As the price of Bitcoin climbs past its 30-day high, the popular Bitcoin payment processor, BitPay, is experiencing system-wide failures that include duplicate bank deposits and bugged exchange rates.
Earlier this month, some of its merchants received notifications that duplicate deposits were sent out by mistake to customer bank accounts. Client Operations Engineer, Wesley Pitts, reassured users that the erroneous deposits would be corrected.
"The bank has indicated that they have reversed the duplicate payout so you may not see any errant entries in your bank account but we wanted to let you know in case you note any unusual activity on your account. We apologize for any confusion and please let us know if you have any questions."
But perhaps more troubling, on Monday of this week, its exchange rate was broken causing the bitcoin price to be calculated at 10% under the actual market rate. This issue caused bitcoin buyers to pay an additional 10% for all goods and services purchased during the day’s rate glitch.
Client Operations Engineer, Ethan Andrews, explained to AP that the issue was unavoidable.
"One of our exchange rate providers experienced technical issues, resulting in their exchange rate updates not propagating through to our system. Our development team has put a fix in place to omit the incorrect rates; they have also added additional safeguards to ensure improved handling of exchange rate updates going forward. BitPay could not have avoided the issue and has taken appropriate measures to handle future occurrences."
On Monday morning, while bitcoin was steadily trading at $370.00 per coin, the BitPay system was erroneously processing transactions based on a bitcoin price of $344.00.
At this late date in the company’s maturity, it is interesting to note that a single rate provider was able to wreak havoc on BitPay’s price calculating algorithm. To cause the BTC price to be off by 10% would mean that one of the rates entered into the calculation was low to the extreme – possibly even zero.
But unless merchants were closely monitoring exchange calculations, the vast majority of Monday's flawed payment transactions probably went unnoticed. Only time will tell if BitPay can successfully negotiate these growing pains and bring its service back to an acceptable level of stability.
Full Story: http://altcoinpress.com/2014/11/bitpay-plagued-by-system-glitches-duplicate-deposits-and-faulty-exchange-rates/