Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled"
That doesn't just happen. The seller will have to press a cancel button, which causes an email to be sent to you. Then, IIRC, there is a minimum of 3 days wait until the cancellation is accepted.
At the very least, you must have ignored the cancel message you got - that, or your mail provider failed to deliver it.
Obviously it
does just happen! If both sides, buyer and seller, are idle for two weeks or so, such unfinished
transactions are cancelled by the bitmarket.eu system automatically, even if the buyer has already transferred the Euros, like it was the case for me. I
did not even receive any warning email about this, and my mailbox is well organized with a separate folder for all buy orders at bitmarket.eu, so I have certainly not missed any email. This "auto-cancelling" of open transactions is apparently the normal behaviour in the bitmarket.eu system, as I learned from the seller who got this information from the bitmarket.eu admin.
(The seller transferred the Bitcoins to me today, so he is an honest fellow - luckily for me.)
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Your coins have always remained safe with us and thats all thanks to M4v3rs coding skills.
I would like to thank all the people who decided to use the site and put their trust in us.
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Well, on 15 August 2012 I made a purchase of 10 BTC, I transferred 98 EUR to the seller, but then the transaction was suddenly having the status "cancelled" in the transaction list, although I have never cancelled it myself!! So the BTCs got unblocked to the seller without my agreement. Now I have neither EUROs nor BITCOINS, and the seller seems to run away with it and does not answer my emails any more.
Note: This would not have happened if the system had not erroneously returned the blocked bitcoins to the seller, i.e. the main protection mechanism failed!
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As said, this "auto-cancelling" of the bitmarket.eu system opens up all doors for easy fraud. The seller just needs to wait for his Euros and then do nothing, and after a few weeks his Bitcoins get unblocked again and he has both Bitcoins and Euros. This is definitely a
BIG CONCEPTIONAL FLAW in the way bitmarket.eu works, and I am wondering how the admins could have designed this behaviour into the system in full awareness of the possible consequences. This hardly sheds any good light on their conceptual capabilities.
There is also a
lack of transparency at bitmarket.eu, because things like that are not explained anywhere to the user.
I hope that the new admin of bitmarket.eu is going to improve this platform and I have two most important advises for him:
- Remove this "automatic transaction cancelling" procedure from the system (I will certainly not do any transaction there any more unless this gets fixed).
- Get yourself an account at bitcoin.de and make your own experiences from the user's perspective to see how things can be set up (much) better compared to bitmarket.eu
Moreover, more information should be provided about how the system works. For example, the criteria about when the personal transaction limit is reached is absolutely intransparent and not explained anywhere.
Finally, I hope that at least some of the goodies of
bitcoin.de are taken over to
BitMarket.eu, because I think it is important to have more than just one major peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange in the European market, and currently bitmarket.eu is way behind bitcoin.de.
Despite my well-founded criticism expressed here, I appreciate a lot the work that has been done at bitmarket.eu, and it hurts me to see that it lacks further development and improvements, contains conceptual flaws to the danger of its users and falls behind other, similarly designed, peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange markets in the European area.