Bitcoin Forum

Heroes aren't supposed to ask stupid questions, they are supposed to know everything. Fortunately, I'm not yet a hero, so should exercise the privilege while I still can. :) Hense - the stupid questions.

What the hell are these bitcoin swaps everybody is discussing nowadays? The more I read about them the less I comprehend. What is swapping with what? And who is swapping it with whom? And why? Where can I see the charts? Which exactly lines/numbers should I look at in these charts and compare them with what? And what this comparison should tell me? When these charts/numbers are bullish and when they are bearish?

Can somebody enlighten me (and probably some other forum readers) on this? Thanks!

Swaps are the interest on loans you take to open a leveraged position. There are USD swaps, and BTC swaps (LTC too, but meh). I'm not sure on the charts web address, so I don't know that part.

I place $1000 USD available to borrow.
You borrow the $1000 and owe me a swap of 1% per day. So for $10/day you can borrow my $1000 to buy Bitcoin with. When you are satisfied with your profit (or loss) you close your position, return the $1000 plus any interest and keep the difference. For the record, these borrowed funds cannot be withdrawn.

I hope this helps!

Edit
When USD swaps are high, it means that there are a lot of long positions open and high demand for the available loans. On the other hand, BTC swaps are high right now. This can also be an indicator that one side may get squoze soon, too

Heres the site:

http://www.bfxdata.com/combined/btc.php

$21m USD [60kBTC] borrowed
$5m   USD [13kBTC] borrowed (+3k in past 24hrs)

IMO people overestimate the shorts, but for the record they are relatively high.

If BTC swaps are high right now does that mean bitcoin is likely to rise in price, or the opposite?

Well, currently there are:
22,193,192.53 USD swaps
17,599.02 BTC swaps (or about $6.1MM at current price)

Say you have $333 and very confident that the current price $1000/btc  ;D  will go up. If you buy 0.333BTC and the price goes up 10% to $1100 next day, and you sell you'd have $366 ($333+$33 ) Yay but that's not good enough for you and instead you decide to leverage long. That is, you come to RyNinDaCleM and say you want to buy a full 1BTC.  RyNinDaCleM, being a loan shark that s/he is, agrees but on the following terms s/he will buy and hold it for you, s/he wants to be paid 1% per day and asks for Initial Margin 3:1 (33%) and warns that Maintenance Margin is 15%. Blah blah STFU you agree and hand him $333 (33% from $1000 as Initial Margin) he puts in $666 of his own money and buys full 1BTC and says he'll keep it for safekeeping you go Whateve's. Now you prop your eyes open with tooth picks and glue yourself to a monitor looking at BTC price charts expecting it to go up. You've entered a leveraged long position.
Outcomes:
A-Day later, price goes up 10% cool!! You ecstatically run to RyNinDaCleM's place tell him to sell that 1BTC and give you your money. He hands you $427.34 ($1100 - $666money he put in - $6.66 his 1%swap interest for day). You come back home and find your girlfriend with another model looking chick having a pillow fight naked on your bed. Cool much better than $366 eh?

B-Day later market moves against you $100 so btc is at $900 now. You kick the cat, lock the dog outside, but hang in there after all you got mad trader skillz and confident that the price MUST go up so must be just a glitch in the matrix. Next day market moves against you again and BTC is at $800 now. You call up your girlfriend and say that she needs to loose few kilos/pounds, call up your mom and say you always hated her cooking. But stick with your btc. After all BTC always rebounds, right? It always does. RIGHT!?! Day three, you wake up and find puke all over your keyboard, empty bottle of vodka and a really fat "thing" passed out in your bed. You really hope it's a chick but can't tell and too afraid to check as to not wake her/him up. You check BTC and it's trading at $700. Damn must be that full moon oh well BTC is only down 30%. You look at the chart and conclude that the pterodactyl's nose points to a trend reversal tomorrow. But phone rings and it's RyNinDaCleM saying it's a margin call and he just sold your BTC and come pick your $14.02 up . WTF thought we were cool bro? Phone ring wakes up the fat dude that was passed out on your bed, he give you a compliment on you pretty mouth while he pukes all over your bed/carpet.  >:( WTF just happened!?!

Well, your equity (your money) started off at $333. 15% Maintenance Margin at price of $1000 is $150 so you're well over that with your $333
-Day one btc is at $900. Your equity is at $227.34 ($900-$666RyNinDaCleM share-$6.66one day 1% swap interest), 15% Maintenance Margin means that you need to be at least at $135 (900*15%). $227.34 > $135 so you're good.
-Day two btc is at $800. Your equity is at $120.68 ($800-$666RyNinDaCleM share-$13.32two day 1% swap interest), 15% Maintenance Margin means that you need to be at least at $120 (800*15%). $120.68 > $120 barely made it.
-Day three btc is at $700. Your equity is at $14.02 ($700-$666RyNinDaCleM share-$19.98three day 1% swap interest), 15% Maintenance Margin means that you need to be at least at $105 (700*15%). But $14.02 < $105 MARGIN CALL!

Shorts are the other way around where you borrow BTC and sell it right away for $ in hopes that it'll go down so you can repurchase it later at a lower price. Don't have time to write up an example for that today  :)

TL;DR lots of USD swaps (longs) means a lot of people holding BTC with borrowed money in hopes that BTC will go up so they can sell and pay back the $$$. But they're paying interest daily, and if market goes down too much they might have to sell their BTC before loosing everything, or if it goes down too much the BTC might be sold automatically by exchange in a margin call. Which might cause a domino effect. Price falls, person 1 gets margin called and his coins are sold on the market, causing the price to drop even more, now person 2 gets margin called and now his coins are market sold driving the price even further down now person 3 is in trouble etc...

BTC swaps  (shorts) are the other way around, people borrowed coins, sell right away and sit on fiat. Eventually they have to buy the coins to give them back (close their short). They obviously hope to rebuy at a lower price. You borrowed a coin from me at $1000, price goes up to $5000 but i don't care and want my coin back, so you're forced to buy at the market price. Forcing price up, and possible margin call on other shorts driving the price even higher...

Epic post DaRude. Wanted to quote this for future re-reads.

Hahahahahahahahahahah

Epic indeed ;D ;D

You're all welcome

I'm glad my loan sharkery is amusing to all  >:(
















 ;D :P

So if i have 100 btc to loan it , where to start ? bitfinex?   how much could i earn daily/monthly?

Yes, you can do it on Bitfinex.

Open an account, send your BTC (or USD with a bank account if you get yourself verified) there, Put your funds in the "deposit" wallet (instead of "trading" or "exchange") and go to "Total return swaps".

If you loan BTC right now you earn 0.15% a day.
If you loan USD right now you earn 0.08% a day.

This is the flash return rate ("the default"), but you can put a different percentage and people can accept your offer.

The current BTC interest rate is quite atypical, BTW. The average daily rate for the last 90 days is 0.0184% for BTC and 0.0768% for USD

I have recently risen to Hero, so I'll dare to ask a leverage trading question: ::)
If someone takes a loan in $ to go leveraged long, does he have to buy BTC immediately, or can he wait 12h - 24h,
for instance if he wants to catch the bottom of a correction? Or if he takes a loan in BTC, does he have to immediately sell all,
instead of selling a chunk, wait for bids to rebuild, then sell another chunk, to reduce slippage?

Edit: Never mind my silly question, someone gave the answer I was looking for in the wall observer thread.

Since we're talking about swaps, maybe someone can clarify how taking liquidity on bitfinex works? Let's say you offer funds for 30 days, and the funds you offered are automatically accepted to cover a position some trader takes. It's my understanding you do not have a guarantee of having locked in the interest rate you specified for 30 days - if the position is closed, so is the swap contract. Is this correct? But if someone explicitly takes your offer up, not directly related to a position they're taking, they are on the hook for 30 days worth of interest?

Swap offers can be closed at any time, you pay interest by the hour.

You mean swaps taken? AFAIK you can't, as a liquidity provider, close an offer once it's been taken before the limit is up. Which seems to pretty much mean doesn't make sense to offer anything else than flash return rates on autorenew unless you like spending your time watching your offers...

it was to good to be true (0.15%)




http://bfxdata.com/calculators/frrswaps.php

Last 30 days for 100BTC

Total Return for Period   $215.62

Total Return from 2014-8-26  to 2014-9-27 :  $139.43

So for me I think it is to risky to keep 100 BTC on bitfinix for such little ROI

(I made 29 btc with 4 trades (sell, buy back, sell, buy back) on bitstamp in this month )

No it's not too good to be true, it is true  ;D


You calculated the interest rate for the last 30 days, but that interest rate is a lot higher now because everybody wants to short.
Recently there were almost no BTC to borrow on Bitfinex:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kctwh/there_are_no_btc_available_left_to_short_on/

I posted what's the flash return rate RIGHT NOW for BTC.
And right now the flash return rate is 0.18%  ;D

I meant closed by the person who takes the swap offer.  So yes, the current system incentivizes flash return rates.

But how long will it keep so high?   if only days or weeks then it means nothing for the long term (long term ROI low)

thanks for explanation.

Good info, tagged for later

Ok,  I made an offer at bitfinex:  100 BTC 0.2% 30 days  , i am curious


What does Non-Compounded and Compounded mean at http://bfxdata.com/calculators/swaps.php ?

I don't know if someone is gonna take that 0.2% (there's a 1'671 BTC at 0.17% right now). But anything below that like 0.16% will do.

It seems not a good return, 100 coins to make 0.2 coins per day... if you use those coins to buy miners, only 40 coins could make you 0.2 coins per day

But those 40 BTC are then gone, and may never see ROI let alone any profit. The 100BTC (if he's a holder anyway) are better working for him than sitting in some dumb safe wallet. :P

If your offer is taken and held for full 24hrs, you should get 0.2BTC. Now you can either withdraw that BTC (non-compound) or let it ride and loan it out again, so next day you're lending 100.2BTC and now should get 0.2004 on the second day, that's where compounding comes in

I meant it, in the nicest way possible  ;D

Don't forget lending is not risk free like keeping coins in the safe. If market moves a lot there might not be enough depth to cover all margin calls, and you might loose $. There's also the risk of exchange going belly up and you loose ALL your coins, like MtGox BitFloor etc....

Just another way to manipulate the price of bitcoins.

Not any bigger than the platform being "hacked"  :D

Trying to invest in bitcoin and get more bitcoin back is quite old way of thinking, "investing" only applies to fiat money since fiat money lose value by itself thus you are forced to invest. For bitcoin hodling is the best investing method and almost risk free

You are new around here, and for that I am sorry.

2014 is certainly a strange year for Bitcoin, compared to the past. You have cherry-picked your interval. Simply zoom out and see that, since 01 Jan 2013, Bitcoin has made gains over 2,000%! Those kinds of returns are unheard-of in any other market. The fact that you have only recently started paying attention to the price desensitizes you to how colossal the gains have been at 300 BTCUSD.

No one's talking about getting rich quick in terms of holding versus investing. Most bitcoiners clearly do not have the patience for a normal investment timeframe. If you invest, treat it like a stock. Purchase, put it away in a portfolio, and come back only after a couple of years at least.

Bought at $275 a month ago, now up 27% to $350.  "Worst investment you can make in 2014".  ;D

He may have been trolling, but he makes the same point as I did, ironically. It's about time-scales.

I've been holding 5$ coins since 2012, you're the one whining about Bitcoin's performance from ATH to current.  That aside, how is buying at $275 and holding to this day (inclusive) not treating it as an investment?  If you want to cherry pick dates to make a point, so can I  ::)

PS: I don't day trade.


How do you envision this working?  I borrow 100BTC from a lender at $300/BTC, price goes up to $1,000,000/BTC, I still owe the lender 100BTC.

So you would rather Bitcoin double in value every week? ::)

They're borrowing the BTC but not selling (shorting) it.  It jacks up the daily interest rate making any new/further shorts costly to open, and/or it also removes a lot of lending offers from the pool, thus reducing the number of coins shorted on margin.  There are also a number of other reasons/things the borrower could be doing.



Which bubble?  2011,  2012,  2013 #1, or 2013 #2? And to address your other question, anything's possible.

Shouldn't there be  "you need to be at lest at $105 (700*15%)" ?

Anyways, it was a huge LOL, epic post, thank you for the laughs!

thank you. now i understand the madness of the trolls here much better.

Great, even I understood that :-D
Thanks!

Yeah, haven't posted for a while but definitely enjoyed that read. Nice.

It's "lose", not "loose". That being said, thank you for all the info you have provided in this thread! :)

BTC swaps have more than doubled to 18600 from the recent low of ~8500 on 24th October

Historically speaking, it looks like bubble territory for the shorts. Backed up by the fact that longs are at $20m which is a third off the july/august high of $30m when everyone was trying to catch the bottom.

Max pain incoming.... ;)

Back to reality, now it is only 0.059% and keep going down,  so it is time to cancel my order and withdraw BTC

For me the average rate (last 90 days): 0.0247% is too low

You're correct.

That works out to an annual rate of ~9% which is actually very high for even historical standards.

The amount you can earn from bank deposits now is well under .2% today and has been under 1% for many years. Even in the 1990's and the 2000's you could generally not earn over 5% on bank deposits

You are comparing government insured bank deposits to a bitcoin exchange. At 9% it'll take you ~11yrs to return your investment (without compound) what are the chances that the exchange will still be here 11yrs from now?

Thanks to RyNinDaCleM  and DaRude for your explanation