(If you don't know me: I'm the creator of Bitcoinica.) Edit: You can also answer at http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1232/im-planning-to-write-a-book-about-bitcoin-any-ideasToday I did a simple search on Amazon.com, didn't find any books about Bitcoin. So I decided to write my first book for Bitcoin, for newbies and Bitcoin lovers. I'm personally highly interested in Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Computer Science (Cryptography) and Finance - almost everything about Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is a gift for me.) Therefore, I think I should be able to cover Bitcoin in different aspects, contexts and perspectives. Planned to cover: Part I: Theory (basics)Cryptography Open source P2P and the Internet Free market Fiat vs Crypto (Centralized vs Decentralized) Part II: ApplicationsThe Bitcoin client Mining Exchange and Trading Goods and Services Deviations (such as alternate block-chains or Bitcoins in other formats) Part III: The IdealLibertarianism, Capitalism and Anarchism Bitcoin as a currency Challenges and solutions (security, deflation, government shutdown, etc) That's it. I'm going to write in simple English after thorough research. (I don't know *everything* about Bitcoin yet.) I hope this book will be helpful for Bitcoin lovers and potential Bitcoin lovers too. Any ideas about the content, publishing, format, book name, preface writer, appendices or anything else? Suggestions are welcomed. |
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yes give me my 4.3 btc back!
Please log in to your account and withdraw yourself, I don't have access to your money. |
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Actually I have done the code and testing for account settlement for a while. It seems that now it's a good time to introduce. Whenever you have a negative balance, Bitcoinica will display this message:  And then you have the option of either settling with BTC or depositing more USD. The system will automatically handle the currency conversion process. Then you will be able to withdraw BTC. I hope this feature can help people who unfortunately made a loss. |
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I'm the founder of Bitcoinica.
The confusion is simple: Bitcoinica is not (yet) a place for you to change your Bitcoins to USD. It's a trading platform for investors and speculators to gain profits from the trade. Bitcoinica is a professional tool.
You can't go to a forex broker and change your dollar to euro because you want to travel.
Bitcoinica uses net accounting system, all the profits and losses will only affect your USD account, but you can use both currencies as margin to trade. You're not trading BTC at Bitcoinica, instead, you're trading BTCUSD, which is a contract based on the ratio of values of these two currencies.
Since your USD account is negative, you can't withdraw. But I have settled your account, by using part of your BTC balance to fill the gap in your USD. Now you can withdraw BTC to your wallet!
I'm sorry that Bitcoinica is not for you at this moment, but we're developing features for people who just want to exchange Bitcoins too.
Currently we have more than 800 registered users, and most of them like Bitcoinica very much. (Most likely because they know what they're doing.)
We will keep you updated.
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I have credited all the accounts above.
Thank you for your support!
Thank you. Now we need to learn how to use the site. Are there any instructions somewhere? The FAQ only describes what you can do, not how you can do it. We will make video tutorials in the future, but not very soon. Because we will have a big thing over the next a few months. Currently Bitcoinica is for people who have a bit of forex trading experience. We will roll out to everyone in the future releases. |
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I have credited all the accounts above.
Thank you for your support!
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Thank you all for the support!
All the accounts in this thread have been credited.
Please recommend to your friends if you like Bitcoinica.
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In a free market, Zhoutong is not the king of Bitcoin, but he IS the king of Bitcoinica.
He can ban, or allow, anyone to use the site for whatever reason he pleases.
Just as the rest of us can decide to use, or not use, Bitcoinica for whatever reason we please.
This is the only moral and fair system of property rights.
Indeed! I can't believe all those people who were crying about mybitcoin.com when Tom Williams, the Grand Nagus of mybitcoin.com, wasn't obligated to give anyone anything. He could have banned you all from his site for whatever reason he pleases. What, your BTC is still there but you can't log in? Not his problem, he got his! No one forced people to use mybitcoin.com anyway, and it turns out his site shut down anyway. The free market works! This is the only moral and fair system of property rights. The guy owed me $995 after a forced liquidation. He has no incentive to pay me back. Why can't I just block the account? |
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i told a friend of bitcoinica and likes it very much... would you gave him the dollar too?
account: styx-it
Yes sure, I have credited $1. |
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Hi,
I have credited ALL of you above.
Thank you very much for your support!
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If you have less profits than expected I think I understand better what happened. But it's hard to know if I have less or more profits. Yesterday when the exchange rate was diving it was a benefit to have this 1 BTC position removed (at a $5.2659 value if my math is correct) but today with a BTC at ~$6, it's a loss :-) That's not much of a problem (I only put 8 BTC on this account to test Bitcoinica, I was ready to lose them all), but currently you should label your service as beta, it seems you need to take a careful look at how you handle your database transactions and locks (as you seem to have started doing) before you encourage serious traders to move in. I'll wait and see. Hi, Thank you for your feedback. As I have mentioned in the email. Database locking issues were started because of concurrency. Since every money-related transaction in Bitcoinica is running through a queue, there shouldn't be any locking problems if there's only one worker process. However, recently we need to scale up a bit so we increased the number of worker processes. During the spike several hours ago (frequent price updates, possible forced liquidations and a lot more trades), everything turned into a mess. Luckily, now we have settled almost all the issues according to other redundant data in our database. You can refer to the email for more details on this error. Again, thank you! |
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Yes, there was something wrong with support. I didn't receive your email. (Now it should be working fine.)
I have looked up your account, and it seems that you really only have 34 BTC in your position. Can you please verify your orders again?
BTW, it's advantageous to you because Bitcoinica implements a net-accounting system. It seems that this is a lost trade, so you should have lost less if your position is 34 instead of 35.
Such mathematical errors shouldn't happen at Bitcoinica. But yesterday's maintenance has caused some database locking issues (duplicated orders, etc). We haven't seen obviously wrong numbers though.
To make it fully transparent to everyone, here is my full orders page :  By gyverlb at 2011-09-20 As you can see (when filtering invalid or canceled orders), - I started with 8BTC (from a MtGox code) - sold them, - tried to catch up with a rise using the leverage and took a position on 35BTC, - found out I was too late and tried various things (probing along how bitcoinica spread was following the MtGox exchanges), - in the middle I had a misclick on SELL, - canceled the corresponding order, - found out that my account was 1 BTC short without $ compensation and believed it to be a temporary state, - finally sold 34BTC during a dive. taking my losses. Now where has my 1 BTC position gone too ? Either it should still be in my positions (which it isn't) or I should have got $ instead. If you have 1 BTC extra, you will have more losses, not less. Because as I said, Bitcoinica is using net-accounting system, which means that a position carries the data of profit/loss. Selling 34 BTC doesn't result in a immediately credit of 34 BTC worth of USD, instead, the system will just add/substract the supposed difference between your base price and the currently market price. Less units are better when you lose. It may be because of the recent database locking issue. We have seen some abnormalities during these days. Our system has detected some customers that are short in balance, and we have credited all of them respectively. However, your account was identified to be "better off without correction", so it was ignored. In cases like this, especially during a huge spike/crash, we only adjust errors (caused by our system) that will either 1) make customers better off or 2) result in a significant loss for Bitcoinica. Currently the problematic algorithm that causes database locking error has been fixed. And most of the user accounts have been restored. We will make a public statement soon regarding this matter. If you have less profits than expected, please email us at support@bitcoinica.com. (If you have less loss, or more profit than expected, it's yours!) |
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Hi, sent a mail to support@bitcoinica.com yesterday with subject : "1 BTC missing". No answer so far so in case something's wrong with support, here it is : ----------------- Hi, Could you please take a look at my account (gyver). It seems it lost 1 BTC. I canceled a transaction at market price (misclick on SELL with default 1BTC) just after setting it up. It seems that even though the transaction is marked canceled, the BTC disappeared. ----------------- To make it easier to look into it, here is the line for the canceled transaction (GMT +2 here) : BTCUSD Market -1.0 - Canceled Sep 18 11:50 PM I bought 35 BTC, then sold 34 and there's 0 left... Yes, there was something wrong with support. I didn't receive your email. (Now it should be working fine.) I have looked up your account, and it seems that you really only have 34 BTC in your position. Can you please verify your orders again? BTW, it's advantageous to you because Bitcoinica implements a net-accounting system. It seems that this is a lost trade, so you should have lost less if your position is 34 instead of 35. Such mathematical errors shouldn't happen at Bitcoinica. But yesterday's maintenance has caused some database locking issues (duplicated orders, etc). We haven't seen obviously wrong numbers though. In Bitcoinica here we have a 24/7 system checking for data integrity. Chances are we know immediately when there's something wrong with your orders or positions. The system can fix vast majority of the errors. So far we have processed over 1.1 million web requests, and error rate is less than 0.01%. I (the system administrator) will receive an email warning when the error rate is above 0.01%, then I will take a look at the problem closely. |
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Hi, sent a mail to support@bitcoinica.com yesterday with subject : "1 BTC missing". No answer so far so in case something's wrong with support, here it is : ----------------- Hi, Could you please take a look at my account (gyver). It seems it lost 1 BTC. I canceled a transaction at market price (misclick on SELL with default 1BTC) just after setting it up. It seems that even though the transaction is marked canceled, the BTC disappeared. ----------------- To make it easier to look into it, here is the line for the canceled transaction (GMT +2 here) : BTCUSD Market -1.0 - Canceled Sep 18 11:50 PM I bought 35 BTC, then sold 34 and there's 0 left... Yes, there was something wrong with support. I didn't receive your email. (Now it should be working fine.) I have looked up your account, and it seems that you really only have 34 BTC in your position. Can you please verify your orders again? BTW, it's advantageous to you because Bitcoinica implements a net-accounting system. It seems that this is a lost trade, so you should have lost less if your position is 34 instead of 35. Such mathematical errors shouldn't happen at Bitcoinica. But yesterday's maintenance has caused some database locking issues (duplicated orders, etc). We haven't seen obviously wrong numbers though. |
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Is it supposed to take this long to execute a market order?  I apologize for the problem. Our system is a queue-based system. With these processes by sequence: Ticking -> Matching -> Hedging -> ... We currently have two queues. But it's possible to have two queues stuck together (especially if there's huge amount of deposits/withdrawals or uncertainties on the connections to Mt. Gox server). In this case, your prices can still be protected because the price will not update if your orders can't be executed. We assign forced liquidation and hedging as our first priority, matching as second and ticking is the last. So when the queues are stuck, it's more likely to get your order executed rather than have the price updated. I think this can offer you some protection. I will investigate this issue in detail by looking at the logs. And I will try to avoid such kind of queue congestion in the future. |
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Zhoutong, What's going on with this? BTCUSD Stop -0.75 $5.7000 Executed @ 5.3103 1 minute ago
BTCUSD Stop -0.5 $5.4100 Executed @ 5.385 12 minutes ago
None of these transaction are huge deal on a $1 investment, and I might understand the last transaction if there was a discrete jump in bid, but this should definitely not be happening on the first order. Explanations, please, both regarding the problem with the first, and the reasons (if no "problem") with the second. Seriously, if this is a regular possibility, your service just isn't robust enough to trust. You're placing a Stop order. Stop order is executed when the market price is below your specified price (for selling). In this case, you are telling the system that you want to set a stop loss at $5.7. When the market rate is only 5.3, it should be executed immediately. Maybe you want to place limit order instead? (Some people have asked me why I haven't labeled the execution criteria clearly. Actually I have, you can refer to the placing order dialog for the explanation of various order types. Anyway, a bit Forex trading knowledge is required because this is something new.) |
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We have blocked your account due to malicious attempt to control prices.
Who are you to dictate who can and cannot trade? Who died and made you king of bitcoin? Bitcoinica is not an exchange. We guarantee liquidity based on current orders in the market. If you build a fake bid wall, Bitcoinica will think it's easy to sell. If you sell on Bitcoinica in large amounts, it's likely that the system will give you a good price since it's easy to sell. However, if you now suddenly cancel all the orders, the system will fall into a trap and make a loss. We have already pushed some updates to refine the algorithm to prevent cheating like this. But the financial loss is not just affecting the platform itself, but other traders as well. I don't decide who can or cannot trade. But for any transactions on Bitcoinica, I'm the counter party. I can refuse to offer prices which definitely don't reflect market conditions. For 99.9% of Bitcoinica traders, blocking malicious accounts will benefit you. According to our statistics, you have withdrawn $142 net. We have no intention to disclose your personal information, but it seems that you didn't count the numbers accurately. If you need full records of deposits and withdrawals, please send an email to support@bitcoinica.comThank you! I don't like you keep speaking of "malicious" accounts. Not at all. No account is "malicious". No one is hacking your site or stealing other users' passwords. Everyone trades at your website by filling in buying or selling orders. You should work hard on improving your website instead of criticizing your users. I have lost lots of money due to the crap algorithms. Sounds like u made plenty before that by gaming the system???, but then throw a fit when the market screwed u with a big sell. Karma No withdraw, no profit. |
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The problem with Bitcoinica is that it's both a market and a player in its own market. Those functions are usually separated. When they're not, you're betting against the house. See "bucket shop".Because you're betting against the house, the house can lose. Hence the banning of "manipulative" traders, without any stated rules. Worse things can happen if the house screws up. Because Bitcoinica offers trading on margin, it's possible for Bitcoinca to lose big if the price falls or rises faster than Bitcoinica can liquidate a margined position. An exchange like Mt. Gox, if they're honest and aren't playing their own market, takes no market risk. Bitcoinica does take market risk, which means they have to have real assets behind them to cover losses. Do they? Yes. As mentioned in the interview, we have $1,000 initial risk deposit and 50% of spread profit as risk fund. Usually Bitcoinica will hedge most of the trades, this will make it a honest brokerage, not a bucket shop. There is a pool of orders, not for betting against customers, but for saving transaction costs only. We never manipulate the prices to gain profit. Our pricing algorithm is independent of users positions. We take market risks, because of responsibility, not desire for profit. We can force you to sign contract with Bitcoinica to ensure negative balance can be paid up, but that's not what Bitcoin should be. We use technological methods to establish trust and eliminate the need for due diligence. You tend to think that risk-free businesses tend to stay longer. That's not true. Risk-free business is a scam. Because we take risk, our profits are generally higher. When there are serious issues such as security breaches, we are glad to put our profit in again and continue operation and compensate all customers. Risk-free businesses will just run away because they can't afford to do so. Personally, Bitcoinica told me a good lesson - word of mouth is important. I know why brand is valuable. I know the established trust should be treasured. Even if there's any unexpected loss, I'll do my best to stay with the customers. And with the risk and profit, i can do a lot more than other exchanges. |
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The problem with Bitcoinica is that it's both a market and a player in its own market. Those functions are usually separated. When they're not, you're betting against the house. See "bucket shop".Because you're betting against the house, the house can lose. Hence the banning of "manipulative" traders, without any stated rules. Worse things can happen if the house screws up. Because Bitcoinica offers trading on margin, it's possible for Bitcoinca to lose big if the price falls or rises faster than Bitcoinica can liquidate a margined position. An exchange like Mt. Gox, if they're honest and aren't playing their own market, takes no market risk. Bitcoinica does take market risk, which means they have to have real assets behind them to cover losses. Do they? Yes. As mentioned in the interview, we have $1,000 initial risk deposit and 50% of spread profit as risk fund. Usually Bitcoinica will hedge most of the trades, this will make it a honest brokerage, not a bucket shop. There is a pool of orders, not for betting against customers, but for saving transaction costs only. We never manipulate the prices to gain profit. Our pricing algorithm is independent of users positions. We take market risks, because of responsibility, not desire for profit. We can force you to sign contract with Bitcoinica to ensure negative balance can be paid up, but that's not what Bitcoin should be. We use technological methods to establish trust and eliminate the need for due diligence. |
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I have credited ALL of you! Thank you SO MUCH for your support! If you have anything, please email support@bitcoinica.com. We're testing our Zendesk. |
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