My sell order also got "No Reserve", why?
This was a code error (the system didn't remove the redflag when needed). I have fixed this already. |
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ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shit  edit: Do you have a plan for what happens if the market keeps going up like I think it will? There are limit orders from the positions of long people. So there will be more selling soon. Also, forced liquidations will still happen (but never at insane prices), but we will eat all the risk. :-( |
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We seriously apologize for any inconvenience.
When Bitcoinica was first built, we included a circuit breaker feature to stop trading at one direction when we are out of USD or BTC. However, it has almost never been triggered until today.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of long positions are we're currently unable to fulfill everyone's request to buy. Even though we do not want to interrupt regular market trading activity, we have no case because we don't want to be trading against our customers in this extreme situation.
Liquidation of short positions is also affected but we had no choice. Withdrawal in USD is obviously, also affected. When some more people decided to liquidate their long positions or go short, or more USD funds are deposited, we will adjust the redflag accordingly to allow buying trades.
TL;DR: Bitcoinica can only sell for you at the moment.
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Zhou, have you changed the way Trailing stops work? Because they don't seem to be trailing...
+1 they're not moving for me either  Hi, I have fixed the trailing stop error. Now it's trailing again. Thank you for your feedback. Each of you will get 1 BTC bonus. (Both, please give me either your Bitcoinica account or a Bitcoin address so that I can send money to you.) I PM'd you about this, but I guess you don't check your PM's that often. Or, there could have been some kind of foul up I suppose. Anyway, I haven't received that 1 BTC yet. I really like BTC, can I have it now? Whoops. Sorry about that. I forgot to check PM for this. I have credited 1 BTC to both accounts. Thank you for your support! |
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Done. Now Bitcoinica officially provides daily quotes charts. Also, the new pricing algorithm is already running in production after testing against all historical data. Available at: http://charts.bitcoinica.com/Off-topic: The most exciting day since Bitcoinica's launch.  |
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FYI, my response to chunglam just now:
4 Posted by zhoutong on December 27, 2011 @ 11:11 AM
Hi,
Sorry for the late reply!
We have two different tiers of currency exchange rates with 50 BTC as the divider. If you enter $150, using the first tier rate, it will result in more than 50 BTC. As a result, the system used the second tier rate and resulted in even less BTC.
We will change to sliding rate to prevent these issues from happening again. In this case, we will simply indicate the rates for different amounts, and customers are required to "Calculate" to know the exact rate.
Thank you for your valuable feedback. We will credit you 1 BTC for this bug report!
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In response to phantomcircuit, and various other participants:
I'm aware of this issue and that's why I have reversed some of the forced liquidations that are deemed inaccurate. In the following days, I will do these two things:
1. Improve the pricing algorithm to prevent the unnecessary spikes.
2. Make charts for history quotes available, for every day since we launched. The chart will look similar to phantomcircuit's, showing both buying prices and selling prices.
I apologize for not doing enough to protect our customers' interest in terms of system engineering.
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I have sent 100 BTC to the donation address to honor my pledge.
Good luck with this whole project!
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I recommend always using limit orders when doing any type of trading. Market orders tend to end up at the worst possible price precisely because there is no "limit".
Unrelated, but @Zhoutong:
What does 240% hedged mean? Is that a bug, or have you really traded 2.4X as much volume on MtGox as was traded on bitcoinica in the last 24 hours? I suppose this could be the case if you were rebuilding your reserves, but I just want to be sure I understand what this number is telling me.
Yes, we hedged more than what our customers have traded. It's our regular maintenance to ensure that we're not under holding or over holding Bitcoins when the prices are changing very quickly. (Sometimes we do miss orders, but we will ensure that this is extremely rare.) |
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Hi, I thought that the price that I saw was guaranteed for 50 BTC. I bought at 4.2 but it filled at 4.29!! What is going on? I ordered 50.
If you are trading, please just use a Limit order to prevent this from happening. You're assured that all prices have nothing to do with your orders and they all reflect actual market depth and price. I see I did not understand how this worked. I thought the price quoted was good for 50 coin. I thought I read that somewhere. So if the price quote is not valid why even have it? The price is good for 50 BTC order that is being executed right now. When your order is submitted for execution the price may have been changed. It all depends but I'm absolutely sure that the system won't increase the price just because it sees your order. We calculate all prices using the same formula at all times. |
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Frankly speaking, their leverage trading system is only game in town right now. My long position in Bitcoinica is more profitable then my 7G+ mining operation  . But their exchange system is another story, it is OK as long as you don't convert more than 49BTCs per conversion. In less than two weeks they will not be the only game in town. I feel I have been cheated so I have one foot out the door. I'm quite curious. Who will join the game? |
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Hi, I thought that the price that I saw was guaranteed for 50 BTC. I bought at 4.2 but it filled at 4.29!! What is going on? I ordered 50.
If you are trading, please just use a Limit order to prevent this from happening. You're assured that all prices have nothing to do with your orders and they all reflect actual market depth and price. |
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Regarding the large spread over price spikes, I'd like to apologize first. At first, the mechanism was designed to minimize the risk for Bitcoinica under extreme market conditions. It turned out to be overly sensitive and caused a problem called "a chain of forced liquidations".
A chain of forced liquidations - When price increases and a few large forced liquidations are being triggered, the system automatically prepares itself for a sudden change in hedging volume and increases the spread based on the market depth. Due to the spread increase, more forced liquidations can be triggered, and it goes on… Last time, when the price spikes to $4.50, our reserve is already depleted which means that we can't hedge at all, and the "ask" price spikes to $4.90 with a chain of forced liquidations.
I have since then introduced a few changes to the system:
- A limit on the pending orders as a factor for the pricing algorithm to reduce sensitivity.
- Redflag "No Reserve" when we are out of reserve. Strictly no buying OR no selling when we're out of reserve.
- Tweaking the algorithm to prevent a chain of forced liquidations without actual trading activity.
The market conditions are more and more harsh everyday. The trading volume is highly concentrated in very short time periods and it's very unpredictable. It's very hard to deal with the market right now.
I hope the changes will improve the system and make trading and profiting on Bitcoinica easier than ever.
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Zhoutong,
I'd like to publicly petition you to stop doing business with GoDaddy. GoDaddy has come out in support of SOPA. SOPA is not good for many reasons. Not the least of which is that Bitcoinica could easily be one of the sites that would be censored by it.
Please take my petition into consideration. Please ask the community about the issue. Please ask for assistance in understanding any issue involved in this decision if there is any doubt.
Although I still do not like go daddy, they have apparently withdrawn support of SOPA. So, I suppose they are back in "Hated, but tolerated" camp as far as I am concerned. I withdraw my petition. I don't like GoDaddy at all. The domain has already been transferred out. For SSL certificates, I will switch to another vendor soon. Also, I have removed all the GoDaddy certification logos in the new version. |
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The problem right now is every new exchange is just another Intersango.
I hope the OP aims to be the next NASDAQ.
So what would it take to be the next NASDAQ? Let me take the list on your first post: 1 Use things like Redis for order book to make trading super fast. (At least 10,000 orders per second.)
2 Build very good APIs, like TCP APIs.
3 You don't have to accept Mt. Gox codes, but you can be the first exchange to accept Mt. Gox green address for instant funding.
4 Put your bank in Singapore or Hong Kong. Singapore banks can sometimes do amazing same-day wire transfers.
5 Give incentive to developers who develop bots, and give them flexible authentication options.
6 Very cheap fees, at most 0.1%. Remember, 0.6% for currency trading is ridiculous. ICBC Bank (China) charges individual customers 0.2% spread for USD/CNY exchange, and CNY is not even a free market currency like USD.
These are nice features, I agree. But do you think that an exchange with these features that launches right now can get more than 1% of total market volume? EDIT: just for reference, here is the chartIf there are exchanges with these features right now I will divert all Bitcoinica volume into it. And it will have at least 25% of market volume. |
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No offense, but if you're asking what is needed in a new exchange then you probably shouldn't be in this already saturated market. It should be blindingly obvious.
You can't do it right doesn't mean no one can't. In what way is a monopoly market saturated? The only possibility I can imagine is natural monopoly. Then you should shut down every exchange that is not Mt. Gox. The problem right now is every new exchange is just another Intersango. I hope the OP aims to be the next NASDAQ. |
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actually i'm not trying to discourage Zhoutong. i'm trying to warn him about what i feel is a flawed business model which i agree is debatable.
but if mtgox does offer options he WILL be at a significant disadvantage. there is no question about that.
maybe he can adjust but i'm not sure how.
also i feel that by offering shorting in an immature market such as Bitcoin, he has contributed to an artificially suppressed price over the last several months since he's been in biz. its too late to help that but now we're seeing the market compensate in the other direction; UP.
I'm sure I have been more profitable than Mt. Gox with this "flawed" business model. If there's a real threat, I'll shut down the service and do something new. It's that simple. You don't have to warn me when I have future plans beyond your imagination. I'm not afraid of Mt. Gox at all. If they launch a good service, then it's good for the community. If they do something dirty, everyone will know and Bitcoinica will switch to another exchange and divert 25% market share away. Also, shorting is natural to a free market. If you can mortgage USD asset and borrow ฿, you can short technically. Bitcoinica just made the process easier, which will help the market find the right price. I have a lot of Bitcoin savings, I have more incentive than you to make the price rise. A lot of friends are telling me that Bitcoinica has left a good impression in terms of technical professionalism and web design, and this improves their impression on the whole industry. They don't have to use Bitcoinica to trust Bitcoin more. You're commenting based on your numbers without considering others' hearts. Customer perception is the utmost importance to me for an obvious reason - I want to change Bitcoin community in every way I can. If your target is $10, then continue suppressing shorting services. If your target is $1,000, you should respect and encourage every new service that makes the community better. |
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You need a very robust trading engine and very friendly user interface.
Volume is not a problem if you can persuade Bitcoinica to use it. But unfortunately, Mt. Gox is the best exchange ever, without even considering the volume.
I have been thinking about building a killer exchange, but now I'm not that interested in grabbing the pie from Mt. Gox, so I'd share my ideas:
- Use things like Redis for order book to make trading super fast. (At least 10,000 orders per second.)
- Build very good APIs, like TCP APIs.
- You don't have to accept Mt. Gox codes, but you can be the first exchange to accept Mt. Gox green address for instant funding.
- Put your bank in Singapore or Hong Kong. Singapore banks can sometimes do amazing same-day wire transfers.
- Give incentive to developers who develop bots, and give them flexible authentication options.
- Very cheap fees, at most 0.1%. Remember, 0.6% for currency trading is ridiculous. ICBC Bank (China) charges individual customers 0.2% spread for USD/CNY exchange, and CNY is not even a free market currency like USD.
I'm giving almost all my ideas out and wish you all the best.
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It's important to know that currently we always have a chain of forced liquidations, because forced liquidations will push the price to trigger more forced liquidations. We will just make sure that they are fully hedged in the market and the prices are reasonable.
so how do you define "reasonable"? no offense but your business model is doomed. especially since mtgox, the major exchange, is going to be offering similar hedging options. you will always be one step behind them in reacting to volatility as they will be the HFT and you will be the retail equivalent. not to be mean but i think you're offering to reverse trades for those customers wiped out in the last ramp b/c if you don't your client base will never return and you need to keep them alive and in the game. this is going to keep happening over and over again. The point is "going to". I'm going to build breakthroughs too, and you forgot this. Bitcoinica is already using Redis to track prices, and we already have the back-end engine to process 10,000 trades per second. Who will be the first to do HFT? The business model may be doomed in the future but definitely not now. Bitcoinica has always been changing more quickly than our competitors. Also, I didn't reverse any trades that happens under $4.55. Sorry but the "reasonable" price range is only the obvious personal feeling. $4.55 is reasonable, and $4.89 is not. I'm the guy coding and I know the price is wrong, that's why I'm reversing. I don't claim profits that shouldn't be mine. |
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Zhou, have you changed the way Trailing stops work? Because they don't seem to be trailing...
+1 they're not moving for me either Hi, I have fixed the trailing stop error. Now it's trailing again. Thank you for your feedback. Each of you will get 1 BTC bonus. (Both, please give me either your Bitcoinica account or a Bitcoin address so that I can send money to you.) |
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