Great points! Here is some input from CampBX:
1. Sort your trading code out.
- Our core trade engine code has been very reliable and error-free. Since our launch in July 2011 we haven't found any bugs or mistakes in the code. There are a lot of trade engines out there, but it comes down to error handling. CampBX core engine is just 5-7% trading code, rest all is error handling, sanity checks, and cross-checks.
The peripheral code will always keep evolving as we need to add new features and scale at a fast clip.
2. Invest in hardware or hosting, you're making thousands or tens of thousands per day. Buy or hire a room full of the best machines you can (I'm not a tech expert). You can never go down through 'excess trading demand' - this is amateur.
- We have invested in dedicated servers housed in an on-shore, top-tier datacenter in Arizona. This data center has:
Triple telecom backbone connectivity for redundancy
Caterpillar diesel generators in case of power brown-out / black-out
Restricted physical access to servers
24/7 monitoring
3. Create a minimum trading size, the tiny bot trades of $1 are swamping the system and add nothing.
- We have minimum size set at 0.01 BTC and the goal is to keep it around one dollar
4. Forget about circuit breakers or 'cooling off', this only works when assets are only traded on only one exchange (ie NYSE/Nasdaq) which is why you do not see gold or Forex stop trading. The market continues and your customers are left helpless.
- Forex trading platform has evolved through Billions of dollars of development expenses, while Bitcoin is a hobby project run by (mostly) volunteers. Due to this reason Bitcoin code tends to choke under certain situations. If I had to guess, cool-off will remain part of the game at least till Bitcoin 2.0 client comes out.
5. Get someone to be a market-maker. You need a pool of money acting as market maker, to provide some depth of liquidity to stabilise the price when the market volumes become very illiquid or eratic. Confidence is everything in this market.
- There are a lot of bots and independent traders working as market makers on multiple platforms and exchanges. But there is a fundamental difference: Bitcoin transfers take 60 minutes to get 6 confirmations, which hinders the market-maker's ability to provide liquidity and increases risk significantly.
6. Prove you have some depth to your security. Right now people have millions invested in exchanges and any number of them could be complete shams designed to take coins that cannot be traced. I could setup a good looking exchange in days, collect coins and money and then disappear, it's been done before, it could be done again.
- CampBX has been audited by two independent penetration tests. We continue to be audited nightly for new vulnerabilities and we are the first Bitcoin website to earn PCI compliance. You can read more about it here:
https://campbx.com/faq.php#security-complianceDo give us a try and spread the word if you like us!
Thank you,
Keyur
