The wait is over. Now Bitcoinica officially supports Google Authenticator, the implementation based on Time-based One-time Password (TOTP) algorithm. Supporting iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices! Enable your two-factor authentication here: https://www.bitcoinica.com/account/securityAPI is still available for use, however, we will introduce API key-secret authentication very soon, and two-factor authentication enabled accounts will not be able to authenticate using username and password. (So if you are using API right now, don't enable it until we have released the key-secret authentication.) |
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As for two-factor auth, I'd reccomend Google Two-factor auth mechanism. It's great, because it utilizes app on your phone as auth mechanism, which works offline, and it also provides fallback in case you lose your phone. Link: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/LOL. It's such a coincidence! I have started working on Google Authenticator two hours ago (1 hour earlier than your post). It's going to be up in 10 minutes! Stay tuned! |
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Is the limit order working as it's supposed to? Right now the sell price on bitcoinica is around 6.60, and if I place a limit order to sell with 0.40 in the add/substract box, I'd expect to see a sell order for 7 USD, but actually it places an order to sell at 6.2...
edit: it works as I'd expect it to if you input a negative value. Useful, but potentially dangerous IMO, since it seems counterintuitive to me. Still, very nice script, thanks!
It's intuitive to me. This feature is designed for price protection, so if you enter 0.4, it means you can tolerate max slippage of 0.4. Then you'd sell at 6.2 as limit order. |
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You might want to consider having staff on call at all times, as well as failover hardware. Operating on a shoestring budget isn't going to cut it if you want people to continue to trust you with thousands of dollars. I'm not upset about the outage, and you responded very well given the situation. However, one must always work towards reliability when dealing with such large sums.
I agree! Bitcoinica is a mission critical project now. I'll consider your suggestion. Thanks! |
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Site completely down for 41 minutes. The worst outage ever!!!
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The Redis server went out of memory due to huge queues of flood of orders.
I have rebooted and the site will be up in 1 minute.
Thank you for the notification and I apologize for the error!
I see the site, but prices are way low compared to what I see from mtgox data. It was temporary and not tradable. Cause confirmed: Recently Mt. Gox API had a lot of issues and our Redis server has accumulated all sorts of errors until the memory is full. You should really have a monitoring system in place to notify you if memory usage is growing without bound. I have new relic to alert me whenever the site is down or any server has issues. However, I'm in the airport waiting to board my plane. That's why I had such delays just now. So unfortunate. |
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The Redis server went out of memory due to huge queues of flood of orders.
I have rebooted and the site will be up in 1 minute.
Thank you for the notification and I apologize for the error!
I see the site, but prices are way low compared to what I see from mtgox data. It was temporary and not tradable. Cause confirmed: Recently Mt. Gox API had a lot of issues and our Redis server has accumulated all sorts of errors until the memory is full. |
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The Redis server went out of memory due to huge queues of flood of orders.
I have rebooted and the site will be up in 1 minute.
Thank you for the notification and I apologize for the error!
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These days most profits come from internal matches, which are not subject to Mt. Gox fees or market spreads. Bitcoinica will continue relying on Mt. Gox, but will definitely be cheaper than Mt. Gox in the future. (And yes, I don't lose money still.) |
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Please make this relation/algorithm PUBIC!.
This will make sure everyone knows the risks.
The risk comes not from the leverage but from the non-stability in your algorithm!
It resonates too much.
sorry, i couldn't let this one go.  This is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same as asking someone to write you a trade bot for free, then explain how you wrote it. But if you don't know the relation between the price at bitcoinica and the rest of bitcoinland then how can you be sure that bitcoinica doesnt have a secret 'flush' button that can be used to tip risky positions over the edge. Maybe at times there is no relation at all to the bitcoin price on the exchanges. How can you know? We release history price points via both API and charts. Go and see yourself regarding price accuracy. Actually all forex brokers have these issues, and some of them are evil enough to manipulate prices to trigger stops. But Bitcoinica doesn't take positions into account during price generation. Again, you can check price history and compare with Mt. Gox. Yeah, well, what happened here then?: http://charts.bitcoinica.com/daily_quotes?date=2012-01-10I'm guessing lots of positions got wiped by that spike. The spread was about 1 bitcoin during this spike. Completely out of nowhere. I think your algorithm overreacted to the big buy on mtgox. No overreaction. Mt. Gox was the same. Not exactly: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2012-01-11zeg2012-01-11ztgCzm1g10zm2g25zvNotice that around 6:00am the price of mtgox is neither below six nor around 7. At the same time bitcoinica fluctuated wildly. So pretty big difference! Not many people are liquidated according to my records.
That's good to hear. Bitcoinica range: 5.97-6.93 Mt. Gox range: 6.01-6.90 Just 4 cents, or 0.66%, including all fees and 50 ฿ depth. Which site is cheaper? |
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Please make this relation/algorithm PUBIC!.
This will make sure everyone knows the risks.
The risk comes not from the leverage but from the non-stability in your algorithm!
It resonates too much.
sorry, i couldn't let this one go. This is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same as asking someone to write you a trade bot for free, then explain how you wrote it. But if you don't know the relation between the price at bitcoinica and the rest of bitcoinland then how can you be sure that bitcoinica doesnt have a secret 'flush' button that can be used to tip risky positions over the edge. Maybe at times there is no relation at all to the bitcoin price on the exchanges. How can you know? We release history price points via both API and charts. Go and see yourself regarding price accuracy. Actually all forex brokers have these issues, and some of them are evil enough to manipulate prices to trigger stops. But Bitcoinica doesn't take positions into account during price generation. Again, you can check price history and compare with Mt. Gox. Yeah, well, what happened here then?: http://charts.bitcoinica.com/daily_quotes?date=2012-01-10I'm guessing lots of positions got wiped by that spike. The spread was about 1 bitcoin during this spike. Completely out of nowhere. I think your algorithm overreacted to the big buy on mtgox. No overreaction. Mt. Gox was the same. Not many people are liquidated according to my records. |
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To all who have DNS issues, please give OpenDNS a try. It will make your life easier and it will keep zhoutong from having a heart attack when somebody says his website is down when it's not.
LOL. Luckily I'm still young and healthy. I receive 3-5 complaints about this and I don't have the time to fix this non-urgent issue. Just use Google Public DNS and OpenDNS. Also yesterday something posted on paste bin gave me a "heart attack" too. As far as I know, about 3% of worldwide ISP DNS can't resolve the domain properly. |
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Please make this relation/algorithm PUBIC!.
This will make sure everyone knows the risks.
The risk comes not from the leverage but from the non-stability in your algorithm!
It resonates too much.
sorry, i couldn't let this one go. This is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same as asking someone to write you a trade bot for free, then explain how you wrote it. But if you don't know the relation between the price at bitcoinica and the rest of bitcoinland then how can you be sure that bitcoinica doesnt have a secret 'flush' button that can be used to tip risky positions over the edge. Maybe at times there is no relation at all to the bitcoin price on the exchanges. How can you know? We release history price points via both API and charts. Go and see yourself regarding price accuracy. Actually all forex brokers have these issues, and some of them are evil enough to manipulate prices to trigger stops. But Bitcoinica doesn't take positions into account during price generation. Again, you can check price history and compare with Mt. Gox. |
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Geez... okay a stoploss is an 'order type'.. wonderful. But check this out. It's broken and just lost me money! http://awesomescreenshot.com/092rrbs6eI selected Order Type of Trailing Stop, read the instructions, set a price of 5.6 (below the current price of about 6.85) then pressed Buy .. then tried it again for a traling stop at $6.3 It EXECUTED this as a BUY transaction AT MARKET!! I now have 20 BTC purchased at 6.93 which I did not ask for. Looks like a very serious bug, has anyone tested this code before releasing it on a public who could lose some big $ due to such bugs?? Buy trading stop below market price should be executed at market. Even the feature is not broken, it should still be executed. Trailing stops and stops are the same in terms of execution. Just that trailing stop is trailing, which doesn't work very well at the moment. |
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I made a simple script for adding this price to the Bitcoinica UI. Looks like this:  Download it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1127246/bitcoinica.user.jsDrag it onto your Chrome browser window (should work in any browser that supports Greasemonkey scripts but I didn't test it elsewhere) and you're done. Hope it helps someone! Note: this is my first real take on UserScripts. Any suggestions are welcome. Also, Bitcoinica UI refreshes in unusual way (instead of updating specific elements they pull whole tables with AJAX). That's why UI could flicker a bit with this (even though I'm intercepting the updater function with my code really early), I can't help with that. Edit: Second note: this doesn't take account for LIMIT / STOP orders that you have between the current price and the min price. Maybe it will, someday. I really appreciate that. Please PM me your Bitcoin address or Bitcoinica username to get a 3.14159265 BTC bounty! Off-topic: I received Google Alerts about this, and when I saw "pastebin", I thought it was a database dump, LOL... |
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BitTalk.TV will interview Zhou Tong this week regarding the now infamous Bitcoinica.com.
We’ll probe his mind on the making of bitcoinica, the issues he faced, the success of it, and his future projects. During the interview, Zhou Tong will be announcing some very important news that you won’t want to miss.
If you have a question you’d like Zhou Tong to answer during our interview, please post it below.
If it makes it on air, we’ll give you a free issue of BitTalk Magazine, the new digital magazine made for bitcoiners, by bitcoiners.
*This thread is live! That means that the topic will change and all future announcements will be posted directly here. You might want to subscribe!
Infamous? Are you sure the word is correct? (I made this language mistake in an exam before.) |
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Zhoutong, did you ever work out the bugs in the trailing stops?
Sorry for the wait, but I don't have access to the code right now. (I'm in my hometown.) I'll fix it once I get back. Thank you for your patience! |
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It's not his algorithm causing resonation, it's his users and others who are overreacting to every little market move.
Quite true. All prices are given. We are now even releasing the charts. All price points are tradable with guaranteed liquidity. Also, don't forget that a huge buy or sell can make the order book very thin for a brief period, and obviously everyone has to wait until Bitcoinica provides better prices when the orders re-establish. The problem is that Bitcoinica is the most transparent pricing engine ever that tells you the *real* trading prices of Bitcoin, instead of the unreliable Mt. Gox "last price". |
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The lowest price ever tracked today is only 4 cents, or 0.66% lower than the Mt. Gox low. I believe that unreasonable forced liquidations shouldn't happen again after the last algorithm change.
Your model is broken. It acts often like a base ball glove. When all logic say's now is the time to buy suddenly your buy price rises far above mtgox price and catches all the people falling for this trick. Same goes for selling. Quite often your spread just sits there, covering up all profit. If this doesn't happen then you suddenly have liquidity problems. So, either your algorithm is broken or you are not doing this fair. Yesterday there was a spread of over 1 bitcoin. That's bizar and totaly unbalanced. And people have to wait untill your algorithm normalizes. Often, when there is action, your algorithm just overreacts and covers the profits. But by the time it normalizes there is no action on the exchanges. This forum has even invented a term to describe this: Being Zhoutonged Your algorithm has tons of hidden risk built in. Now, the relation between the exchanges and your casino is unknown. Please make this relation/algorithm PUBIC!. This will make sure everyone knows the risks. The risk comes not from the leverage but from the non-stability in your algorithm! It resonates too much. I tell you a public algorithm that you can use to test against ours. It's not identical, but a lot easier to handle: Just estimate the average cost to buy/sell 100 BTC at Mt. Gox plus fees, considering slippage.In reality, we have some minor adjustments on top of this to give customers better rates when possible. You should never attempt to catch a spike on Bitcoinica using market orders. If there's no market depth at Mt. Gox, it's impossible to have a narrow spread on Bitcoinica. I can assure you that. It's not about profit at all. Maybe someone can make a bucket shop with independent pricing power to compete with Bitcoinica. 99% of the time, Bitcoinica spreads are just as cheap as Mt. Gox fees. If you're the guy that hates Bitcoinica just because of the 1% time when spike happens, just go to Mt. Gox and see what happens when you attempt to buy/sell something fairly significant. |
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Just wanted to say thanks, zhouthong. The spreads have been amazing for the last 12 hours.
Now that we are back at the normal spreads, would it be possible at all to reduce them a bit ?
I know that you have some risk because of margins, providing liquidity and you need to make some money.
Whatever you do, I appreciate your service very much.
It's to my best interest to lower the spread, because people don't trade on Bitcoinica if the spread is high. We have to pay Mt. Gox fees though. Currently we are paying 0.25%, the lowest tier. And the "commission" we charge is always less than 0.6%. So just do your own math by looking at the homepage numbers. Bitcoinica is actually quite cheap. If you just want to catch the spikes, perhaps Mt. Gox is a better choice because they don't guarantee any liquidity and you are completely on your own. |
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