This just happened in the last 30 minutes… I had 5 pending SELL trades and 3 open SELL offers in my portfolio. I went out for a little while and I come home to see Bisq is flooded with errors. It said someone was trying to accept an open offer and errors occured. I didnt have a chance to copy that error code but it was something about a null address…
…anyway, I restarted Bisq and immediately received this error " java.lang.IllegalArgumentException" and whatever had happened it completely wiped out my entire portfolio. None of my pending trades were listed anymore. The buyer has already initiated payment so there was no way to recover from whatever happened.
THANK F***KING GOD I had started backing up my data folder any time there was any change in state inside my portfolio!!! I was able to restore my data folder from my backup and now everything is fine BUT this is a huge software issue. If I hadnt backed up, both me and my buyer would be totally screwed right now.
Unfortunately Im now terrified to post any new trade offers.
What is going on with this software?? I just updated to the newest release, this sort of thing never happened previously (before 1.0… before the DAO thing was turned on… I suspect there is a connection there somewhere)
All I can say is, everybody NEEDS to start backing up their data folder CONSTANTLY because thats the only thing that saved my ass this time.
[ [ [ [ BACK UP YOUR DATA FOLDER PEOPLE ! ! ] ] ]
Bisq is NOT a stable platform at the moment. BE SAFE
I agree that this is a major issue. I see you already opened an issue on GitHub, but java.lang.IllegalArgumentException in itself isn’t nearly descriptive enough to figure out why it happened. To get this issue fixed, it is absolutely essential that you upload your bisq.log file there, too, this contains:
A stack trace showing where in the code the IllegalArgumentException occurred
What happened prior to it and might have caused the exception
Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Bisq seems to make backups on its own for every file in the db folder, so you could have restored the working state even if you didn’t back up your whole data folder. It’s pretty unlikely that your buyer also had an issue, so he would have been able to sort it out with the arbitrator. The trade being canceled and everyone getting their funds back would have been the worst outcome, which would of course be very annoying, but still far from “totally screwed”.
Even if you don’t have to worry about losing funds, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to open any new offers. I also had an issue with my data directory in the past (before 1.0, though) and I felt the same way, I didn’t open new offers until I got the data directory fixed up again.
I can’t really disagree with this… While it is generally safe enough to not have to worry about losing money, there seem to be bugs quite frequently which cause much unnecessary annoyance, fear and/or frustration.
I think part of the reason for these “rare bugs” is that Bisq just doesn’t have a very big userbase yet. If there aren’t many users, the chance of these bugs getting encountered is low. This is why you absolutely have to help making Bisq more stable by discovering what caused this issue as much as you can, so go post these logs and answer potential follow-up questions by the devs!
Yes, even though devs do great job with internal backups and safety messures, still you need to make regular backups, as it is still not that reliable.
We need to focus a bit on the bugs now, in my opinion, instead of new features. Good reliable code is very important for this software.
Bug hunting and fixing should be funded by the DAO for anyone that wants to help out. If you can help, please do. This is an open source project, we need to all chip in if we want this software to be what we imagine it should.
We need all the help we can from users that report bugs. In cases like this more information is very valuable. If we can’t reproduce the bug it’s very hard to fix it. In this case it would be helpful if you could share the log file. If you don’t feel like sharing it on a public forum you can also share it directly with me or one of the other developers.
