Bitcoin Forum

Now, the limit order book is public.

Order Book: https://www.bitcoinica.com/pages/order_book (https://www.bitcoinica.com/pages/order_book)

Our to-do list:

- Make it "live".
- Make platform-wide trade history public.
- Make it available via APIs.

why suddenly?

IIRC you always argued that doing so would be a disadvantage to bitcoinca users.

What are you talking about?  We were always at war with Eurasia.

Finally  ;D

Oh and Zhoutong this is a step in the right direction +10000000

cool, so is it safe to say that you are no longer matching mtgox orders?

Bravo.

Looking pretty long (with plenty of dry powder) on bitcoinica.

zhou, I hope the huge askwalls are fake.

;D ;D ;D ;D

Yay leverage! Short sell all the Bitcoins x10!

HAHAHA. It’s on the bids now too.

lulz... completely useless orderbook

Not completely, you can divide it by 10 and see which capital the owners at least have on Bitcoinica, unless this is caused by some kind of bug.

When we can expect API?

why no stop orders?

I don't get it... why there should be walls like this?

But they must have at least 1/10 of funds right?

nope - any limit order can be placed with 0 funds

bitcoinica越办越好！

Interesting. Watching the spread earlier of $4.70/4.81 I saw orderbook w/ a spread more like $4.77/$4.78. I had a sell order inside the spread. A 1400+ buy order @ $4.85 showed on the book, which I watched get filled, without any of the ask side moving, including my order inside the spread.

I'm thinking that's not super helpful. If the above is truly what happened (and I do have a series of screenshots) and wasn't a bug (I saw millions of BTC on order) well.....I just don't know how to explain how

$4.70 > $4.85 < $4.81  ??? with supporting volume inside the spread  ???

I understand you're not showing all the actual orders, but...hmm - I guess I have to wonder what the spread has to do with reality.

That's why Bitcoinica is not an exchange. We rely heavily on Mt. Gox liquidity.

Our pricing algorithm doesn't take the order book into account.

The background: I was surprised when I see the order book myself. I haven't done that for a long time. I didn't know that we have SO MUCH liquidity! I was always under the impression that people are mostly interested in market or near-market orders.

We are displaying our book in a format that's similar to an exchange, and it doesn't mean that we have to match these orders in the exchange way.

it appears more based on the MtGox price.


with so much slippage potential, I'm sure many folks don't use market orders (or others that execute as market orders) I try to only use them when I have a reasonable guess the slippage will be light.

If there is so much liquidity, and there are orders on the books, why don't orders fill? ;)


No...you fill orders more like a broker, and that's what I'd expect. I also expect wider spreads. IMO, your pricing bot is a little overcautious, spreads a little wide, but I understand you have to mitigate risks, too ;D

I really don't pay much attention to the orderbooks myself, though it's very interesting info indeed. I guess I found it surprising that the spread, the orderbook, and the actual fills have rather different values.

It does shed some light perhaps on why it's difficult for me to make an intraday trade work (at bitcoinica).

All in all, +10 on the website update. The interest page improvements are great!

If you are going to allow fake orders, why even have this?


https://i.imgur.com/y9S19.png

maybe someone has 5000:1?

That wouldn't be enough.


Maybe they have 1 quadrillion (10^15) dollars  and 1 billion billion billion billion billion billion trillion (10^66) : 1 leverage.

1.0e+80 bitcoin made my head explode and I wrote the biggest number I could think of afterward.

It also makes me think of Lord James (British House of Lords) talking about some $15,000,000,000,000 supposedly backed by some 750,000 tonnes of gold. 1.0e+80BTC is as realistic as that much gold ;D
(this was the entire value of the US debt not too long ago)

At least in this case, it looks like a bug. Or zhoutong does his math on Intel Pentium Processors. And is trying to pay off the US national debt.

Edit: I guess i failed to pay homage to the 1.5M BTC order on the bid side.

Also, I guess i can see why orders might slow on occasion - 1.5M BTC to fill 1.0e+8 BTC is a lot more math than my bot could do.

all the joking aside, zhoutong, I really like your service, it helps me make money regardless of how it works!

So, oddly that 1.5 million BTC ask wall is at $4.70, which is about $0.10 above the MtGox 50K BTC wall. Any correlation? More importantly, if I put in a huge bid that I don't actually have money to back (e.g. let's say I have $1 in Bitcoinica and I bid on 1000 BTC; it doesn't matter what my leverage is, I can't actually support that order), does it still show up? If so, you probably need to ax that portion of the order book.

I concur with the others.  Don't allow people to place orders if they don't have the funds to back them. 

What next, executing unfunded orders too?

I believe the crazy orders generally go away after a while (try placing a limit long 1 million), which is why the 1.5 million bid is interesting.

We don't have a mechanism of removing unfunded orders at the moment, because in our system, we only process the order when the price reaches the trigger, including the margin assessment.

We didn't previously open our order book to the public so that was not part of our consideration. It's not a bug, but it does affect the usefulness of the data.

Currently we're in a process of rewriting our matching algorithm to make everything faster and more sensible. We admit that our current algorithm isn't that suitable for a large-scale trading platform like what we are now. It was designed for thousands of dollars of trade per day.