Bitcoin Forum

Skilled short-term speculators buy low and sell high, making the price more stable in the longer term. Stability makes the currency more useful.

Also speculators need leverage so that they can benefit from their skills. So a bitcoinica clone is needed. Anyone working on this, or are there already tools for these?

BitDayTrade just opened up to offer this. It got hacked and closed down shortly after launch.

https://icbit.se/ work for you?

Just trying it out. The UI really sucks ass, using the site seems pretty painful. I just registered an account logged in, and now I want to trade, and now it is asking for my login details again when I want to trade.

I think I can handle the getting hacked risk using Open Transactions, but I am not yet convinced that any of the leverage/shorting services were actually viable; possibly people keep finding out its a recipe for disaster thus pretend to be hacked as their excuse for failing horribly.

I would very much like a very sure and certain and clear method of how exactly to safely and securely do it.

Right at the start the very idea that someone is going to loan you their precious bitcoins for you to use to force down the value of bitcoins seems somewhat weird...

-MarkM-

I'm a speculator, and if mtgox offered leveraged trading, Id probably use it. I wouldn't trust a newer service though.

fair enough, I've only put in a couple of bitcoins myself to learn all of its features (I'm up a bit since shorting from 14 to 12, and then got some at 13 again)

I'm pretty sure that mtgox isn't going to offer leverage at least in years, they make enough dough with their current business model, and their software seems to be pretty crappy (they can't add new features very easily since it is badly designed).

However if a new service would come, perhaps you could risk a few btc to try the service out? Eg. Test the functionality and that withdrawals are working, then maybe try risking it with higher sums?

Look what happened yesterday, the price jumped to $15.30 or so then back down to $10 or so.

That kind of volatility, happening that fast, seems very likely to cause disasters to anyone providing significant leverage.

Since speculators love volatility, I don't suppose there would be much interest left if some kind of volume-averaged price was used as strike price or price used in margin calculations or whatever, would there?

As I now have scripts for working out the actual value of a portfolio of assets, I have been thinking of offering lines of credit secured by assets, so that people can borrow for any purpose, even for the purpose of shorting. I would protect myself somewhat against volatility by only considering somewqhat less volatile assets to be suitable for collateral, or by lowering the amount of collateral an asset is evaluated at for use-as-collateral purposes if the asset is quite volatile.

Thus basically people would deposit in a margin holding area hopefully-not-very-volatile assets, some percentage of the evaluated value of which would be useable as collateral to secure loans.

This breaks the shorting/leverage problem down, separatign the loan aspect from any worry about what people might actually want loans for. It would be none of the loaner's business what people do with what they borrow.

Since speculator around here seems mostly to really mean gambler, I am doubtful such a service would be popular... I expect some kind of "contract for difference" system would be more popular, but it seems only a matter of time before rollercoaster price movements throws such things off their rails... Heck the fiat markets are usually a lot less volatile than cryptocoin markets yet still every once in a while they need bailing out due to some disaster or other they evidently bring upon themselves (or maybe are trying to bring upon others but get sucked into themselves along the way?)

-MarkM-

EDIT: It occurs to me it might not be at all clear where the "leverage" comes in with my loaning concept. Basically it would be incremental. Say you can borrow 50% of what your collateral is evaluated to be "worth". You can thus buy more collateral. Provided what you are buying to use as collateral is indeed good picks, that go up in value, you could end up growing quite a large pile of collateral. That would be your leverage, come some day you decide to take a gamble on something you think you might be able to make a profit shorting...

I think what you meant to say is, "Bitcoin needs more rubes I can profit off of."

The second authorization was for a trading web-client, it's kind of independent from the main site. (other third-party web-based or non-web-based clients may appear later).

Can you please tell what exactly is wrong with the UI so we can fix it ?

Here is some feedback:

- Lots of info on the front page, still it is unclear what the site is for. More clear "Call to action" needed, big button "Register now"
- Just remove the double authentication, it confuses people.
- Less text, more action. People don't like to read, they like to gamble.
- Streamline the process. Imagine a scenario where dumb guy like me comes to your site with pockets full of money, and wants to make more money using your site. You don't want to keep a lecture to me about your great sitee and its features, you just want to offer the best tool for me to destroy my life savings using your great service ;)

So the process should be like "Register" -> few fields -> add funds -> gamble with as few clicks and text as possible.

Also add the number of confirmations you are using for bitcoin transfers in the deposit site. I just sent small amount of bitcoins to test the service, now 3 confirmations and no any info about that showing up...

6, as usual (or 0 for deepbit). Ok, we will add this info.
May be listing even unconfirmed TXes will be useful...

I disagree, in my opinion bitcoin need's more places to spend your bitcoins and less speculation.

At the moment there are very few commodities that you can buy with your coins, and next to no places to buy common communicates like milk, bread, butter etc.  A huge percentage of the daily/weekly/monthly volume of bitcoin trades are for other currencies, in traditional money markets this usually lead's to volatility.

Just my opinion though.

Why would a rational merchant accept such a volatile currency as bitcoin? Merchants want a stable currency. And the best way to make make bitcoin more stable is to attract more speculators, and I mean short-term speculators - those who want to make money with price movements.

A little more feedback:

- default values make it easier for customers
- It should be more clear what the customer has to do if he/she wants to profit from the price going up or down. I'm pretty sure that the average chap just wants to gamble on the price movements, he doesn't care about technical details how it works.
- Overall the software/process looks like some enterpricey internal app from some 100-year old organisation (bank?)...

Hmm, there is already text note on this: "Hint: "Buy" contracts if you want to profit from price going up and "Sell" if you want to profit from price going down." below "Buy" and "Sell" buttons.

Speculation is all about boom's and busts.  The dot com speculation lead to the 97 bust, property speculation gave us 2007, most people blame debt speculation for the great depression 1928-29, but like I said, its just my opinion (and about 100 years of history).

Have you tried http://www.bitme.com ?
Seems pretty nice and intuitive to me.

Does it work the same way as bitcoinica? Does it offer leverage? Looks like a just normal exchange to me... I started creating an account, but left it because I felt lazy...

(I should note that I'm not the target market (speculator) myself, because I'm pretty sure that I suck at predicting the price movements in the short term. So I leave that gambling to others. However I think there is a dire need for some kind of service which allows it easily to short sell bitcoins.)

There are CALL and PUT options:

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MPEx

That's one of the reasons why ICBIT project was born. It's not for gambling. Futures contracts are more serious instruments and could be used for many things, including speculation on the price movements (for which they suit very well due to their nature - marginal trading, low fees, fast execution, etc).
Furthermore, we plan to add commodities futures too, including oil, gold, and index futures. This would interconnect the Bitcoin market to the fiat-money exchanges (thanks to arbitragers) and hopefully establish a new ecosystem previously absent in the Bitcoin world, reducing volatility.

I started BitBid for just this reason. I've had quite a few people sign up but not many have posted anything for sale. I think lack of prominent escrow services are hurting it since it's so easy to get paid then never send the product. Also it seems most people are either hoarding or speculating with Bitcoin instead of using it to buy things. It will come eventually. Slow and steady wins the race, etc...

Whatever it is for, make it easy to understand and easy to use. And my recommendation is that solve one problem properly first, (like speculation in USD/BTC market), and after that start thinking about additional features.

Sure, thanks for your feedback!

That was a nice movement, 3.1BTC into 10BTC so far, as a test 'play' this is going well

What bitcoin really needs is acceptance by a major corporation willing to perform the tasks formerly reserved for sites like bitcoinica and Mt Gox.