It is a valid concern that is discussed on the last 2 pages here already. On the other hand, a 50% dip would still return some USD, so lenders could be partially refunded. I am not sure how these platforms work internally in the end, but I think it might be possible to have "stop loss" safeguard selling offers for the long positions so you don't need to get in new offers at difficult times. As I don't use mtgox I'm not sure if you can set up an offer that gets executed if a price gets crossed (e.g. sell 2k coins if the price touches 180usd) but it would be a nice thing to have if it doesn't exist yet. On the other hand offers like this would make it even harder if there's pump and dump, as the action would increase on both ends (sell and buy). Edit: aaand 750k active loans! Congratulations!  |
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High five to my fellow lenders, vir is over 800% even with the dampened algorithm! Meanwhile going long on BTC today meant 20% gain in one day or 7300% apr. Just to put things into perspective. |
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Newbie lender here: Do you earn interest on lending if it is lent for under an hour? I just started out and see my funds got executed/lent in my history a couple of times previously in the last 24 hrs, but my USD funds still show the same amount I started with.
Also wondering is the history page supposed to show when one of your loans is repaid by the borrower? I don't see any entries for that, just the initial executions.
As far as I understood it, interest is calculated/billed by the hour. If someone has a position for 5 minutes and closes it again, you still get interest for a full hour - in the edge case positions are very very short so you might be ale to get paid more than once for the same hour. I'm not 100% sure of this, but it would seem logical to me. Interest is paid at 00:0x (usually about 2-8 minutes after 00:00) GMT. You can check the History tab for more info on that. Yes, I agree it would be nice to see times there as well. Also I would really prefer to have the funds credited asap after a position is finalized (or hourly) - why do I have to wait until midnight (or 2 AM in my case) to get credited? Yes, it creates probably a much larger history tab, but in my opinion that's a platform/database limitation that might be worth overcoming. I have more features I'd like to see (for example a better "cruise control" mode than the current auto-lending feature) but these can be mostly implemented via a small bot and an API that can handle lending offers and would only clutter/confuse the user interface even more if implemented on the site. About compounded rates: No the rates are not compounded, so a ~405% rate you put up and that's lent out for a day returns 1% per day (considering the 10% fee). The interest which you get daily can be withdrawn, lent out or moved to a trading wallet to trade. Except for lending this is currently not possible to do automatically (well, you could write a website scraper...). |
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Well, my 2400 loan is still in use... as are all my others. I track my earnings daily by the way, including charts and Apr calculations. Yesterday for example was my best day so far with 540% Apr realized over the day. This includes times of not lending out some amounts, different amounts at different rates etc. (Interest that day divided by open balance times 36500) About wish nr 2: auto lend already automatically lends out all of your interest. The cruise control mode for holidays would probably be vir loans plus autolend. Edit: the next morning (now) I tried 4k instead of 40k apr and voila: after 1 hour already 400 USD lent out!  |
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Yeah, I have lent 2.5 dollar at 1700%  . Wish the rest of my money wasn't loaned out already . Then again, people who loaned out at 2400% today (provided they took the loan at the start of the day) actually still made a decent profit... PS: over 600%? Damn, perhaps I should be more aggresive in my demanded percentage. Are your funds not-lent a lot of the time? Actually I got in about 1000 times your amount at 2400...  I doubt that that position will stay open for very long though. Still a nice thing to have, after all that alone will give more return in a few hours than a bank account in a year! I tried vir and then after the last sudden rally up to 130 I just put in loans at double the amount of vir and since then I kept just doubling the rate every day in autolend. Still I did not see a USD loan offer of mine open for more than 1 hour until it is snatched, I check the page maybe every 6 hours or so. Interestingly this even worked with 800% loan offers when there were plenty of lower offers on the market too... I however consider my USD superior to others and am happy that traders seem to think so as well  I didn't really expect my ridiculous offer of 2400% really to work out, now I'm aiming for the large pot and will try 40000% until tomorrow... |
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I put up some lending offers at 2400% as a joke and they really get taken! Seems like there are people really believing in a high success rate. Are you sure the average is "only" about 340%? Currently over all my loans I have north of 600% per year after the 10% fee. Another question: if I fill a loan demand, does the lendee have to keep the loan for the advertised amount of time? E.g. there's a demand for 50k USD at 200% apr for 1 year. If I fill this demand, can this be canceled early by the lendee or not? |
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Congrats to 500k active loans by the way! |
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Yeah, an API would be really great and useful. I guess it is anyways on the to do list and probably even quite high. As soon as the risks for losses because of getting goxxed are mitigated I guess this will be one of the next things on the agenda. Hopefully it will be close to existing ones, so developers don't have to start from scratch. In other news: it seems to be possible now to deposit and withdraw via wire transfer! |
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Yes, that would also be as I imagined a function like this. Also I'd like to add that the opposite (earning interest in btc and selling them for USD) might also be interesting for others. Another potential function could be to have a cutoff value (e.g. 20 USD per day) above which everything else gets converted to btc. That way one could for example mimic a traditional 5% bank account and everything above is automatically in bitcoins.
Anyways, please look into listing the bitfinex internal exchange on bitcoincharts, it is free promotion and gives nice data as well as helping in global price discovery.
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That sounds a bit like a dominant assurance contract with a twist. My question is why it's better/worth the extra complexity.
It would encourage betting/bidding as opposed to not betting/bidding. Either you get some small profit or you really paid for the hash rate you were looking for. However I'm not too sure if it would work out - who would even bet on any realistic difficulty? All you need to do is bet higher than 4 times the current diff (impossible to reach) to always get a profit. If everybody does that though, nobody gets a profit at all. Probably it would be smart to have a (exponentially? diminishing quadratically or cubic?) larger reward for people who bet close to the really reached difficulty or simply do parimutel betting... All in all it seems to me as if you want to do some kind of "penny auction" of mining fees or network costs. As this is about money, the reward is good for anyone contributing and people donating out of charity is unlikely/unsustainable, there need to be rewards or potential rewards for anyone taking part, not only miners and as few freeloaders as possible. Also the system needs to be as automatable as possible, betting might be fun and nice for a few times, but if I had to look at hash rate diagrams and estimates every week to make sure I either get a small profit or loose the whole wager to secure the network I guess I'd quickly choose to cash out and leave this behind. On the other hand, this could be done by an external service as well for the beginning - do parimutel betting with for example a half cut off bell shaped curve for rewards on the difficulty after the next difficulty switch, pay high bettors 10%(?) of the low bets and 90% as pure fee transactions towards each of the 2016 blocks created. Should there be blocks built too fast to include some transactions, just divide the remaining reward by the new count and the remaining blocks then get paid a little more. Might not be as lucrative as SD but (if done charitable --> only covering hosting+maintenance costs) could be used by various services also as some kind of CSR measure - they either support the miners or make a small profit that they then can automatically reinvest for the next round of course or just directly donate to a pool, service they like, still donate to miners... |
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You can't know the rates in 7 days I guess. 60 days is just the standard setting for lenders and I guess most just don't care to change that since most positions get realized much earlier so far.
In other news: congrats on a quarter million USD open loans!
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That would be a loss for bitfinex then. The risk for that happening is currently at least higher than it should be, since mtgox seems to lag out on large market orders and the subsequent rally or panic. If there's a second reactive exchange with depth (internal or external) that problem should be gone.
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1) Neue BTC werden nicht wirklich erstellt, man darf sich nur als Miner bis zu einer bestimmten Anzahl BTC aus dem Nichts an beliebige Addresse(n) senden, derzeit 25 BTC, früher mal 50. Die Berechnung dazu ist SHA256, eine Hashfunktion. Die ist an sich schon sinnvoll und wird in unterschiedlichen Bereichen angewandt. Sie ist aber nicht im Sinne von "kann man Bitcoin mining Software verwenden um Passwörter zu knacken?" nützlich, da Mining ein paar spezielle Eigenheiten hat (z.B. wird die Hashfunktion 2x angewandt und soll möglichst unter einem bestimmten Wert liegen) die sich nicht wirklich gut eignen um irgendwas anderes damit anzustellen.
Geld hat in der heutigen modernen Gesellschaft generell kaum "Wert" (es existieren weit mehr Euros und Dollars als es an Wirtschaftsleistung gibt), Bitcoin treibt das eben an die Spitze indem es einfach an Miner "verschenkt" wird und diese dann damit machen können was sie wollen. Je mehr Leute jedoch minen wollen, um auch BTC geschenkt zu bekommen, desto schwieriger wird es werden, diese auch tatsächlich zu bekommen und nach einiger Zeit kostet eben der Betrieb eines Miners auch ein paar Euro. Jetzt muss man sich dann eben überlegen, ob man das zum Spaß macht, oder ob man es irgendwie schafft z.B. ein bisschen dieses eigentlich wertlosen Geldes um EUR zu verkaufen um die Stromrechnung zu bezahlen... so entstehen dann erste Märkte etc.
Mit Monopolygeld funktioniert das z.B. im Großen nicht, da man nicht genau wissen kann, wieviel davon überhaupt vorhanden ist bzw. wer das eigentlich herstellt. Du kannst dir also nie sicher sein, dass nicht dein Gegenüber plötzlich ein Bündel an 50.000er Scheinen hervorzaubert und deine mühsam verdienten 100er quasi auf einen Schlag entwertet. Bei Bitcoin (weil es ein Algorithmus verspricht dass es nur 21 Millionen geben wird) und auch einigermaßen bei USD oder EUR (weil es eine Zentralbank verspricht, dass sie nur ~2-5% mehr Geld jedes Jahr ausgibt) wird das nicht so sehr der Fall sein, daher ist man dort eher auf der sicheren Seite, informationsmäßig gesehen.
Bitcoin ist generell als Geldsystem und Transaktionssystem designt worden, daher ist es recht einfach als Geld zu verwenden. Die gleiche Technologie (man hat einen Beweis der nicht rückgängig gemacht werden kann und der einmalig ist, dass etwas zu einem gewissen Zeitpunkt/vor einem anderen Event stattgefunden hat) kann auch z.B. für Wahlen verwendet werden oder auch für Sachen wie das Domain Name System (siehe Namecoin) wo man IP Addressen mit Zeichenketten einmalig verknüpft und auch darauf baut, dass wer zuerst kommt, zuerst "mahlt".
2. Das Angebot reguliert sich alle ~2 Wochen (alle 2016 Blöcke) selbst, indem die Difficulty hoch-/runtergesetzt wird. Bei genau 10 Minuten zwischen Blöcken, sollte ja genau 4 Jahre nach Start Anfang Jänner 2009 diese Umstellung von 50 auf 25 BTC Belohnung pro Block erfolgt sein. In der Realität (dadurch, dass immer schneller gearbeitet wurde) war das schon im November der Fall. Trotzdem kein allzu großer Unterschied, wenn man bedenkt dass da um einige Größenordnungen mehr Arbeit hineingesteckt wurde.
Je schwieriger es ist, Blöcke zu erzeugen, desto sicherer ist man vor Angreifern - die meisten bekannten Attacken (Bugs im Client mal außen vor gelassen) beruhen darauf, dass ein böser Miner schneller Blöcke erzeugen kann als der gesamte Rest des Netzwerks. Viele Leute unterschätzen das auch, z.B. ist das Mining mit GPUs oder CPUs schon so ineffizient im Vergleich, dass z.B. das Bitcoin Netzwerk schneller mining betreibt als vermutlich alle Supercomputer der Welt zusammengerechnet. Viele davon verwenden allerdings eben CPUs, die schon von GPUs abgehängt werden.
Je höher also die Hashrate, desto sicherer kann man sein, dass niemand plötzlich einen Supercomputer für ein paar Stunden mietet und eine Transaktion rückgängig macht.
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You do realize that without giving any information about that shop (or your boss) this looks only like somebody trying to scam 1 BTC?
Also you seem to play quite a bit on Satoshi's Dice with the address (1FKppwEjrenyhNXC9AHobgtuCcBTSLdnzY) in your signature - I don't trust gamblers, sorry.
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Wow, congrats on snatching a few great positions then! I'm based in EU, GMT +1... maybe that also has something to do with my inability to snatch some good lending demands as I might be asleep then. On the other hand I am not too unhappy either with my returns and I am probably too much of a coward for keeping money from traders in the hopes that a few thousand VIR loans get eaten up quickly and the rates end up in the high thousands. Autolend doesn't help much there either, as the spread is usually huge (right now: 49% demand, 180% (VIR) or 200% (fixed) offers, which get actually taken a lot - 80k USD loans more since I went to sleep!) so auto-fill might cause even greater losses and guessing a percentage led me to guess 400%, not 2000%. Well, it seems the situation has settled down a bit now with again close to 200k USD active loans and (surprise!) already ~700 BTC active loans at still quite interesting interest rates (the ~160% you'd effectively get at VIR right now still mean that in ~160 days you double your amount of money, after 1 year you'd have 5 times as much - I don't want to speculate on how BTC prices then would have to look like though...). I agree though that the risk might be much higher than at a bank (except for cypriotic banks that is...) but as rpietila said, even with 40% risk of loosing everything the return would still be 10 times as high as the highest interest on a bank account that I could get (only as a small bonus for the first few months by the way, then yearly interest goes back to 1%...). Compared to holding BTC in a cold wallet probably still bad, but that's up to everyone on their own. |
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The average apr was far below 2k% in the last weeks... Yes, there were some very lucky positions a lender could grab, but they often listed only a few hours and then you'd need to relend or have 0 interest while waiting for the next high demand. I made on average over the past 2 weeks close to 200% (I love statistics and created a tracking sheet including nice graphs etc).
Even though vir sometimes spiked, lending out at vir would have given me probably even poorer results. Maybe some other vir only lender can comment on that.
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Offline according to Cloudflare... Damn kids and their DDoSes these days!  And all that in the holiday season of course. |
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Eine spannende Frage ist ob es auch 'gültige' Adressen gibt zu denen kein privater Schlüssel existiert.
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE ... Achtung, die Adresse ist gülting und nein, dafür hat vermutlich noch SEHR lange Zeit niemand den Private Key. |
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Yes, having more exchanges in the backend to get more depth is probably really necessary - getting Goxed isn't nice and happens far too often in rallies. A lot of the issues and risks can be lowered and/or worked around by the way, so I guess it also comes down on Raphael on keeping the overview, his priorities straight and also not to burn out (Nefario from GLBSE managed to get himself a severe case of burnout after some time being bombarded with feedback, feature requests and constantly trying to improve everything). There's another multi-exchange API, this time in python that I'm aware of by the way: https://github.com/maxme/bitcoin-arbitrage / https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153661.0Other than that I don't know of any serious efforts to create a unified API for exchanges. There might be a need though to create a meta-API that exposes exchange APIs as a current finance standard API to be used in other softwares as well... though I guess the XChange library already tries that. |
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Risks I can think of:
MtGox running with funds/loosing funds
No/not enough users on the platform who actually want to trade
Raphael or someone else from Bitfinex running with the funds
Platform gets hacked/defaced/??? and looses reputation and/or money - if the goal is having one competitor less, I guess it won't matter that the MtGox key cannot withdraw.
Banks. (--> Cyprus)
Laws + regulations. (both on my end (taxes?) and on Bitfinex' end (KYC?))
Internal errors and bugs in the system (e.g. mixing up two values after a midnight hacking session and suddenly dumping all coins)
Environmental risks (Raphael isn't immortal, neither are his servers)
Mismanagement and/or communication problems
Better competitors
No real insurance that I'm aware of (compared to FDIC - not that they could pay...)
Some of these are more likely than others and I bet I've forgotten quite a few.
Also it seems the bears are awaking from their hibernation slowly! This is gonna be an interesting weekend.
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