Bitcoinica is the winner because of the fees/spreads.
Zhoutong is in an ideal position for insider trading. He could easily have made BTC 50K last night from the gullibility of those gamblers. Spreads and fees are only a facade to pretend this is an "honest" business. Got anything to back up those accusations? No, it's mathematically impossible to prove him guilty. He'd thus be mad not to do it. EDIT: Of course there is the possibility that he's a person of exceptional integrity. But somehow "exceptional integrity" and "derivatives trading" don't go together very well. I know there are evil forex brokers out there, but that's the motivation to have a change. I feel good enough the reality isn't hurting the honest people, even in a free market. I even questioned myself whether I can justify the profits from a negative-sum game. It's the people who love Bitcoinica that make the project going. There are a lot of both money-making and value-generating opportunities out there, and I don't want to spend my energy on exploiting other people. |
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I was force liquidated with funds still in my account, isn't the margin call meant to deplete your funds before you're force liquidated?
thats what i thought too. since when has this been the case? We always have maintenance. And it has never been changed. |
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other thread seems to be locked, just spent a half hour reading it though
Oh My God
!
Very entertaining eh? (Yes I am Canadian) Zhoutong even replied to him twice which shows good faith on his part IMO. You don't know the 10+ PMs
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I was force liquidated with funds still in my account, isn't the margin call meant to deplete your funds before you're force liquidated?
There's 4% maintenance. Obviously we can't allow anyone to deplete funds and cause uncollectible debts. |
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I think more important than anything is that the asterisk goes away. It gives away to much information, and restricts the market.
What happened today is a result of people exploiting this information.
You should keep your customer's positions, and even the aggregate information of their positions, confidential.
If lowering the leverage for large accounts allows you to avoid the asterisk then do it, at least until you build up more reserves.
I agree with this. Zhou, I think this is important -- I understand you want to be as honest as possible, but there is a such thing as being "honest to a fault". We can't hide it anyway. If we don't have reserve, we will become a bucket shop if we don't tell our customers to stop buying/selling. So after all the only way is to distribute the trading power evenly to everyone. I wonder what Forex brokers do when they run out of reserves? Does that happen? I have research to do... Anyone who knows a lot about Forex, don't hesitate to provide clarity for me on this point. I thought I just read...Aren't you the one who's going to be writing the documentation for Bitcoinica when it comes to their Forex-based trading ? LOL. Blind leading the blind. I mean, I'm all for hiring others to do work for you...but I mean...this just kinda disturbed me a little LOL. I'm fine with this. I check Rails API docs all the time when I code. |
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I think more important than anything is that the asterisk goes away. It gives away to much information, and restricts the market.
What happened today is a result of people exploiting this information.
You should keep your customer's positions, and even the aggregate information of their positions, confidential.
If lowering the leverage for large accounts allows you to avoid the asterisk then do it, at least until you build up more reserves.
I agree with this. Zhou, I think this is important -- I understand you want to be as honest as possible, but there is a such thing as being "honest to a fault". We can't hide it anyway. If we don't have reserve, we will become a bucket shop if we don't tell our customers to stop buying/selling. So after all the only way is to distribute the trading power evenly to everyone. |
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I think more important than anything is that the asterisk goes away. It gives away to much information, and restricts the market.
What happened today is a result of people exploiting this information.
You should keep your customer's positions, and even the aggregate information of their positions, confidential.
If lowering the leverage for large accounts allows you to avoid the asterisk then do it, at least until you build up more reserves.
I agree that. Most of our profits come from 2:5 traders and 5:1 traders. Not only 10:1 traders lost a lot themselves during volatile periods, we lost a lot due to market slippage as well. |
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Even, if you will go this way, new limits should not affect old orders and positions (because it will be violation of contract).
Active orders may be affected due to decrease of tradable balance (but you're allowed to place a 1000000 BTC order regardless of tradable balance anyway). But existing positions won't be cut off, definitely. We never do that anyway. This is not a complete truth. With changing reserve level you will increase zhoutong price for existing long positions, and this may lead to premature liquidation of these existing positions (and to losses which should not occur under current reserve level). No. It's the same 4%. I won't change. |
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Can not understand why Bitcoinica does not give a detailed instruction HOW to trade and also if you have got questions do not reply to them. As a newbie like I am I donīt have the chance to learn trading on bitcoinica.
Also I am sure, that this kind of extremly up- and down spikes are made by bots and almost bitcoinica.
I would like to see, if Mt.Gox could regulate this a bit and forbid those kind of bots.
@speeder: I guess you are right: after all bitcoinica is the only winner.
We should give it a new name "bitpanica" is much better. ;-)
Full, in-depth documentation is coming soon to Bitcoinica. Confirmed! Yay! |
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Trailing stops work now ?
WTF ? seriously Zhou ?
I didn't change anything. I was revisiting the code and I didn't find any problems. Perhaps it's caused by floats. (Don't worry! Your money isn't saved as floats.) |
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Big clients are using the reserves all the time, and it's definitely unfair if we don't have the money to back their trading potential. If just 2% of the customers were limited to 2.5:1 we wouldn't have to see the asterisk.
Even, if you will go this way, new limits should not affect old orders and positions (because it will be violation of contract). Active orders may be affected due to decrease of tradable balance (but you're allowed to place a 1000000 BTC order regardless of tradable balance anyway). But existing positions won't be cut off, definitely. We never do that anyway. |
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Exactly. Don't change the system because people don't know what they are doing. We all are aware of the risks and this should be a lesson to those that overextended themselves. Unless this is something Bitcoinica needs to do to be profitable, leave it alone or move up and onward.
Big clients are using the reserves all the time, and it's definitely unfair if we don't have the money to back their trading potential. If just 2% of the customers were limited to 2.5:1 we wouldn't have to see the asterisk. |
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The main thing is - if this is not zhoutong, what could this XMAN earn from this trade?
he just liquidate me virtually. No trades on mtgox.
But who's got interest in this trade?
Liquidation trade was made on mtgox, so the only one reason to make profits is to put 20 000 order for sell at 6.99 and buy until 6.98 (to liquidate me and take profits at 6.99)
this didnt happen.
May be in equador police do nothing about this. but here this is a crime.
Is anyone here was liquidated right point in point ? please contact me.
Mt. Gox was delayed at that time. So it's not a virtual liquidation at all. Ask anyone on IRC because I was talking to them during the market spike. I didn't know anything about this until the price suddenly turns 6.95. |
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gotta keep the zombies alive.
Overall loss in recent 24 hours: less than 20%. |
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Strongly disagree.
You should take voices into account according to margin ballance.
I believe that people with large accounts will generally vote for "disagree" since they are the impacted ones. However, we hope everyone can understand for each other, even at the free market. We will revise the threshold amount when our reserves are larger. (We will lift the threshold to $5,000 and $50,000 when our reserves reach $1 million, and we can hopefully reach there in 6 months.) Currently, even 2.5:1 for a huge account is a lot of leverage! $20,000 will get you $50,000 tradable balance. |
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It is still possible to game this by creating multiple accounts and doing a coordinated trade.
Bitcoinica is doomed.
We allow that. At least that will split forced liquidation to multiple orders at different prices. If someone deliberately do a coordinated trade to maintain identical base prices, then it's their choice. We just want to make losing money a bit harder and less impactful even when it happens. |
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EDIT:
The poll hasn't ended yet. But we have started a trial. Unless the poll results reverse, we will keep this change.
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Public Proposal: Change of Leverage Options.
Due to recent volatility, a lot of traders were forced liquidated and caused a snowball effect: forced liquidation causes more forced liquidations due to excessive market movements.
Also, we want to make sure that Bitcoinica always has reserves for traders. We hope the asterisk will not appear frequently in the future.
Therefore, I propose a solution to such problems. Since this solution may negatively impact some of our customers, we want to hear the voice of the public. This is how the implementation will be decided:
If Agree > Disagree, we will implement this change. If Disagree > Agree, we will not implement this change and we will consider other options.
Neutral votes will be ignored at the moment.
If you have better ideas, please voice out and we will consider.
So what's the change?
-------------------------
If your margin balance is less than $2,000 (inc.), you can set leverage to 10:1, 5:1, 2.5:1 and 1:1.
If your margin balance is between $2,000 (exc.) and $20,000 (inc.), you can set leverage to 5:1, 2.5:1 and 1:1.
If your margin balance is greater than $20,000 (exc.), you can set leverage to 2.5:1 and 1:1.
This is to protect our customers' interest and maintain market volatility at low levels by preventing huge forced liquidations as much as possible. Also, less funds will be used up by large clients so we will have more available reserves.
Now, please vote!
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This is can be funny, i dont care about money. but this is a cime, and people who do the crime should go to jail. this is the screen with volume of the trade which liquidated me. there is just 20 000 volume. exactly what you need to move price to 7.0  If i was liquidated, where is another 20 000? the same situations was here Possition :  Liquidation (point in point) at 6.75 +spread 3 = 6.78 look at the price...  Real liquidation :  what do you think now ? this guy is an offender. Tommorow i go to police. Who has the same situation please contact me. At that time, all trades were delayed, including Bitcoinica's. Your liquidation was piled up in the system and partially hedged a few minutes later. At the same time, there were a lot of sell orders at Bitcoinica too, so both are balanced. We disclose how we hedge and the volume of our Mt. Gox account on home page (updated every 5 minutes). You can check that out and see if your order hedged, and/or internally matched. |
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Why can't we build something better than Mt. Gox?
We already done that - we use DarkExchange on I2P I mean, OP assumes that Bitcoinica is a buggy system like Mt. Gox. And it's entirely possible that Bitcoinica hasn't been affected in this crash at all, systematically and financially. then why do u need the short term loans? Because we don't have reserves for some heavily leveraged users. We are absolutely solvent throughout the crash, and we made some small profits from the huge volume. This has nothing to do with the crash. We had the asterisk since two days ago. so some of your heavily leveraged longs couldn't sell during the crash and some of your heavily leveraged shorts couldn't cover during the ramp? Your memory stays two weeks ago. Anyone with a position can close it or reduce it. There's no such state as "all trading stops" on Bitcoinica, except when the site is down. |
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Zhou, 1 thing I would suggest for your site: lots and lots and LOTS of clear documentation. When I trade on TD Ameritrade I have a whole exhaustive documentation section that breaks down the fees and math into plain english that real people can understand. When you're a business making money, it's sort of incumbent on you to help your users understand what's going on.
I could even provide this for insanely cheap. I have a lot of free time and don't wish to spend it all on school work  LOL. I missed this just now. PM me with you Skype name please. |
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