided to disable the site until I'm certain how it happened.

From what I can tell now, accounts were accessed normally, using their respective logins and passwords. We store only hashes of our passwords in database, so it's impossible to get them from there.
Attacker used the TOR network, so tracking him by IP is useless.

Early reports suggest that this may be somehow connected with Mt. Gox. That's why I want everyone affected to confirm if they have indeed had Mt. Gox accounts with same usernames and passwords as on Bitmarket.

I'll update this post with more information as soon as I learn something.

Update: This doesn't affect most of you. Only a very limited amount (about 15) of accounts were compromised.

[kneim]

...
Early reports suggest that this may be somehow connected with Mt. Gox. That's why I want everyone affected to confirm if they have indeed had Mt. Gox accounts with same usernames and passwords as on Bitmarket.
...

Sounds like Mt.Gox would save passwords as clear text, not hashes. Hopefully not, do somebody know?

Perhaps the hacker has the account name from Mt.Gox, the password from other sites.

[M4v3R]

They don't store their passwords in clear text, MtGox had a leak a year ago and only MD5 hashes leaked. You can crack MD5 if the password is not very secure. I'm not sure if they're still using it though.

[M4v3R]

I have more confirmations from other affected users that they used same login details on Mt. Gox. I still don't want to jump in to conclusions, but it's smells fishy...