[e-gold-list] Re: E-gold serious BUG last night

[Patrick Chkoreff]

Oleg Pokrovsky wrote:

> According to my account records it seems that yesterday, between 20.00 and
> 22.00 GMT e-gold SCI had returned the erroneous USD/OZ rate.
> For the transaction completed at 20.00 GMT the rate was 617.90, then I've
> got SEVERAL transactions at the rate of 318.10 (!!!) and only at 21:41 the
> rate again becomes normal 619.70

I have always wondered if this would ever happen, and I have always
taken steps to avoid the problem if and when it did.


> As a result, clients of my automated exchanger had a rare possibility to buy
> egold from me at half a price and obviously had done so :)
> Can anybody from e-gold explain the situation and the measures I should
> undertake to ask for the refund of the appropriate OZ amount of gold.


Anybody who does automatic payouts based on a fiat/gold exchange rate
from ANY data feed should take precautionary measures.  The approach I
took was to "box in" the acceptable exchange rate as a configuration
option in the software.

That is, I can tell the software a minimum (and maximum) "sane" exchange
rate I will accept.  I set the minimum because I don't want to get
screwed, and I set the maximum because I don't want to screw anybody else.

So for example if the exchange rate were now 617.90, I might box in the
sane range as 556 to 679, allowing for a 10% swing on either side.

If the exchange rate from the data feed ever falls outside the range,
the software should REFUSE to make the trade and promptly email the
operator about the problem.  The human operator can then either adjust
the range to accommodate a change in real-world prices, or ignore the
change as an aberration (and look for another data feed if necessary).



> Also I'm surprised that nobody (at least at this list) had noticed that. It
> would be interesting to know, whether this problem was specific to SCI users
> or to all e-gold customers.


Although e-gold is an amazingly reliable system, an exchange rate
aberration like this pretty much had to happen sometime, in my opinion.

-- Patrick

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