Dear Mr Z,
I have been mucking around on Bitcoinica for about a month now, with a small amount of coins. I think the site is excellent and I'm very impressed.
However, the possibility of becoming trapped in a position (due to no reserve) is stopping me from moving more money to your site.
Is this something that will be fixed in the future?
If you followed the discussions, you would know that you wouldn't be trapped in a position. Trading restriction only applies on new positions. You can close any position any time. This is guaranteed now. |
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I'm pretty sure you right! I think I just watched you take a dump all over the market, it broke moody and goxlive!
Bitcoinica doesn't use the crappy API that Clark moody and Mt. Gox live use. There's never anything wrong with the prices after the algorithm change. |
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Bid at 4700BTC deep!  uh-oh! I'm pretty sure that your Clark moody connection was broken. My data suggested otherwise. |
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Maybe I am missing something but the bid price on bitcoinica is 6.27  The bid price in gox is 6.42  Now I understand you have this guaranteed liquidity of 50BTC but down at 6.4 you have got 94BTC At 6.27 BTC depth was over 1300 ?? This is just an example, it was like that on the way up too (about 20 mins ago) I'm not stupid, I know your game is rigged against me but when you come and tell me your spreads are matching gox, you need to explain what that means, because right now it doesn't seem to mean 'your spreads are matching gox' It's very likely that someone has placed a large sell order on Bitcoinica. Then we can't guarantee the liquidity at better prices. Also, delays might be an issue too. |
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We have reached 2,000-user mark. To celebrate, we're glad to announce that we won't charge any extra spreads on top of market spreads in the next 12 hours. Starting: January 9, 2012 2:00 pm UTC Ending: January 10, 2012 2:00 am UTC We are paying all Mt. Gox fees incurred during this celebration. You just have to trade at the price that provides you enough liquidity! Our largest 24-hour volume ever was over 200,000 BTC. Let's see how much we can trade today! Enjoy your trading! By the way, if you still don't have an account yet, grab one at https://www.bitcoinica.com before time runs out. UPDATE: It has already started! 12 hours 3 minutes and counting... Yea, unfortunately you forced liquidated me for a price that was lower then what really occurred in the market two hours ago. Basically the way you have the site set up one large trade (that forces an unrealistic price due to your much larger then normal spreads) positions that would survive in a real market do not in yours. I only had a 3 BTC position, but I do not think I will be coming back while you are treating spikes this way. 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. |
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I have said this before. being forced to sell bitcoin long at the fee, and then to buy them back again at the fee is just fail when you want to make a withdraw. i bought 100 bitcoins why do i have to pay it twice to get it out??
its not fair.
also 3 plus days for mtgox withdrawal is too much
It was a temporary problem because we hit our Mt. Gox monthly withdrawal limit at the beginning of this year. Over 98% of Mt. Gox withdrawals were processed instantly. Thank you for your patience and understanding! If I am long Bitcoin, why do I have to sell my bitcoin to get dollars and then buy back bitcoin to get it out?? Why do I have to pay these fees twice? Also why do you force me to buy bitcoin when i have a negative dollar position now? This is new... You only get away with stuff like this because you are the only one in the game right now.. You can now withdraw USD on demand. Our withdrawal limits have been refilled already. You don't have to pay the fees twice if you withdraw USD. |
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Very good but a bit hard to use.
Gotta be quick so as to not lose track of the market in periods of high volatility.
Thanks !
1Eq1u2NzwHWqFzj5ksD5D3Bc5iVwzFmYZS
Sent 1 BTC. Thanks! |
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I have said this before. being forced to sell bitcoin long at the fee, and then to buy them back again at the fee is just fail when you want to make a withdraw. i bought 100 bitcoins why do i have to pay it twice to get it out??
its not fair.
also 3 plus days for mtgox withdrawal is too much
It was a temporary problem because we hit our Mt. Gox monthly withdrawal limit at the beginning of this year. Over 98% of Mt. Gox withdrawals were processed instantly. Thank you for your patience and understanding! |
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We have reached 2,000-user mark. To celebrate, we're glad to announce that we won't charge any extra spreads on top of market spreads in the next 12 hours. Starting: January 9, 2012 2:00 pm UTC Ending: January 10, 2012 2:00 am UTC We are paying all Mt. Gox fees incurred during this celebration. You just have to trade at the price that provides you enough liquidity! Our largest 24-hour volume ever was over 200,000 BTC. Let's see how much we can trade today! Enjoy your trading! By the way, if you still don't have an account yet, grab one at https://www.bitcoinica.com before time runs out. UPDATE: It has already started! 12 hours 3 minutes and counting... |
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is there any way to limit the buy/sell messages only to one ? the second message cover the 1-2-5-10 buttons
Well, you can close the notification if you want. Or just wait for a few seconds. I believe that most people who place different orders don't change quantity every time. They usually place limit orders instead. |
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We're glad to announce that now we have 2,000 registered users! Out of which, about 40% of users have funded their accounts. (That's pretty high among Bitcoin trading services.)
We're now running a contest for all Bitcoinica users. Share your thoughts with us by posting any of the following in this thread:
- Your feelings about Bitcoinica
- Your story with Bitcoinica's customer service guys
- What do you use Bitcoinica for?
Leave your Bitcoinica username, Bitcoinica user id (can be queried via RESTful API) OR a Bitcoin address at the bottom.
The authors of the first 10 valid entries will get 1 BTC each!
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I believe it uses your entire balance to calculate your forced liquidation price, so say you have 100 BTC in your account and have it set to 10:1, if you limit yourself to trading with 250 BTC only, its exactly the same thing as having it set to 2.5:1. So really, you have any leverage you want up to 10:1, just limit your trades on your own.
Exactly. The leverage depends on trades only. Maintenance margin requirement has nothing to do with leverage either. The account leverage setting is just a upper limit that helps customers. |
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One more thing I'd like input on: Should I keep open the option of going short? I was going to just either hold USD or BTC, that is to say, long or no position, but in those terms it seems I should go short too, when the "coin" says so. I just worry the experiment might be ended too soon with such a risky approach. What say you?
Flip 1 - BUY, Flip 2 - SELL. I would do this if I were you: (Assume you buy 10 BTC at a time.) 1 - BUY 10 1 - HOLD 10 2 - SELL 0 1 - BUY 10 1 - HOLD 10 2 - SELL 0 2 - SELL -10 2 - HOLD -10 |
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Hi Zhoutong, I suggest you to host a Bitcoin speculation competition. Every participant start a new account with 100 USD and no further deposit and withdraw allowed. After one week or one month, the most net balance participant win the competition. What do you think?  This is a cool idea! I will see if I can do anything in the future few weeks to make it happen. Thanks for the great suggestion! |
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The rocket refuels fuel And miners are mining new coins  And right now there are no dollars on bitcoinica:  It is strange, but at me wasn't an asterisk... Mt. Gox API isn't reliable all the time. Whenever we get an error we place a redflag. It would always be reset within 15 seconds. |
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I really love this idea.
Bitcoinica might be a good solution for you because you can hold negative coins if you want. You can buy/sell say 5 BTC at a time, so that you can buy/sell multiple times in a row. (You can use our RESTful APIs for this too! It'll be even better.)
The account ledger feature can show you the balance changes everyday very clearly.
I'll match $25 if you deposit $75 into a new Bitcoinica account. Just PM me the username.
Good luck with your experiment! :-D
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My general strategy is to take an expected future value, something simple like a linear interpolation from the past week or so. When the price jumps higher sell, when it's lower buy, but only a little bit. In the inevitable situation that the price jumps again, sell/buy more. Make sure you have enough reserves to double down 3 or 4 times. If you predict it wrong 4 times in a row, well then you lose.
That's called Martingale strategy and is an absolutely certain (probability=100%) way for anyone to go bust. Read any book on trading. I would say this is gambler's strategy. With unlimited reserves and zero trade commissions, your overall winning is guaranteed. With limited reserves and some trade commissions, your overall losing is guaranteed. The chance of blind predicting wrong 4 times in a row is 1/16 and you would lose the entire investment. The profit of predicting correctly after 1, 2 or 3 jumps will always be less than 1/16 of your entire investment. So: P=15/16 -> profit less than 1/16 P=1/16 -> lose 1 |
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From the user's perspective:
Mistake 1) will assume he has a typical "maintenance margin requirement" with no idea how close to typical it actually is
Mistake 2) will assume a constant margin balance, when actually that margin balance will decrease as the price of bitcoin decreases
Mistake 3) will calculate the "zhoutonging price" based on the current bid, which will of course change. Checks back later when the bid is lower, and suddenly their "zhoutonging price" is different than what they calculated using "current bid". Maybe even zhoutonged already.
Three strikes and you're out.
How about a formula for the "zhoutonging price" which uses variables instead of constants?
1) You're typical unless you explicitly request for a change (which will be rejected most likely). 2) Just a simple tweak will adjust for BTC balance. Original post edited. 3) If current price has changed, the net value should change too. The result should be consistent. |
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This post assumes your maintenance margin requirement is 4% or 25:1, which is applicable for typical Bitcoinica users.
Is it possible to get a different margin requirement? Yes, it is. But only for very special accounts. Normally we don't accept such requests. |
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"Zhoutonging price" = current ask/bid +/- (net value - maintenance) / amount
Am I to understand this as current ask DIVIDED BY bid, or current ask OR bid? That was unclear. Edited. Thanks! |
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