You're running a huge risk trading on a platform that does not do business directly with a regulated bank. It may be fun and all, and perhaps profitable if you're a decent trader, but without regulatory oversight these types of exchanges answer to no one and therefore can do whatever the hell they please with your money.

Poloniex has a serious problem with lag which can cause you to lose money on their margin trading as well as regular buying and selling.

What will happen is you'll try to close your margin position, or sell your coins, and you'll just get a spinning loading circle gif forever. Meanwhile, all your money is getting lost as the market moves.

Numerous people complain about this yet people still use Polo. I'm officially done using them after losing money for the last time.

BEWARE!

Scary stuff.

And yes, that makes sense as a way to prevent (or at least minimize) loss of funds. If the server is having issues, things like new margin orders, new signups, and maybe even customers with no open orders and no holdings of any cryptocurrencies outside of Tether should be refused until the problem ceases.

Yup. Actually, I did the math using their API. For their USDT_BTC pair alone they make over $26k per day, which is over $9 million a year. Add in all those other markets and yeah, I think they can afford to fix their server problems, they just don't care because it's the HFT whales who make them the most money anyway, and I'm sure they all have their servers colocated next to polo's servers, so lag isn't an issue for them.

Using Poloniex's public API, I grabbed all the USDT_BTC trades from Friday March 17th 2017 and multiplied the total USDT for each trade by the maker fee, 0.15% (which is on the low side since they charge 0.25% for takers) and here is what I got:

March 17th 2017
$1,773,2666.6642 in trades
$26,598.9999963 in fees
-------
$797,969.99989 estimated monthly

Again, this is on the low side. AND this is only for USDT_BTC. I can imagine this is small compared to the rest of the markets of Poloniex combined in a day.


You're not only naive to think that Bitcoin exchanges "mostly do not make much at all", you're actually really, really misinformed and should shut up before you further make an ass of yourself. You must be 15 years old or something.


You apparently don't understand the term "guess" or the word "slander". You can call it what you want, but I can express my opinion however I damn well please.

That's terrible, sorry to hear. I'm lucky that I decided not to do any margin trading with a lot of money. I spoke to someone who lost thousands the same time I did. I asked him why he still uses the platform and he said it's the cost of doing business. With unexpected losses like that, I really hope he is still making a profit overall...

See my thread regarding Poloniex lag and not being able to trade at crucial moments: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1830920.0

I wholeheartedly agree that the ethical burden is on the exchange. They can control how many trades are taking place simply by halting trading or limiting the number of traders either at one time or in general. The thing is, with all the fees these guys are making daily, it really should be no problem for them to hire top notch engineers to solve these problems for good.

My guess is they either don't want to solve the problem or are creating the problem themselves.

You apparently didn't read a thing in my post. Or even the title. Maybe you shouldn't respond to threads you haven't read.

Margin trading comes with the risk of being wrong about the trade. That isn't what I'm talking about.


This is a problem with their servers not being able to handle the client load and causing massive monetary losses for traders trying to close their margin positions.  

 i.e. broken trading platform = "accidental" loss of funds


My question is:  who is at fault? From my standpoint, if the trader is paying fees to use the servers to handle large sums of money, then it's not weird to expect those servers to function properly.

Don't use Poloniex's Margin trading platform unless you understand that you could lose all of your money in one server glitch that apparently happens all the time


I'm not an expert trader, and I don't trade in heavy volume, but I do know one thing: when I click a button on an exchange website to close a margin position, it should work.

Basic stuff, right?

Kinda like when you go to the store and buy some groceries, you expect to leave the store with the groceries you just bought, right?

Well, this morning, Poloniex had some of the heaviest Ethereum trading during a massive pump to $50. It was exciting, it was fruitful and it was intense. Naturally there was a little lag from time to time, as with any exchange on high volume days. It's to be expected and has never been a cause of concern for me on any exchange. (To be honest, I never even thought it was Poloniex when I noticed a lag, I figured it was my browser due to all the AJAX requests happening at once). But today I noticed folks in the Troll Box complaining about "transaction failure", "lag" and straight up "can't trade", and this was in the middle of my long position on ETH, which made me a little nervous.

So when I was ready to close my position when the price started to drop, the "close" button didn't do its usual crypto fairy job of sending my winnings to my wallet and instead quickly turned my morning from "crypto fiesta!" to "I WILL FUCKING END YOU" as I watched my ETH earnings disappear... along with half the money in my trading account.

I clicked "close" again and again, I tried asking in the chat box (which was intermittently frozen), I even thought about letting the margin ride in the hopes of ETH turning around while I rebooted my computer and searched for another way to close the trade. Unfortunately, my long exposure became so great that the Poloniex system issued a big red warning box to tell me that they would force liquidation of my account to cover the loss. Once this message appeared, the "close" button on the margin panel suddenly worked again (isn't that odd).

Now I'm not going to accuse them of scamming me for the simple reason that I have no evidence that they have done so. My qualm is about the fact that it was their server that caused my monetary loss. The chat box had blown up with complaints of not being able to place and close margins right around the time this happened to me, so that pretty much ruled out anything on my end.

Thousands of dollars have been lost today by people who were trying to make honest trades. I even read someone saying, "this is ruining my life!"

Think about that... Poloniex's server issues (issues that a multi million dollar company shouldn't have) ruined someone's life today. Maybe even a few people's lives...

So I wrote to them about the problem and when they finally responded to my support request about the issue they said


That was horribly concerning to me.

Basically what he's saying is that, as a crypto trader on Poloniex, you need to accept that you could lose all the money in your account due to a glitch in their system, and because it's their policy not to compensate you, you are up shit's creek.

Does that sound ethical to anyone?

If I paid you to allow me to use your bike for the afternoon, and as I was riding I noticed the breaks didn't work, whose fault would that be?

I'm interested in how often this happens on other exchanges and why Poloniex can get away with this. The only other time I've had a similar issue of major lag that was affecting my trading was with a binary options broker whose call and put buttons weren't 100% responsive (things like placing my trade too far after the time I placed it and not at the price I wanted it, missing opportunities, etc.)  It got to the point that I didn't trust them anymore and stopped using them.

That's where I'm headed with Poloniex.

It wasn't a huge loss in the grand scheme of things. I actually really enjoy trading there, but this may be it for me, seeing that

 - I'm not the only one who basically got cheated out of a large sum of money

 - That there's no way to get that money back

 - That the people who facilitated that theft take responsibility for the server problem but refuse to compensate me
   (not even my trading fees? C'mon...)

 - That my amount was only enough for small claims court, but that it could have been much more on any given day

All of this is really begging the question of how Poloniex isn't being sued right now, for negligence at the very least. I mean, aren't they responsible for computer glitches that result in the loss of funds??

Extremely disappointed..

That is a good point, there may be a lot of traders upset with the exchanges for holding the funds. To my knowledge they were not asked to hold withdrawals by the PBOC, and if I had money stuck there I can imagine feeling angry about that and wanting to move my money to another exchange ASAP. If enough whales do that when withdrawals resume, it could lead to a bigger dip.

It is absolutely not "always time to keep holding your bitcoins", are you high? I would never hold my coins when there's a huge price drop that looks like it'll put me in the red, I sell before it gets to the price I bought it at and buy more for cheaper on the dead cat bounce. It's always surprises me that people trade by not trading LOL

Republicans are known to be pro free market capitalism, so I'm not sure what your point is.

It seems analysts don't think it will pass, but investors do. 

I've been reading about it for a while now and about ETF's in general and nothing I've read has explained exactly why the SEC would not approve it.

Why wouldn't it pass?

Absolutely, agree 100%.

And I feel bad for those guys, they just don't seem to understand bitcoin at all. The adoption and regulation of it around the world is increasing every week, China halting withdrawals while the U.S. has pro-bitcoin in the White House, India and Venezuela outlawing currencies... the world is turning to bitcoin, blockchain, Fintech in general. If the ETF doesn't pass, it would be very, very surprising.

For anyone with the same problem, it turns out that everything was set up fine on my end, but the Gridcoin Wallet does not tell you that you have to wait 24 hours or so for your info to show up in the next superblock. That should be fixed.

I am now running smoothly and mining, however I'm still waiting for my coins to become stake (apparently every 16 hours your coins are staked) in order to earn from my BOINC projects.

This is interesting but the waiting with no messages from the wallet app sort of leaves the user in the dark...

Hey folks, Merry Christmas!!

I was just wondering if anyone could help me figure out why I'm stuck with Project: INVESTOR

I set the directories to the proper locations in config file but still getting INVESTOR status.

Here is config file:

cpumining=true
email=myemail@gmail.com
addnode=node.gridcoin.us
addnode=gridcoin.asia
addnode=grcmagnitude.com
UpdatingLeaderboard=false
tickers=GOOG,^DJX,^RUT,^VIX,SPY,AAPL,$GRC,$BTC,SHLD,$LTC
boincdatadir=C:\\ProgramData\\BOINC\\
boincappdir=C:\\Program Files\\BOINC\\


Those last two lines are accurate, so I'm confused about why I'm still marked as INVESTOR. Thanks in advance to any help people can give!

Just spend $50? I'm assuming there is no mining rig that will bring in 100Mh/s for a mere $50!

Would you be able to suggest some hardware for me to check out? Thanks in advance!

Speaking about Monero specifically, is it even possible to get over 1Mh/s without spending thousands of dollars on equipment?

I don't see any reason why people would pull out of Monero except to make a quick buck. It's a strong cryptocurrency in what it achieves for the consumer, so far there is nothing like it, from what I can see.