Just pathetic. What's even more pathetic than the lag in transfers and today's total clusterfuck is the fact that the co-founder is a moderator on these boards but not even able to give at least some sort of brief life sign explaining what the heck is going on (despite being active and constantly logging in here today, last one 8 p.m.).
I can't facepalm my face enough for such an unprofessional conduct of business.
God, I'm longing for the day some real players step up with a reliable, professional exchange and stomp these amateur exchanges to the ground. You'd think with a market cap of 8 billion the time for serious business has come. But nah, let's just run our exchanges like drunken apes. So frustrating.
I'm also not happy with the communication of Bitstamp. A short note on twitter is the least they could do, even if they can't fix the problem immediately.
That said, you're maybe not entirely fair about the "all exchanges are run by drunken apes". A major reason for exchange downtimes appear to be DDoS attacks. The sites don't handle them well, true, but then again, which (non bitcoin) sites do you know that *do* handle DDoS without downtime? The effect is just more spectacular in our case because traders tends to get twitchy when they can't log in and trade.
Of course, there's no real protection against a large DDoS. If this is causing today's downtimes, no hard feelings because of that (though communication is still pathetic).
However, I don't think DDoS had and still has anything to do with the delay regarding wire transfers since the middle of last week.
The site was running smoothly back then, still more and more reports came in complaining about SEPA transfers not being processed into Stamp accounts. That in combination with today's event just doesn't leave a good impression, i.e. me as a customer is definitely losing trust in their operations. I don't think I really have to explain how important customers' trust is when it comes to attracting mainstream interest and catalysing Bitcoin growth.
I'm quite new to Bitcoin, invested the first time at the beginning of this month. Currently, another batch of my money with which I wanted to buy more coins is somewhere in limbo and not where it's supposed to be, i.e. in my Stamp account.
I've already planned to further increase my investment in Bitcoins beyond that limbo money (basically quadruapling it). However, now I'm of course extremely unsure whether I should still use Stamp in order to get coins for that kind of fiat on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm also pretty unsure about the general development of Bitcoin when exchanges just can't get their act together, meaning I'm starting to ask myself whether I should really invest that much money if this is the current state we're in.
I'm just serving as an example. I think lots of people start developing such doubts when stuff like that goes down, and obviously this will have quite a negative impact on the overall development. That's also part of why I'm pissed and referring to the exchange operators as amateurs - not just because I'm concerned about that limbo money and because I've missed out on a lower price per coin (which I would have gotten if transfers would have been processed normally), but also because all these exchange issues severely hurt the overall development imo.
And certainly keeping your mouth shut if your whole exchange goes south for several hours doesn't really help scattering some of these doubts and getting some trust back.
On a sidenote: At least my coin withdrawal was processed roughly an hour ago, still 4 hours after my request.