Topic: Introducing BitSimple. A simpler way to buy and sell bitcoins. - page 3. (Read 14382 times)

BitSimple was subject to a denial of service attack and extortion attempt this morning from roughly 7:30 AM Eastern to 10:30 AM Eastern.  Connectivity has been temporarily been restored although load on the server is still high.  There was no risk of lost or stolen coins as we  maintain a 100% cold wallet at all times.  Our watching wallet operates from a different server and was unaffected, it properly recorded timestamps and exchange rates of exchanges despite the website being unavailable.

We are continuing to monitor the condition and will take additional steps as necessary.

BitSimple Staff

Open for people outside US now?

With a rush of large buyers depleting our Bitcoin reserves, we want your coins and have improved the price offered for your coins.  Remember our exchange rate is what you receive.  We never charge a deposit or trading fee.  Make your withdraw request by Bank Wire (4PM EST cutoff) or PayPal (8PM EST cutoff), and receive them the same day.

Does the Sell Address change every time to a new address after you send funds to it?  Or does it always stay the same?


Update June 10th:
Well, apparently the answer is no.  

Second update, June 10th:
I guess they are going to try and implement unique sell addresses.  :-)

Hey, whoever fixed that -- thank you!  ;-)

Not sure if this thread is monitored by support, but if so - could someone look into a "stuck" transaction for me?

I sold some BTC for USD on 5/28/2014 (TID# 10066079) in the amount of $32.85.  It's been in USD pending ever since.  I don't understand why the exchange would ever reach this state.  Shouldn't it immediately go into USD available?  I cannot find any indication on your site on how long it will stay there.  Perhaps it's a mistake?  Or perhaps there are not enough USD in the bank to cover the transaction?  :-)

Thanks!

Not a massive deal, you guys have always been great, and infinitely better than Coinbase. The panicky situation of not knowing and having struggles with support (again, just not *knowing* -- aka, what are the hours, that kind of thing) is my only beef here.

Changing it to say 4 PM EST is a perfect solution. (No one will ever complain if it magically goes through a little after the cutoff!) Thanks for the quick reply. How long will it take to roll back my account so that I can request the after-hours PayPal transaction?

It is after 8PM Eastern so there is no active support at the current time, we don't have or promise 24/7 support.  I will however have someone contact you by email to make arrangements.  There was a delay which prevented the wire from going out the same day.  To give us a larger window to avoid this in the future I have changed the cutoff time from 5PM Eastern to 4PM Eastern.  If possible the wire will be cancelled and you can make an alternate withdraw request by PayPal.

It pains me to say this, as I've been an outspoken supporter — in the past, BitSimple would have accurately been described as a site which just works.

Here is my current experience:

An unexpected emergency has occurred and I needed USD. I transferred and sold Ƀ at BitSimple today, as I've done many times, and elected to wire out to my bank, which I've also done many times here. This usually takes around an hour or so; I never paid much attention because it was always quick. The transfer completed according to the UI and the timestamp is before the cutoff by about 15 minutes. I've also gotten this close to the cutoff before, which contributed to my confidence in BitSimple.

It's been several hours, however, and I haven't seen anything in my bank account.

Ok. So I email support, but that promises to take a day or so.

So I try live chat, and watch my as the Desk help window timer ticks up to 18 minutes waiting for a reply. (It says "we will be with you shortly" the whole time.)

So I call the phone number for support, which says something about being redirected and a grasshopper—idk, automated service I guess—and then immediately get a voicemail saying they're closed, but nothing about what hours they're *open*.

It's the weekend now. There will be no bank movement if it hasn't happened already. This is extremely bad for personal reasons, as I live very much on 99.9% Ƀ, and those are secured via a multisig arrangement that I cannot access for reasons related to the emergency. Thus, this amount WAS my emergency fund.

I imagine the amount wasn't initiated on time on BitSimple's end. We can discuss that issue later, but right now I need someone from BitSimple to push me the funds ASAP. PayPal is pretty much our only option right now. It's not a good one but that's life. Push me the funds via PayPal and cancel the Wire, which I assume is now scheduled for Monday.

Thanks for the updates!

Have you guys opened accounts for International Bitcoiners yet?

From UK and have been acquiring BTC from a traditional exchange based in Europe for over a year. It currently takes 4-5 days for me to complete a transaction. This period largely due to my bank sending IMT from UK to Slovenia.

Once verified on Bitsimple, if I lock-in a deal with you guys, then send/IMT GBP over to you, once you process/clear my funds - How long do you estimate this will take?

Can you guys tell me who is your USA banking partner and a note on exchange rates (retail or corporate)?

Best regards,

RH

Our pricing model continually adjusts to reflect supply, demand, and volatility.  Currently our ask is only $430.98 making BitSimple the best deal for buying Bitcoins.  That is more than 2,300 bits to the dollar.   Remember there are no additional trading fees above our quotes rates.  Payment is by bank wire and you can receive your coins, in your wallet the same day usually in about an hour.

Issues with support chat should be resolved.   I forwarded the PM to support.  In the future I would recommend using the BitSimple_Support account here on Bitcointalk as it is monitored by multiple people and my personal account is not.

Gerald

I have the same problem lysdexic had.  I started bank verification a couple of weeks ago and never got the trial deposits.  Tried online chat and gave up, no response after four minutes.  Phone call diverted to voice mail after a while.
Can't see any way to restart the bank verification process.
DeathAndTaxes:  I sent you a PM with my bitsimple username.

IPMI access is on a private VLAN behind a dedicated hardware firewall.  You are right IPMI should never be on a public untrusted connection.

This is not an exchange?

what is the difference between mintpal.com?

Many of them can never be effectively disabled regardless of what settings you choose.

Still okay as long as you keep them on a separate, internal network with no attackers on it though. You're already screwed if attackers have physical access.

I read this paper once

http://fish2.com/ipmi/bp.pdf

not sure I would entirely trust IPMI to be left switched on if I was running a server.

Our colocation provider had complete loss of connectivity for almost 17 hours from roughly 3AM to 8PM EST on the 17th.  Even after 8PM connectivity was seriously degraded until around midnight.  Utterly unacceptable but beyond our control.  A network provider as large as Sago should never have a situation where they have almost a day of downtime for an entire datacenter.  It was the last straw in increasingly bad service and I pulled an all nighter, working with our new provider to move BitSimple to it's new home.   A big thumbs up to Hivelocity!  A big thumbs down to Sago Networks (which I wouldn't use to host a website for someone's dog).  Sadly I didn't even choose Sago, they chose us.  We were previously with Razor networks and they were rock solid ... until Sago bought them and proceeded to destroy everything which made Razor good.

I am mildly delirious at this point from a lack of sleep (body reminding me I am not a twenty year old anymore) but the server has been migrated.  There may be a few post migration glitches but let support know if you see them, we will get them ironed out over the next couple days.  As always, BitSimple takes security seriously so even our temporary server is 100% dedicated (no VPS or backdoor super admin accounts) and I personally installed the OS and configured the BIOS remotely over IPMI.

Gerald

works for me lol