You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at Bitcoinica. You can view it in your web browser. Bitcoinica's Recent Data Errors What happened? We have been constantly upgrading our algorithm to provide better services and cheaper rates to our customers. However, despite the intensive testing that has done internally, sometimes the algorithm may break under certain market conditions (such as a spike or crash). Therefore, we have also implemented a data integrity checker, which verifies the consistency and integrity of all important financial data of our customers. Today, our data integrity checker has reported an abnormally high percentage of errors. And we have also received service requests from a few customers regarding this issue. Common problems are: duplicated orders, extra orders or positions and unupdated account balance after liquidation. Why it happened? Bitcoinica has a scaling issue about two days ago. Since our site is expanding so fast, certain types of processing jobs are slower and slower due to the huge increase in database size. We have added more processes ("dynos" in Heroku term) into the application stack, and the extra concurrency seems to solve the problem. After that, we have found that it's possible to have two concurrent processes processing the same order or user at the same time. This has caused some conflicts, which result in duplication of some data entries. Some users' account balances haven't been updated correctly because of this. We have quickly added database locking to every single transaction that involves money. Database locking ensures and strictly requires concurrent processes to process data entries exclusively. However, some of our database locking was not correctly implemented. Concurrency problems still continued. Today, during the spike in BTCUSD, increased number of orders have added extra probability of processing the same order at the same time. And our system was kept busy with a long queue of tasks. Is it corrected? We have an automated system to correct these errors. In order to protect our customers, and fulfill our promise of "bear the cost of financial losses that were not caused by our customers", we have implemented this policy: If you were made worse off (less profit or more loss than expected) because of the errors, all errors have been corrected for you. If you were made better off (more profit or less loss than expected) because of the errors, we bear all the associated cost and your account remained unchanged. In the extreme cases (such as $1,000 difference in adjustment), we have reviewed on case-by-case basis and taken manual actions respectively. We hope our resolution for this recent issue is much more professional than simply reverse the trades. What should I do next? You should check your account, and make sure that all the data is correct. If there are still some incorrect data entries, please send an email to support@bitcoinica.com, including the following information: - Your username

- What is incorrect

- What should be the correct value We will verify your information as soon as possible. If you were made better off because of the errors, or you simply want to share part of your profit with us to help Bitcoinica grow, you can donate to Bitcoinica anonymously by sending any amount of Bitcoins to this address: 196D4C3f2MgFrjfRoAh4mkQKfALBvPEnB1 At this moment, our finances are healthy and we can absolutely afford to compensate for this issue. More importantly, we will keep Bitcoinica continued and more exciting features will be announced soon. The Bug Bounty Program We're introducing the Bug Bounty Program. If you have found any bugs, security loopholes or irregularities in our technical systems, you can report them to us and get the chance to win bounties. This is our offering: Security-related or critical loopholes: 5 - 100 BTC each Operational bugs: 1 - 25 BTC each User experience issues: 1 - 25 BTC each Please note that only the first person that reports a particular issue can win the bounty. Also, "potential improvements" are not considered as bugs as long as the features are fairly working. We will determine the amount of the bounties based on the urgency and importance of the issue. Please send any issues you have found to support@bitcoinica.com, including detailed instructions on how to reproduce the issue. Thank you! Thank you for your support! We hope that Bitcoinica can become your favorite trading platform for Bitcoins. More features are coming up soon. We will continue using newsletters to communicate with you all. Again, thank you! Don't want to receive these newsletters anymore? Manage your email preferences here, or unsubscribe.