[BETA]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading

[markm]

Possibly you meant "bootyfull" ?

-MarkM-

[naima53]

minor bug - firefoks I can`t change leverage, Chrome - works well 
Edit
Please expand (run) service "Bitfinex chart", a publicly available source code should be. (better without the depth of the market). It helps by working ahead. (runs in front of the market, ahead of the game) and the diagram of Interest Rates

[unclescrooge]

Hi naima, thanks for reporting this bug I'll have a look.

Chart of btcusd price are in the pipeline, charts of interest rates may come later. However at this point we don't intend to replace the advanced professional charts available on others sites (like clarkmoody.com for example).

Meanwhile, we added an option in your account settings to choose your default currency. Now, when you'll close a position, profit will be taken in this default currency rather than in USD only. Price will be the midpoint between btcusd ask and bid at the time of closing.
Profit/loss displaying and accounting are still displayed in USD, this will later be displayed in the default currency of your choice.

We changed the developer that helped us with this as he doesn't seemed to fit the job. The migration toward float free code/database is almost done, it should be deployed this week.

Thanks for everyone trying this platform and helping improving it. We still need bears to balance all you bitcoin bulls though

Raphael

[BorderBits]

Did you make sure that everyone using your (stolen) platform has apologized to and thanked pirate yet? 

[naima53]

Who said that the platform is stolen? Or It is not allowed to make a platform based on an existing ? ...

Another annoying minor bug: in the history of receipt payment repeat the same transaction multiple times. (do not worry, be counted only once  If taken into account, I have not understood yet)

[guruvan]

MPOE-PR is 100% correct.

Icthyo - noooooooooooo. We don't give people the benefit of the doubt with money. It works the other way around. You prove that you're capable of handling money, and then you get some to handle. When we give people the benefit of the doubt we create scenarios like pirate, and the so many other scams (and/or colossal fuckups) we've seen here.

When I made a deposit, I felt it was worth the risk to plunk something in and confirm my suspicions - namely that there is no way that unclescrooge can actually guarantee BTC70 liquidity at the quoted price in either direction, most likely because he has no funding of his own.

The short of it, unclescrooge, is that you appear to have no float of your own. This can't work. You should have significant assets to back deposits, plus insurance, and be hedging positions. You're not doing that at all. You're hedging positions WITH deposits. (This, IMO, is precisely what lead to the "thefts" at bitcoinica, which I continue to suspect to have been staged to cover up exactly this type of loss of customer deposits) While it may not be illegal to trade with customer deposits (it may be in some cases) it is not necessarily advisable unless you can cover 100% of your trading losses.

If you look at the rules for registration as a broker-dealer in the US (which you'd need in order to offer bitcoin derivatives, which are securities) you'll see rules similar to what I mention above. While I may not be a fan of the US trying to regulate everything in the world, many of the securities laws and rules make good common sense, and should be followed even if one were to operate 100% outside the law. Capitalization requirements make good sense.

And, I guess, I'll apologize to pirate when I get something back from him

[2112]

You're hedging positions WITH deposits. (This, IMO, is precisely what lead to the "thefts" at bitcoinica, which I continue to suspect to have been staged to cover up exactly this type of loss of customer deposits.)

Good thinking. But because of the "cold wallet" only a fraction of deposits would be available for hedging.

[greyhawk]

MPOE-PR is 100% correct.

Icthyo - noooooooooooo. We don't give people the benefit of the doubt with money. It works the other way around. You prove that you're capable of handling money, and then you get some to handle. When we give people the benefit of the doubt we create scenarios like pirate, and the so many other scams (and/or colossal fuckups) we've seen here.

Ichthyo has been shilling for the Bitcoinica Trio for months. I think he has an agenda.

[Ichthyo]

Ichthyo has been shilling for the Bitcoinica Trio for months. I think he has an agenda.

This can't stand uncorrected.
All I insist on is that people stick to facts.
We're grown-ups, we're bound to control our emotions.

What enrages me is that kind of lynch mob mentality you guys think is just cool and adequate. It isn't. Its detestable.

I am all for such critical inquiries as done here by guruvan, or by davout, who actually inspected the leaked bitcoinica sourcecode.
How can such discussions be carried out, when everyone just spits insults around without any discipiline, posts a shitload of half baked conjectures and flatters his own inflated ego?

This is not how it works nor how it should work.
"Benefit of the doubt" belongs in fiat world, with the courts. In Bitcoin unknown = thief, plain and simple, because if he wasn't a thief, he wouldn't be unknown.

The MPOE-Lady is clearly wrong here.

If everyone new and unknown is treated as a thief, chased and and defamed, the established forces soon control everything, without being supervised by anyone.


This is the mindset of criminals and mafia.
This mindset might have been appropriate somewhere in Siberia or some remote mountain valley of the past, but this not the way it can work on a small, crowded planet, loaded with conflict and technology.

[MPOE-PR]

If everyone new and unknown is treated as a thief, chased and and defamed, the established forces soon control everything, without being supervised by anyone.

There's two problems with this. First among them, that yes they are being supervised. They are being supervised by Bitcoin itself. You understand this, there's no bailout, there's no too big to fail. The market watches, its hand unseen. This is precisely why we've moved to bitcoin: to get out of the cat-and-mouse game of who's watching the watchers. Bitcoin watches us all.

Second, notice that I didn't say the guy should not be doing anything at all. I said he should be tackling a task commensurate with his ability. This is nothing other than natural morals, you don't see a wolf trying to swallow a whale. You don't see a hawk trying to carry away a moose. You sometimes see snakes trying to swallow things they can't, but that's rare and it works as proof that snakes aren't really all that smart.

Maybe it got buried under the rest of the words of my previous post, but it's in there: I don't say "don't do", I say "don't do this, it's too much, do something simpler". That's exactly how it should be.

[naima53]

\//////\
This is the mindset of criminals and mafia.
This mindset might have been appropriate somewhere in Siberia or some remote mountain valley of the past, but this not the way it can work on a small, crowded planet, loaded with conflict and technology.

You are wrong about Siberia! Live there are friendly and poor people ("northern mentality") Mafia and criminals - it's Volga region, the Urals, the Caucasus (Most Extreme aggressive mentality, can kill a Verbal abuse, this is not a joke  )

[unclescrooge]

Ichthyo, I appreciate what you're doing, but seriously, that's not worth it. The mob is the mob... Anyway thank you, really

Guruvan, you have good points, and some wrong IMHO. I do not have significant funding (~300 btc of my own). I use deposits to hedge positions, that's why deposit are remunerated.This is really a lending business, you lend me your money, which I pass on people who want to trade with leverage (hence the "swap" and the remunerated deposits). When I can't hedge positions, you can't pass an order, as simple as that. But it's my understanding that every financial institution uses customers deposits to trade. What they also do is cover them with an insurance. Which currently we don't do.
That brings me to this point: Your deposits are not insured. I explained to you how we secure them, but should anything happen, the deposits are not insured.

Anyway,

Migration notice:

We want to inform all of our users that we will proceed to a migration tomorrow Thursday on 11:00 AM GMT. We will migrate the database and code numbers type to have a greater accuracy in accounting than we have today (no more float, all numbers will be handled in decimal or integers). To proceed, all open positions will have to be closed. Your USD and BTC balances won't be affected by this migration as they will be manually checked after the migration.

Tomorrow on 11:00 AM GMT, we will close any remaining open position, proceed to withdrawals if any, and proceed to the migration of Bitfinex. The expected downtime is 1 hour. After that, trading will happily resume.

Beside this change, we will update our hedging engine to a more useful and accurate one, and set the spread to be tighter than today (expected average spread of 0.08 usd as opposed to 0.13 today).

We are sorry for the inconvenience it may cause, and would like to thank you for trying our platform and helping us improving it. We welcome any suggestions you may have.

Raphael

[naima53]

The migration process is complete?

[BlackBison]

So the guy who started the "Sorry and thank you, Pirate" thread is to be trusted? 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101345.msg1108077#msg1108077

Now that Pirateat40 closed down his operatations thanks to all the fud that was going on and growing on the forum, I expect everyone that spreads this fud, accused and insulted Pirate and the people that supported him to apologize.

Not only did Pirate brought us a great opportunity for investors (once in a lifetime actually), he did help stabilise and grow steadily bitcoin price, volume exchange, and thus contributed to the success of bitcoin. For that, Pirate, I want to thank you. You've done a wonderful work, and I hope you're stay around here.

Now, apologies on.

This speaks volumes about the poor judgement and lack of common sense of the OP. Someone that delusional even after concrete facts have surfaced cannot be trusted to run a potentially very large and complicated business with a huge amount of money at stake a la Bitcoinica. Exercise extreme caution and only use small amounts of btc you can afford to lose. You have been warned.

[unclescrooge]

The migration process is complete?

So the migration process is over. The database handle numbers with decimal and integer types only, no more binary float problem! The balances has been restored (the migration did rounded the balances off a few satoshis).

I would like to thank Davout for talking about this issue and allowing us to correct it.

Exercise extreme caution and only use small amounts of btc you can afford to lose. You have been warned.

This is always a good idea when using a beta site anyway, thanks for the advice

Raphael

[davout]

I would like to thank Davout for talking about this issue and allowing us to correct it.

Nice! let's see if you know what you're doing by answering this :
Did you guys change only the database schema or the code as well, and if you changed the code can you give a couple of examples of what you changed ?

[BorderBits]

Unclescrooge, why should you be trusted when you scolded the community and told everyone that they ought to apologize and thank pirate? 

This operation is an obvious scam and anyone who puts money toward this scammer will lose it.  Unclescrooge's post demanding that people apologize and thank pirate was likely done in coordination with pirate as part of his month long stall that allowed him to make an exit from the community.   

[Ichthyo]

This is really a lending business, you lend me your money, which I pass on people who want to trade with leverage (hence the "swap" and the remunerated deposits). When I can't hedge positions, you can't pass an order, as simple as that. But it's my understanding that every financial institution uses customers deposits to trade. What they also do is cover them with an insurance. Which currently we don't do.

There is another thing: in many conventional lending businesses, there is a limitation on what you can withdraw in a given time span.

To the contrary, here in Bitfinex the part of the deposited sum which is not used in positions may be seen to form a pool, together with the existing reserves of the platform. Effectively the contents of that pool are what can be used as leverage to open positions. When this pool is exhausted, users get "the starfish". So far so good.

But the problem is: there is a promise for the account holder to be able to withdraw any time (just a short security timespan to confirm the withdrawal, but no limitation on the amount). On the other hand, there is no way to make any users close their positions. Thus, when a user withdraws, he re-calls money which is bound into a position on the market, with unlimited duration. Assuming this situation, the platform is forced to turn into a "bucket shop", even if unclescrooge never wanted to do this: Assumed there are no further reserves, the platform is forced to close some positions internally to get the money for the withdrawal request, while keeping those positions opened nominally. So effectively the platform is forced to take a counter position to these internally closed positions, i.e. bet against the user.

Why did I say "bucket shop" here? Simple:

• Contract for Difference => swapping of cash-flows and risks
• "bucket shop" => a betting business users against the house

Incidentally, whenever a position is opened, the premium (on top of the actual market spread) can be immediately accounted to the liquidity pool.
Thus: larger premium => better chances for the platform to become more solid financially.

[unclescrooge]

I would like to thank Davout for talking about this issue and allowing us to correct it.

Nice! let's see if you know what you're doing by answering this :
Did you guys change only the database schema or the code as well, and if you changed the code can you give a couple of examples of what you changed ?

Hi,

We change the database schema, and the code, mostly ".to_f" > "to_d" (and sometimes the developer forced that to make sure of the type even).

[unclescrooge]

Unclescrooge, why should you be trusted when you scolded the community and told everyone that they ought to apologize and thank pirate? 

This operation is an obvious scam and anyone who puts money toward this scammer will lose it.  Unclescrooge's post demanding that people apologize and thank pirate was likely done in coordination with pirate as part of his month long stall that allowed him to make an exit from the community.   

Ok seriously no. I would have edited the post if that was the case. If I left this poor thread of mine as it is, it's a reminder for my own stupidity, for having been fooled as so many have. Now you can make your own judgement about that, I don't care. But I don't put my real name to scam people, I have a longer term vision than that