Reduced globally.

If you want to request for changing back, email to support@bitcoinica.com

The price you see is immediately available for trading. Your market orders can be executed immediately. Our bot will simply get the price from the database and add the position into your account. Matching and hedging will be done later.

If you trade more than 50 BTC, it will be split into multiple orders of 50 BTC. There will be a reasonable interval such as 5 seconds between them during the execution to allow the price to change.

The small number is a pipette. It's simply the 5th digit. Most forex brokerages use this format to show "pips" (0.0001) clearly while providing more precision.

No, unless the slippage is too large that we can't find a correct price to trade at, we don't leave any orders open.

Bitcoinica offers guaranteed liquidity, so sometimes we may lose, but most time the slippage is within the spreads.

It's a fair comment. But as far as I have observed, manipulator exists. Bitcoinica don't place walls. It's just a dark pool that removes liquidity from the market when there's liquidity at favorable or unfavorable prices.

Keep in mind that all trades executed by Bitcoinica are completely automated. Even though I do have a personal account and I sometimes trade, I don't trade based on the information about my clients and I never trade more than 300 BTC.

Saw some people discussing about the "manipulator" sold below $2.

It's not the manipulator, but Bitcoinica. Our system liquidated a lot of positions at the price around $2.

We sent three limit orders to Mt. Gox for hedging:

SELL 19693.42 BTC at $2.00778
SELL 3130.5 BTC at $1.81321
SELL 3083.0 BTC at $1.81253

Apparently, the lowest price hit $1.994. We have been continuously warning our clients about the risk of margin trading. However, this was an inevitable outcome as the bot is unable to judge whether the price will go lower.

In order to protect our customers, we have lowered the default leverage to 2.5:1, while still preserving their freedom of choice.

This post is not intended for anything. Just to let you guys know so that you know what happened.

When you have 10 BTC and 20 USD, you will have 50 USD margin balance at the price of 3. With 2.5x margin, you have 125 USD to trade, so you can buy about 40 BTC. If BTC rises to $5 tomorrow, you get profits of 40 x (5-3) = $80. Then your account will have 100 USD and 10 BTC. The 10 BTC you deposited will remain unchanged, and it appreciates!

If you have BTC and want to short BTC, you must short more than what you have in order to be effective. When you make profits, your unrealized profits will come into the mortgage as well. So even if your BTC loses value, your unrealized profits of your short position can cover the depreciation. In the end, you still get the same BTC back, but you will earn USD profits.

It depends. If you want to stabilize your business, it's a nice thing to have. You can hedge even before the confirmations (and ship the good after confirmations). So you get guaranteed USD payments with minimal risk. The best thing about leverage is that you don't have to deposit you whole business into Bitcoinica. Only a part of money which is enough to cover the fluctuation will be good for hedging. Same thing applies for mining.

All credited.

Thank you for your support!

To satisfy your need immediately, here you go:

So, you want to buy Bitcoins, and you're pretty sure that it will go up. You can buy some Bitcoins, and mortgage these Bitcoins to borrow some dollars, and buy more Bitcoins, ...

When you make profits, you will basically sell them all at higher prices and you just have to return the dollars to us. All the profits belong to you!

If you want to sell Bitcoins just because you feel it will drop and you don't even have Bitcoins, you can take advantage of this movement too. You can simply mortgage your dollars, borrow some Bitcoins, sell them and turn them into dollars, and mortgage these dollars and borrow more Bitcoins to sell,...

When you make profits, you will basically buy back the Bitcoins that you've sold at lower prices, and return the Bitcoins to us. The dollars leftover will be yours!

Bitcoinica makes the whole process seamless. You can open an account, deposit either currency and start trading with 1, 2.5 or 5 times the account balance that you have. When you trade, we first try to match your orders with someone else at Bitcoinica who trades in the opposite direction, if we can't find one, we will buy or sell accordingly at Mt. Gox to maintain a balanced portfolio.

We make profits by setting different prices for buying and selling, and the difference minus Mt. Gox fees will be our profits from this process. We don't charge or give interests.

At the same time, your account balance may be borrowed by someone else for trading. So basically Bitcoinica is a pool of USD and BTC, and everyone can take advantage of the secured loans of either currency to trade.

We're considering making a series of videos to showcase Bitcoinica's various features to newbies, or "dummies".

Thank you for your feedback!

1. 5:1 leverage can be given without justification. It was our default, so you have the right to enjoy it if you register before this change.

2. To me, business should be from the heart. We haven't spent a single cent on marketing (except the $1 starting bonus and sponsorship for Bitcoins for Christmas), and we hate referral programs. Everything relies on word of mouth so far. Bitcoinica users love Bitcoinica and we're happy to know it. It's not my responsibility to maintain client relationships, but we can't simply ignore their interest by using financial jargons that they don't understand, or things like "you should have understood the risk before investing", "it's your bad trading decision" and "it's for our protection since we can't sue you viably" to end the relationships straightaway. That will be bad for our image, too.

We chose the opt-in mechanism because it works the best: it doesn't affect your freedom and it works.

You can say whatever you want about the reserves, but we hope that our past honesty and transparency can contribute to the trust that we've established with our consistent efforts. To put it simply, this decision has nothing to do with our reserves.

I can obviously make more money with higher leverage, but I will feel bad. The one thing about Bitcoinica that I'm most proud of is that it's made by a real human. It's meant to be benefiting everyone, and I'm quite disappointed that we have somehow encouraged excessive speculation. The profits don't make me happy if they come from someone who lost their money just now just because the system allows him to trade that much and he doesn't know the consequences.

I appreciate your feedback. If there's anything you can suggest to practically help the community, I will seriously consider adopting.

That's a good way to warn users about the associated risk!

However, it might be too complicated because we have to consider the appreciation/depreciation of the user's BTC deposits. I'll figure out an algorithm to calculate the price accurately.

Thank you for your feedback. I will definitely try to implement such features in the near future.

No, our reserves have always been in a healthy state. We can effectively handle long or short positions up to 20,000 BTC now based on our current reserve levels. However, it's frightening to see some speculators with no knowledge about margin calls and the whole thing to lose their entire account.

We are just changing the defaults for everyone. For any person with a reasonable understanding about leverage, he should be able to send an email to us to request a change. It's that simple.

We are not limiting anyone's freedom. In fact, we have the incentive to make the leverage as high as possible, so that we can make more profits. But Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, we want to create a good environment for all kinds of trading, not just pure speculation.

This change doesn't affect the group of people who know what they are doing, and for some special clients, we are happy to give them beyond 5:1 as long as they can provide valid justifications.

Let me know if you still have any concerns.

Dear Bitcoinica Users,

Recently we have noticed a significant increase in Bitcoin's price fluctuation, and many Bitcoinica clients have been affected extremely negatively. The average spreads and the frequency of margin calls have been pushed up.

There are rumors saying that the Manipulator(s) are targeting Bitcoinica's clients for profits. We ensure that all your private trading data is safe with us and no one else other than me (not even Jon) has access to it at this moment. There's no way that a manipulator can get an accurate estimate of a price that triggers liquidations. However, it's entirely possible to predict for customers who trade with full leverage.

In light of the actual situations, we have decided to temporarily decrease the leverage to 2.5:1 (from the previous default 5:1). Existing customers with open positions over this leverage will not be affected and this applies only on your next trade. Accordingly, we have adjusted the maintenance margin requirement to 10% (down from 20%) to enable more tolerance of loss.

By doing so, the cost of manipulating against Bitcoinica customers will be much higher, with our maximum tolerance of as high as 36% for movements against positions. That means, a drop from $3 to $2 will not trigger forced liquidations for customers who bought at or below $3. Or put in on a larger scale: drop from $30 to $20. This will obviously make Bitcoinica-targeted manipulation significantly harder.

Bitcoinica is now the second largest trading platform, with over 39,136.772 BTC traded in the last 24 hours, representing about 25% 35% of the total centralized trading volume between BTC and USD in the whole market. We are aware that this action taken will have an adverse impact on our trading volume, and our profits, but it's to the community's best interest to have a healthy environment of investment, trading and speculation. We are glad to make chances that benefit every Bitcoiner in general, even at the expense of our business potential.

In the future one week, we will roll out an update that allows you to choose your favorite leverage level from 1:1, 2.5:1, 5:1 and 10:1 (subject to verification). Meanwhile, if you are not satisfied with this change, you can request an increase of leverage to 5:1 by sending an email to support@bitcoinica.com or submitting a support ticket. We will fulfill your request immediately as we see it.

Thank you for your support and understanding in this matter. Should you have any enquiries, please reply below or sending an email to us.

Bitcoinica: https://www.bitcoinica.com/

But how about those banking apps? You can do wire transfers or write checks with iPhone too.

As far as I know, most Bitcoin apps have extremely low quality - some are just displaying a webpage. Apple will definitely reject such apps.

Hi,

Everyone is credited.

Thank you for your support!

I agree with you.

So many people dreamed about $100, $1000 or even higher. It's entirely possible since the number of Bitcoins is very limited. Not to say that for the vast majority of people on this forum, an increase in BTC value is beneficial.

Offer Bitcoiners a choice: do you want price to stay at $3 forever, or potentially increase to $1000 with huge volatility? I guess 99% will choose the latter.

Stability is never a solution. It takes gold and silver thousands of years to be stable (or you can say, to have a price). Technology can make Bitcoin grow faster, but not just today.

I would regard gold's price as a good stability benchmark for Bitcoin - average about 1% per day and maximum about 4% per day with a long-term trend of going upwards.

It's bad for them anyway.

People want to trade on Mt. Gox, that's why they withdraw from Bitcoinica. No one can benefit from funds being stuck between two platforms.

Trading on Mt. Gox, they receive 0.6% fees; but trading on Bitcoinica, they can only receive 0.26% (the fee tier we're at).

The withdrawal limit may be troublesome, but it has never limited Bitcoinica's growth. To put it simple, less withdrawals = less business for Mt. Gox.

In the future, we will try not to rely on this single exchange.

They are very different.

We're limited by what Mt. Gox allows us to do. We don't even have an official partnership with them. So basically we have the same withdrawal limits.

You can send a support ticket to us and we will withdraw for you manually if automatic withdrawal fails.

For both technical and security reasons, we can't set up automatic withdrawals from our hedging account at the moment. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, I couldn't wait to showcase the newly re-designed interface of Bitcoinica.

The intuitive design and wonderful experience have always been Bitcoinica's core competitiveness. We'd like to share our inspirations and set a high standards for Bitcoin-related platforms and services.

Apparently, Twitter Bootstrap is heavily used in this design, but this time more elements are designed from scratch. Some unique patterns have never been used by other Bootstrap-powered sites.

Enjoy, and don't forget your valuable feedback!



PS > Bitcoinica's new release is coming soon. We don't have an exact schedule yet but most likely will be within 1-2 weeks!