Commissions Reduced

Effective immediately, commissions are down.

Now that the risk of doing business grew higher, we could not bring down the commissions to the previous level, but the good news is that we have some redundancy in our business model, and would be able to withstand problems with one exchange.

Please, enjoy the new prices, and by all means give some love to our Wireless products! All wireless refills are with zero surcharge.

Update on Increased Commissions

At this time it won't hurt to explain a little better, why were commissions raised, and when they go back to normal.

We do not currently have a stable, reliable cash-out mechanism. The company which we use to withdraw money is going through major issues and could stop working at any time. That is a major risk, since there is a chance that it will take our funds with it.

Unfortunately, we have not been proactive in finding an alternative withdrawal method. So, instead of switching, we are going through our options, and testing alternative withdrawal methodologies. There are quite a few options, but so far we could not find the one that would be reliable enough to run business with. It is a major embarrassment for us that we had to jack up the commissions, but it is what it is.

There are some good news, though. It seems that we are close to finding reliable vendor. If all goes well, we could reduce commissions before the end of the week.

Please, be sure to check our wireless refills. It is our new offering, and in order to promote it, we are still selling wireless refills with no surcharge.

Temporary Price Increase

Lately, there have been some issues withdrawing cash from MtGox. The issues got to the point when a big chunk of cash got stuck and now we have troubles fulfilling orders.

To help with this crisis, we are temporarily raising commissions to 10% across the board for all gift cards. This is not  permanent price increase. Prices will go down once the money transfers will go back to normal.

Thanks for your attention and for your business.

Apparently, our recent outage was caused by a now-known bug:


CVE-2012-2459: Critical Vulnerability


A denial-of-service vulnerability that affects all versions of
bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt has been reported and fixed. An attacker
could isolate a victim's node and cause the creation of blockchain
forks.


...


Your bitcoin process would stop processing blocks and would have a
different block count from the rest of the network (you can see the
current block count at websites like blockexplorer.com or
blockchain.info).  Eventually it would display the message:


"WARNING: Displayed transactions may not be correct!  You may need to
upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade."