BitMe blog

BitBox

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:45:00 -0400

Bitcoin emerged from necessity.

The 2008 financial crisis forced people to question and reevaluate their relationship with money and the cacophony of financial instruments built on top of it. What they found were systems that were opaque and anachronistic. The money we use today wasn’t made for…

Suspending Operations

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 08:53:00 -0400

BitMe is suspending operations indefinitely. The website will remain up until April 15.

Great thanks to all of our customers!

Server Crash Recovery

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:48:07 -0500

On Monday Morning, February 18 at 03:09 UTC, both our website and the REST API stopped responding to requests. We initially believed this to be a network connectivity issue at our data center, but it later became apparent that our server had crashed.

A trip out to the data center had confirmed that the server was completely unresponsive. We did a hard-reboot on the system and brought it back up. The RAID immediately began to resync itself, and after reviewing some logs, we declared the major “fire” to be out.

We took the downtime as an opportunity to do some software upgrades that we had been planning for, as some downtime was necessary to complete them.

After being extra cautious and allowing the RAID resynchronization process to complete, we were able to bring the system back up at approximately 02:00 UTC on February 19.

Two-factor Authentication

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 09:18:31 -0500

Two-factor authentication is now available for your BitMe account using TOTP compatible devices such as Google Authenticator.

USD rounding

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:20:32 -0500

Since the new order rules have gone into effect, we have taken additional measures to make the site more user-friendly. All USD user balances have been rounded up to 3 decimal places. Other USD values when calculated will also be rounded up to 3 decimal places:

order Cost (when buying Bitcoins)
order Gain (when selling Bitcoins)
order execution fee (when selling Bitcoins)

BTC values should continue to function the same for the most part, except that when calculating the order execution fee in BTC (when buying Bitcoins), the value will always be rounded up to 8 decimal places.

New SSL certificate

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:47:53 -0500

We have moved Cloudflare in front of our site, and thus our SSL certificate has changed. If you get a nasty error warning when going to bitme.com, then please clear your browser cache and try again.

New order execution fees

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 01:36:39 -0500

Starting December 10 at 03:00 UTC, BitMe will be changing it’s fees for order executions. Liquidity provider rebates will be discontinued, but they will be replaced with a discounted rate. The new fees are as follows:

0.75% taker fee
0.60% provider fee

This should create a more sustainable revenue stream, so we can continue providing improvements and great service!

New user-friendly UI

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 07:38:53 -0500

Over Thanksgiving weekend we quietly released a significant overhaul to the dashboard UI. This UI is the first thing users see when they log-in and allows users to place buy and sell orders for Bitcoins, see their current account balances, see best prices from the order book, and the status of their own orders.

These changes are meant to address the confusion new users would run into when trying to buy Bitcoins. New users were often confused to the point of sending support emails on the most important aspect of the site, creating Bitcoin orders. This wasn’t their fault, but rather the non-user-friendly UI that was filled with jargon (bid, ask, currency pair, rate, quantity) and required users to manually calculate how many Bitcoins they could buy with a given amount of US Dollars.

Now when logging in, the first thing the user should notice at the top of the their dashboard will be two widgets - one for buying Bitcoins, the other for selling Bitcoins. The price (per Bitcoin, in USD) is defaulted to current best bid/ask and the user can either enter in the quantity of Bitcoins they would like to buy/sell, or simply the amount of USD they want to spend/gain.

New order rules

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:23:00 -0500

tl;dr

changes go live December 23
rate precision (tick size) changing from 8 to 3 for orders
new minimum quantity for orders 0.1
new error code 1402 for API on POST /rest/order/create

Starting December 23, the rate precision (tick size) on BitMe will be changed from 8 to 3. This will limit the rate (or price per Bitcoin) to 3 decimal places. The new minimum quantity for an order will be 0.1.

When the changes go live any orders still open with a rate precision greater than 3 or a quantity less than 0.1 will be closed. New orders will automatically be opened for any order that has a remaining unexecuted quantity of 0.1 and was closed because of the rate precision violation. Bids will be rounded down, while asks will be rounded up, ensuring the user gets a better rate than they had anticipated.

Also, a new pre-order check will be added that prevents a user from placing an order that matches/overlaps with any existing open order they have. A new API error code, 1402, has been added for this scenario for the POST /order/create call.

BitMe back up after being down for a few days

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:16:49 -0400

BitMe is now fully back up after being down for a few days. I was out of town at a conference and was unable to attend to my daily duties.

-Sean Lavine BitMe, LLC Founder

BitMe security improvements and other changes

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:54:58 -0400

BitMe has released a software upgrade this evening with the following changes:

Password is now required to be entered for both VouchX and Bitcoin withdrawals
Confirmation screen for Bitcoin withdrawals shows user the amount and address
VouchX withdrawals that fail no longer get “stuck” in pending status; they now are automatically cancelled
VouchX withdrawals are now charged a 2% fee
International wire transfer withdrawals have been temporarily suspended

New Payment Methods

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:46:38 -0400

BitMe is proud to announce that in keeping with it’s theme of simplicity and ease of use - it is now accepting several new payment methods including:

Direct Deposit to your bank account
cash deposit to BitMe
wire transfer - US
wire transfer - international

Software update, downtime

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:58:00 -0400

Starting August 29 at 00:30 GMT, BitMe will be down for approximately an hour for a large software update.

Software update to fix withdrawals to self

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:40:00 -0400

Saturday evening (August 18) it was discovered after reviewing transactional logs that a user had withdrawn Bitcoins from their BitMe account to themselves (using their BitMe deposit address). The BitMe software was not able to handle this automatically. The user’s account was debited (for the withdrawal) but the credit (for the deposit) was not able to be processed automatically as normally.

The user’s account has been manually adjusted to correct the issue, and the BitMe software has since been updated to correctly handle this in the future.

Hardened SSL/TLS configuration

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 04:52:45 -0400

Saturday evening a user reported an issue with BitMe’s SSL/TLS server configuration. A notable issue was it’s susceptibility to a protocol-based vulnerability with SSL/TLS known as BEAST. While this is a potentially serious issue, it can be difficult to pull off, as an attacker must first create a man-in-the-middle attack via another method.

BitMe has since hardened it’s SSL/TLS configuration for SSL v3.0/TLS v1.0 to mitigate this issue and has added support for TLS versions 1.1 and 1.2 for clients supporting it.

Updated Account Recovery / Security Features

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 23:54:41 -0400

BitMe has been updated with several new account recovery/security features.

Security Questions

New users are required to answer security questions when joining. These will be used as part of the lost password process.

Current users will soon be required to answer security questions upon logging in before continuing, these may be answered now by logging in to your account and navigating to the “Account” tab.

API Keys

Creating a new API key now requires your account password to be entered
API secrets are now hidden by default when viewing API keys for your account

Software Update

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:27:00 -0400

BitMe will be undergoing a software update August 4 03:00 UTC and will be unavailable during this time. Expected downtime is 30 minutes or less.

Disclosure: bug affecting order placement

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 04:01:00 -0400

Late Friday night (UTC) a user reported an error they were receiving while attempting to place an order through BitMe. This error contained the message “Cannot have more than 100 open orders”. This is known as code 1401 in the API. The BitMe Founder immediately investigated the issue and indeed confirmed that this was a bug. The pre-order placement check that emits this error was counting a user’s closed orders as part of this limit.

This bug was within the order placement system and therefore affected both API and normal web users. The bug was confirmed, test coverage expanded, and a fix was deployed to testnet and production in approximately 30 minutes.

These facts have been agreed upon by the reporter of the issue prior to publication. Thanks to deego for responsibly reporting this.

You can read more about BitMe’s disclosure policy as part of it’s broader security policy.

Open Beta

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 06:02:00 -0400

BitMe is now in open beta and available for trading!

BitMe testnet reset

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:36:45 -0400

The BitMe testnet site has been reset.