I’ve had a ridiculous experience with Bitmex, both fun and depressing, but I think I’m finally getting a grip on it, so I wanted to share some things I’ve learned. For clarity, when I first started using Bitmex, I lost about 3 BTC over the course of a month because I had no idea what I was doing and I’m an idiot. Since then however, I’ve taken .06 BTC and I’m currently at 2.7 BTC from Bitmex alone in a few weeks. It has the potential to make you rich, but also super broke. Do not take it lightly.

If you've never used Bitmex before, you can read my original newbie guide on how to start using Bitmex here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/84stai/bitmex_for_dummies_leveraged_trading_longshorts/

Also a reminder, you get 10% off fees if you sign up with a referral code. If you already signed up and didn’t use one, email support and ask them to apply one, it's pretty quick and definitely worth the 2 minute hassle. Would appreciate if you use mine, but just make sure you use something to get the 10% off: "http://bitmex.com/register/BCCNeF"

1. Maker vs Taker: I wasted SO much money on fees originally before I knew about this. Market buying/selling means you pay a fee and based on the last point that is very expensive. If you set limit orders and choose the "post-only" option, you will only place an order if it doesn't execute immediately. If the price hits your mark, you'll actually receive fees rather than paying them. While that seems super small, as mentioned when working with high leverages it adds up a LOT. Fees are based on leverage, so if you’re cross or 100x, you’d literally pay 7.5% just to open an order. At 100k contracts, this is nearly .01 BTC.
2. Cross Leverage: Far left on the leverage slider. This is 100x leverage, but it uses your entire wallet balance as margin. If you have 1 BTC and you open a position worth .1 BTC, on normal 100x leverage, your liquidation would be ~$60 away from your entry price. With Cross, you have .9 BTC as margin, meaning your liquidation would be about $600 away from your entry. Nearly everybody uses this because it helps guard against those fluctuations where you have the right call, but you got liquidated right before. It does mean you can lose 300% or 700% of your money though, so be warned, use stop losses.
3. Funding: In the bottom left of Bitmex, there’s a “Funding Rate”. Every now and then, this will get ridiculously high (i.e. if everyone is longing, and no one is shorting) and play a massive part in the landscape. If the fee is positive and you have a long open, you will pay that fee every 8 hours. If you have a short open in that situation, you get paid that fee. On 100k contracts and a .2 fee, this is .02 BTC, which isn’t bad at all. More importantly beyond the fee though is the pump/dump around it. In the case of a positive .2 fee, the price on Bitmex will tank ~30 minutes before funding (because everyone is closing their longs to avoid the fee) and the second that funding goes through it will skyrocket. Often times it’s worth it to pay the fee just for the price bump afterwards, but I’d honestly recommend just having no position if there’s a massive funding fee coming up.
4. DCA and Small loss vs Big one: There’s two schools of thought to a losing trade. You can dollar cost average, meaning, if I enter long at $9500 and it goes down, I can add more at $9400 to get my entry to $9450. This sometimes works beautifully if you truly believe it goes up. However, the flipside to that is that you add at $9400 and it then goes to $9200. That’s nearly a 300% loss. Adding at stoploss at let’s say $9430 would have lost you 80% instead. But there are times where your stop loss triggers and it shoots up right after. You need to make a decision in these situations how you’re going to handle it. I’ve done days where I make .2 BTC four days in a row and feel great, but then lose 1 BTC all because of one bad trade I refused to get out of and it’s all nullified.
5. Wait for entry and pre-set orders: Bitmex swings HARD. If Bitfinex has a $100 candle, Bitmex may have a $200 candle, solely because of overloaded blocking people from new orders meaning only orders on the books before the big candle are counted. Never, ever, ever, try to catch a candle. By the time your order goes through, it’s too late and you’ll likely be stuck with a terrible entry as it’s about to retrace. Additionally, use this to your advantage. If you expect a $100 pump, put your take profit close at $170 above, or a take profit earlier and then open a short at $170 above with expectations for a retrace. Even outside these large pumps, jumping into a wave is almost always a bad idea. If you miss an entry, just be patient. Missed profit is better than losing money.
6.Signals: You should learn how to do your own TA, but there’s also lots of Twitter guys/Discord groups that provide signals. One thing you’ll find is they never agree on anything. Don’t trust any single person because every single one will brag about how much money they’re making, but they can and will be wrong. Use them as guidelines, but not gospel

Fair point, but that's the fun of it. Each decision you make is incredibly important. Bitcoin drops $100 in 5 minutes and you either just 50% your money or -50% your money. High risk, high reward!

Hope you guys have been shorting!

I kept seeing the Bitmex wrecked twitter thing and seeing mentions of leverage all over 4chan, but had absolutely no idea what it all meant. It also looked too complicated for me so I've always ignored it. Got bored today and it's actually much simpler than it seems. There's a ton of guides that go super in-depth and those made absolutely no sense to me, so I'm going to explain it from an idiot's perspective.

First of all, the draw of Bitmex is you can do what's called Leveraged trading. In the simplest terms possible, it means you multiply your percentage gains/losses. If you go 10x leverage long on bitcoin and bitcoin gains 1%, you gain 10% more money. This is super cool for impatient people like me because it allows you to trade more actively without getting wrecked by fees, and it's ridiculously exciting.

Bitmex doesn't allow US users, but supposedly, all you need to do is register under a VPN and you're good to go. I used ExpressVPN. It is a paid VPN, but they have a 30 day money back guarantee. You can register on Bitmex with it, then cancel. Or keep it because it's actually a super nice program.

Once you're registered, deposit some BTC into your Bitmex wallet. When you first open the trade screen it's going to look super complicated. It's not.

Buying Long on a coin means you expect it to go up. Buying short on a coin means you expect it to go down. Playing those buys works like any other Exchange (i.e. Binance). You can set a limit price to buy in at and an amount. to buy.

Now you want to pick your leverage. In the menu below that, there's a slider. Again, each multiplier of leverage means every 1% = your leverage multiplier. 1% gain with a 25x leverage means 25% gain. I would start with 2x/3x leverage until you get a good handle on things.

The Cost number below the buy long/buy short number is the big one here. With leverage, you're essentially putting loaned money toward a coin. With 10x leverage, you can buy 1 BTC even if you only have .1 BTC (this is why the percentage gains are so drastic). However, this means you can lose it as well.

Let's say you bought 1 BTC at $10000, Long at 10x leverage (So you put in $1000). If BTC dropped 10% to $9000, you would lose all $1000 you put in. If it went to $11000, you would gain $1000 and double your money. Bitmex will auto "liquidate you" if you drop too far and don't have any more money to cover (10x leverage means if it drops more than 10% you lose all the money you put in. 25x leverage means if it drops more than 4% you lose all your money).

You can change orders on the fly and constantly adjust. Let's say BTC raised to $10100 (1%). You could then sell your long order and you will have gained 10% and now you can invest your $1100.

Like I said, there's a ton of guides out there that go into the more fancy TA and ways you can adjust orders, but this should provide a quick overview to get you started. They have a testnet site where you can practice with fake money first as well.

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BTC has been interesting the last few days. Been shorting 9500 and longing at 9000, done fairly well!

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Personally going long on BTC early morning tomorrow. Not sure what will happen tonight

[mod note: removed ref spam]

Going to shill one of my favorite ICOs I've been a part of lately, FundRequest, or FND. Released on IDEX yesterday and is currently about 60% of ICO price. Not too surprising considering the market, but I actually just bought in even more cause I'm a huge fan of this one.

FND is basically Kickstarter for fixing open source projects. It's not my favorite idea in the world cause it's probably never going to hit 1 Bil, but it's such a solid little project. It's hands down the smoothest ICO I've ever seen. Prompt responses from the team in Telegram every time something even became a minor issue and they promptly provided token sale audits. They are extremely communicative and always asking for community feedback. They also just had a survey where they airdropped 30 FND per response.

It already has a working alpha product. They're partnered up with a few big names already. The ones that stand out to me are Singularity and Request Network (yeah, that REQ). Roadmap is very quick including them starting to support their own projects in Q2.

Here's a super informational post on their github which really shows how thorough this team is: https://github.com/ico-check/ico-check/issues/45

Currently only on IDEX, but team has stated some bigger exchanges are coming soon. Check it out!

For those unaware, ZCL is forking into BTCP on the 28th. ZCL holders get 1 BTCP for every ZCL they own. ZCL will dump incredibly hard post fork, so your profit is pretty much dependent on Bitcoin Private's opening price. If ZCL is $200 at time of fork, it means BTCP needs to open around $200 for you to break even. Technically no one knows what BTCP will open at, but going by previous trends, $300 seems like a low baseline, with $500 being reasonable as well.

Here's why this is a crazy play this week and why I'm personally pretty much all-in. Right now, ZCL is about $130, namely because Binance/Bittrex have not announced they are supporting the fork yet (which is not uncommon, Bittrex has waited as low as 2 days before to announce).

IF Bittrex announces support on the fork tomorrow, ZCL will easily moon 50% if not more. If they don't, you can either get out of the coin ASAP and maybe lose 10-20% or hold through the fork and take your bets on BTCP (which is what I'll be doing). You risk a relatively low amount of loss for a gigantic gain solely based on if they announce it or not.

With the market the way it is, this just seems like the correct play to me. The reward outweighs the risk so much. All it takes is one tweet that everyone expects to come (Bittrex not supporting it would be incredibly surprising).

Decided to make this thread about general use cases for a broader scope. Would love to hear you guys ideas!

I guess distributed storage sounds like a bad idea because it's too much data. I guess the main idea is some SaaS that sits as a middle man between large scale applications. Even if it's not storage, it seems like there's some way to connect traditional applications that use SQL (or even SQL) itself and decentralize those, but then again, I'm not super familiar with the Blockchain so I could just be understand it wrong.

I decided to just turn it into a group discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2982515.0

Take a look at the graph on HPB. Ridiculous buy signal for an already great coin. About to rebound hard.

Also NAS. AMA coming on the 24th. CEO of the coin was Co-founder of NEO. Enough said.

Yeah okay I'll buy that. Not some revolutionary idea I'm worried about people stealing and it's just for fun anyway so I'm cool with a discussion format.

Edited the main post for the "idea"

If it's only $500, I'm going absolutely ham and looking for moonshots. No point in going ETH/NEO and hoping for a 5x by end of year.

Go for a moon like HPB or NAS and hope for minimum 20x with a chance for even more. Even if you went $250 in each of those and one went to 0 and one 20x'd, you still have more money than ETH/NEO. No reason to be conservative and boring for $500.

Look into HPB. It's like getting in on NANO a year ago except HPB already has connections with Unionpay. If they deliver on even half of what they're saying this year, it's legitimately 50x by EOY.

NAS as well. Not the same amount of upside, but less risky than HPB. One of the best teams in crypto (NEO cofounder is their CEO)

I'm looking for someone that understands blockchain and it's capabilities far better than me just to have a quick chat with. It's nothing super serious, but I've got a quick thought experiment/idea I want to bounce off someone to see if it's feasible. No grandeur dreams of multi-million dollar ICO, but as a dev myself (albeit a terrible C# one), I want to explore some avenues a bit and learn something in the process.

Obviously this is just for fun unless we hit it off and become best friends. Just for someone bored tonight I suppose. Again, this isn't some 14 year old delusion of grandeur where I'm going to offer you equity to code my project. Just want to chat through some things.

PM me your Skype!

90% of coins are just new platforms that do it "better" or "faster". Obviously, there's some super neat cases out there like HST for voting where tokens make complete sense or stuff like NAS where we can now search the blockchain. Just for fun, I've been sitting here brainstorming, what else is left? What would be a fun, unique use for blockchain that seemingly no one (or whoever did is horrible) is tackling? Part of me would love to get involved in my own ICO or Usage, but I just haven't come up with something I actually want to pursue. So maybe this thread is also looking to steal your ideas, who knows.

I continue to look at it from an actual software/application perspective, since that's where I'm more familiar. My two thoughts were:

A middleman that ties into existing enterprise IT infrastructure and decentralizes some of their functions. In my mind, this would tie into something like Active Directory or Exchange where you can offload some tasks onto the blockchain and reduce the need for 50 servers to 10 or something along those lines. I don't think transaction speeds are fast enough for full tie in (i.e. a mailbox database on Exchange), but even doing some hot/cold storage seems feasible. I view it somewhat like Azure/AWS but on the software (SaaS) side. Could even target stuff like SAP.

EDiscovery-esque/Chain of Custody data storage. Big part of Legal discovery is data gathering, so I'm imagine an application where the law firm plugs in a few settings and send off to the client. The client runs this "script", that script ties into X applications database (think a mailbox or accounting records) and pulls those records, then uploading them directly into our blockchain. This guarantees the data pulled and that the data hasn't been touched in transit and cannot be modified.

I'm sure there's a ton of holes in my ideas as my head isn't fully wrapped around blockchain tech yet, but happy to have them ripped apart. Also would love to hear some of your unique use cases.

A lot of these are absolutely horrible.

Look into HPB. It's like getting in on NANO a year ago except HPB already has connections with Unionpay. If they deliver on even half of what they're saying this year, it's legitimately 50x by EOY.

NAS as well. Not the same amount of upside, but less risky than HPB. One of the best teams in crypto (NEO cofounder is their CEO)

Consolidated really well yesterday. Breakout incoming in the next day or two.

Staying perfectly steady while BTC moons today. Really good side. If BTC goes sideways tomorrow like expected, this should have a great day.

That's why I already did the work for you!

Copying this from a Reddit post, but it is SUCH a good time to get in on this coin right now.

HPB - High Performance Blockchain

Buzzwordy name? Yes. Why? It comes from the Chinese words Xin Lian. Xin meaning heart or core, and Lian means to link or connect.

It is compared to EOS, as EOS is a high powered blockchain using parallel processing, but the major difference is they will be using accelerating hardware chips as well.

What Do They Do?

This is truly one of the most innovative projects in crypto world. They are going to be the world's first company to combine software with accelerated hardware to significantly improve ease of use and speed of data transfer and access. They will be able to do 1,000,000+ transactions per second. The software will be open source.

Who Is Their Market?

Their market is the massive companies and industry that uses large amounts of data. Their white paper mentions Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent. In case you don't know, these are absolutely massive Chinese companies. Baidu is their Google. It's the fourth most visited site in the world after Google, Youtube and Facebook.

Other target markets include the IOT, financial industry (see UnionPay in partnerships), medical industry, governments and supply chains. Absolutely huge, multibillion dollar industries with enormous amounts of data being transferred every second all over the country and world. The goal is to make it easier to use and speed up the data transfer and transactions.

The Team

The founder is Wang Xiao Ming. He's been an early blockchain innovator in China for years and has written three books on blockchain technology and spoken at multiple crypto/blockchain events. He's been connected with NEO since day one. The rest of the team has been assembled from Huawei, Intel and other major Chinese companies.

Advisors include the executive president of UnionPay(more on them later), a noble prize winning physicist, and the president of the very successful Dongfang Fuhua Fund.

Investors include NEO (this alone should get you interested), TimeStamp Capital (Major Chinese investment), Lei Zhen (founder of OKcoin), and more.

Partnerships

This is the exciting part. First, they are partnered and work closely with NEO. The last coin I found out that was partnered with and working with NEO was Loopring. I bought Loopring at $0.035. Loopring hit $2.60 yesterday, that's a 74x increase in price (full disclosure I sold my Loopring at 30 cents). It will be the first blockchain in the industry to support NeoVM (NEO Virtual Machine).

Second major partnership is UnionPay. Most of us in North America aren't familiar with the name but they are massive. They do 80% of all Chinese transaction data, which equals out to a turnover of $12.5 TRILLION(!) per year. To help visualize that, they are bigger than Visa and Mastercard combined. Imagine hearing a coin is working with those two companies directly. This is one of the biggest partnerships ever in cryptocurrency.

They also have more high value partnerships that have no been announced yet. After partnering with UnionPay, they will have no issues making further partnerships, that's how big UnionPay is.

What Else?

This is the chance to get in early, they are a Chinese company with no marketing and literally unknown right now. This is similar to Tron and Vechain which I got into. Whether you hate Tron or not, I got in at $0.002 because of the team and success of the team. It took Tron a while to take off because their success was from out East, and didn't translate to North America. Same as Vechain. Vechain has MASSIVE partnerships out East that were looked past because they are from the East, just recently Vechain's success is getting world wide notice.

Here they are at a Semiconductor conference where they spoke at and set up a booth:

Upcoming News

Q1 - HPB Testnet Launch!
Q2 - HPB Mainnet Launch!

Where To Buy

It currently is offered on Kucoin and Bibox

Price Predictions and Market Cap

Only 133 Mil MCap right now. I don't think $1B market cap is much of a stretch in the very near future. I think this can really blow up. That would put the price around $27 and around #40 in terms of cap. I really don't think that's reaching too much. Again, I try to be conservative, but with this tech, the mainnet in the not too far future, being tied to NEO, UnionPay and other announcements coming, $2B and $3B and a top 20 coin wouldn't be far fetched. This is assuming there is no major crash or dip that changes things.