[Announce] bitcoinmonitor.net - Free professional notification/payment service

[mrvision]

Functionality/Security update:
Starting immediately bitcoinmonitor.net agents will NOT trigger 0-confirmation notifications on transactions which have a locktime set. Notifications for transactions with locktime will only trigger when the transaction gets a first confirmation.
The change is fully backwards-compatible: If you have an agent setup to notify on 0 confirmations you will get 2 notifications as soon as the transaction gets a confirmation: First for status "unconfirmed", followed by "one confirmation".

What's that? I need 0 confirmation notifications!!! Even when i know that i'm not serving the product until i have SIX notifications, i need 0 confirmation notification in order to make ajax continue.

[Herbert]

Functionality/Security update:
Starting immediately bitcoinmonitor.net agents will NOT trigger 0-confirmation notifications on transactions which have a locktime set. Notifications for transactions with locktime will only trigger when the transaction gets a first confirmation.
The change is fully backwards-compatible: If you have an agent setup to notify on 0 confirmations you will get 2 notifications as soon as the transaction gets a confirmation: First for status "unconfirmed", followed by "one confirmation".

What's that? I need 0 confirmation notifications!!! Even when i know that i'm not serving the product until i have SIX notifications, i need 0 confirmation notification in order to make ajax continue.

No worries, you still get the 0 confirmations on all standard transactions. Only when a transaction comes which has a locktime set I don't trigger the 0-confirmation. This locktime feature is not used by any client at the moment (and also there is no real usecase for it in general as it is only halfway implemented). But it can be abused for trying double-spend attacks. So this change is a security feature to protect you, but will not affect any normal user of bitcoin.

[Herbert]

Unfortunately it turned out I introduced a nasty bug with the last changes regarding transactions with locktime set . This bug could lead to delayed notification and even sometimes in completely missing notifications. I reverted the problematic changes so that notifications now work again as expected.

[mrvision]

Unfortunately it turned out I introduced a nasty bug with the last changes regarding transactions with locktime set . This bug could lead to delayed notification and even sometimes in completely missing notifications. I reverted the problematic changes so that notifications now work again as expected.

Thank you, i noticed there was a delay in the notifications that's why i asked.

[Herbert]

You may have noticed delays in notifications for confirmed payments today. Bitcoind was running fine and all, except for the rpcthread to handle the jsonrpc commands. So monitoring did not complain, and all 0-conf notifications went through. But notifications for confirmations > 0 were stuck since block 221370.
I restarted bitcoind and the system is now catching up on the missed notifications.
Sorry for any trouble :-(

[Herbert]

The last weeks there were some incidents resulting in notifications for confirmed transactions being delayed by several hours. The root cause is that the current hardware is not really up for the job anymore. I started this site more than a year ago and requirements drastically changed since then. With the current rate of transactions going on and the increase of blocksize I need to move to bigger hardware (Main issues are RAM and disk IO at the moment).
I have a better machine available already - Just need to find the time to move to it. Will keep you posted...

[TheButterZone]

Are you getting enough donations to cover costs? Blockchain.info now has the same notification facility (with even more options like SMS), even for Watch Only addresses. It's good to have redundancy but please don't go into the red!

[Herbert]

Are you getting enough donations to cover costs? Blockchain.info now has the same notification facility (with even more options like SMS), even for Watch Only addresses. It's good to have redundancy but please don't go into the red!

Well, you can't say I'm swamped with dontations so far : https://blockchain.info/address/12AxBpvmqzYbSHmvZML6Xv9TPncJgdnikm

But that's okay for me. I use bitcoinmonitor.net also for myself / some of my own projects, and I also see it as a kind of contribution to the bitcoin project as a whole.

[Herbert]

Hi,

today I finally made the transition to the new machine. The frontend is remaining on the old system, while bitcoind and backend is on the new system. All went smooth without noticable downtime. From the logs all seems fine, but please let me know if you experience any troubles.

No need to change anything on user-side - IP and hostname for website and API access stay the same.

I am quite confident that this will finally fix the downtimes experienced in the last weeks 

[Swapster]

I am checking this out.


See how it goes...

[Herbert]

The server hosting bitcoind backend went down yesterday evening, resulting in no notifications being sent. Got it running again this morning - system has caught up in the meantime and all missed notifications should be sent out. Sorry for the downtime :-/

[Herbert]

Just noticed that this thread started exactly 20 months ago! This feels like ages in the bitcoin world.
Just look at the exchange rate at that time - around 5 USD

[Herbert]

Two updates on the documentation:

• As some user pointed out, the parameters in the callback are NOT in alphabetical order. (http://www.bitcoinmonitor.net/help/)
• Your agent ID is now displayed in the dashboard after the agent's name. Also the API docs have been update with the info where to get the agent ID

And someone added bitcoinmonitor.net to ProgrammableWeb: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/bitcoinmonitor - Thank you 

[Herbert]

Site is unfortunately offline as my hosting administration account was compromised and I need to rebuild all related servers. Right now I can not tell how long it will take.

[Herbert]

Site is unfortunately offline as my hosting administration account was compromised and I need to rebuild all related servers. Right now I can not tell how long it will take.

Server rebuilt and running again . Still catching up on the blockchain, might take about an hour until it is up-to-date. Let me know if something is not working as expected, as I was quite in a hurry getting it to run again...

[bitpop]

Aww damn it says invalid Bitcoin address
I entered 20 addresses

csv worked, new lines do not

[Herbert]

There is a problem with notifications at the moment. Only 0-conf notifications getting through, notifications for higher confirmations are not triggered. Looking into it right now...

[Herbert]

There is a problem with notifications at the moment. Only 0-conf notifications getting through, notifications for higher confirmations are not triggered. Looking into it right now...

Working again, but may still be a bit flaky. System is catching up on the lost notifications, that might still take an hour. I will have a closer look on the logs the next days - please reply here if you see any missing notifications.

[Amitabh S]

possible bug?

In the API docs it is mentioned that

watch_type:
    "1" = Watch for deposits,
    "2" = Watch for withdrawals,
    "3" = Both.

However when I create the agent using the API, the values "1" and "2" seem to do the opposite (based on the "Edit agent" window and my experiments)


I want to use this for a real world ecommerce site. Is it advisable? Are people losing notifications?

[boiron]

I want to use this for a real world ecommerce site. Is it advisable? Are people losing notifications?

I only got the 0 conf-confirmations for this transaction