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

[Ichthyo]

looks like Bitfinex is under pressure again.

Can't login since 15 minutes.


Well, I wouldn't be surprised if shortly hereafter yet another staged dip will follow...
Bitcoin entering the awareness phase

UPDATE: got in now, but its very slow to almost unresponsive...

[Sukrim]

Offline according to Cloudflare...
Damn kids and their DDoSes these days!

And all that in the holiday season of course.

[Ichthyo]

Offline according to Cloudflare...

...seems to be working -- at least when you manage to get in, the trading page is operative

Damn kids and their DDoSes these days!

Would be interesting which URLs they actually attack. Do they bother to understand the site they are attacking, or do they just send arbitrary requests without login...? Anyway. At least it shows Bitfinex is deemed "relevant" now.

[GCInc.]

The cutoffs kicked me back to my senses and reduced the positions to 10% of the earlier manic funds dump . With the average 2000%+ APR for a week it was worth it to lend, but 90% a year isn't just gonna cut it for any larger amounts on a beta platform. If $10k is peanuts to lose, why not as compounded daily it's still 2.5x your money in a year. However I estimate the risk of something serious happening to a large lended position during the year ahead larger than ~40%.

What comes to margin trading it has enough risks by itself, any additional technical extra hazards  - and there are many - are unacceptable (for me that is).

[Sukrim]

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.

[rpietila]

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.

200% return will probably go to more like 100% for the next year. And if there is a 40% chance of total loss, this would give:

60% * 2 + 40% * 0 = 1.20 = 20% return in fiat terms.

A cold wallet will probably give better return..

[GCInc.]

The average apr was far below 2k% in the last weeks

Talking about my personal positions. I lurked and snatched, and could get over 5% a day for ballpark $1000 for a good few days during the fat bull. No VIR of course. Seems that the early mover window was very short.

20% return in fiat terms.

Mixing estimated value with return? However the 40% risk is arbitrary. Unknown hazards are nasty for a $10k stake. I could sleep my nights very well if I had 10k in cold BTC, but be insomniac if I had it at Bitfinex 

[Sukrim]

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.

[unclescrooge]

Offline according to Cloudflare...

...seems to be working -- at least when you manage to get in, the trading page is operative

Damn kids and their DDoSes these days!

Would be interesting which URLs they actually attack. Do they bother to understand the site they are attacking, or do they just send arbitrary requests without login...? Anyway. At least it shows Bitfinex is deemed "relevant" now.

Hello,

We were not in holidays last night, though we didn't intervene. There was no DDOS attacks, just a heavy load, which forced us to upgrade some settings, and restart the server. You probably saw that after this episode, loading was good (I hope ).

To everyone,

Thank you for discussing the risks of having your money at Bitfinex. Since the beginning, we only had one user ending up with a negative balance (1000 usd). And that was because we liquidated all long users at once which worsen the price dump.
If you are too nervous, I suggest you wait until with have insured deposits (which will be required by regulation).
If you have any questions/suggestions, don't hesitate to ask here.

Happy trading
Raphael

[GCInc.]

On the other day I had this on my portfolio:



The only parts I understand are the pair and amount. The rest make no sense, but are hopefully correct from your accounting perspective.

[unclescrooge]

On the other day I had this on my portfolio:



The only parts I understand are the pair and amount. The rest make no sense, but are hopefully correct from your accounting perspective.

Yes when your position is reduced to a very small amount, the base price (initial price of the position) can look "funny". It may happen when your position is in profit and your loans expire: a small portion of your position stay opened, backed up by your profit.
Everything is fine in this screenshot, what matters here is the profit/loss displayed.

Raphael

[myself]

On the other day I had this on my portfolio:



The only parts I understand are the pair and amount. The rest make no sense, but are hopefully correct from your accounting perspective.

when you reduce a part of the amount the base price goes down to keep up whit the gain

[dani]

Thanks for response, but somehow i managed to make the loans work again. I really don't know why it wouldn't work

[myself]

Thanks for response, but somehow i managed to make the loans work again. I really don't know why it wouldn't work

please check your imbox i bet you did get the invite to BFX forums


also can you check http://community.bitfinex.com/showwiki.php also each article support user discussion

[dani]

Thanks for response, but somehow i managed to make the loans work again. I really don't know why it wouldn't work

please check your imbox i bet you did get the invite to BFX forums


also can you check http://community.bitfinex.com/showwiki.php also each article support user discussion

Thanks! I got the invitiation, I will be happy to be part of that community

[Spaceman_Spiff]

A quick question: if one would go long leveraged, and the margin call liquidation amount is insufficient, leaving a net negative balance on the trading wallet, would this be deducted from funds in other wallets, or would bitfinex take the loss?

[Sukrim]

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.

[Faraday]

Can anyone explain to me how this works? I went to the lending page and 'borrowed' $1000 usd. But these funds are just sitting under 'unused borrowed funds' and when I go to buy bitcoins on the margin trade page it just borrows more USD at higher interest rates instead of using my already borrowed funds.


edit: never mind I have figured it out, it was because I needed to select a 7 day period rather than 60 days. Why is 60 day so much more interest? Isn't it better just to borrow for 7 days and then repeat at much lower rates?

[Sukrim]

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!

[unclescrooge]

Hello all!

A quick question: if one would go long leveraged, and the margin call liquidation amount is insufficient, leaving a net negative balance on the trading wallet, would this be deducted from funds in other wallets, or would bitfinex take the loss?

Bitfinex will take the loss (this has happen once in BFX existence).

Now we are putting in place some mechanisms to prevent this from happening (as you can guess, we don't like to lose money )

Can anyone explain to me how this works? I went to the lending page and 'borrowed' $1000 usd. But these funds are just sitting under 'unused borrowed funds' and when I go to buy bitcoins on the margin trade page it just borrows more USD at higher interest rates instead of using my already borrowed funds.


edit: never mind I have figured it out, it was because I needed to select a 7 day period rather than 60 days. Why is 60 day so much more interest? Isn't it better just to borrow for 7 days and then repeat at much lower rates?

Yes you figure this out
I guess the rates are lower because at the moment, repeating 7 days several times means opening and closing positions several times, and thus losing the spread + fees. Hence why lower interests.

And yes, we're past the 250 000 usd in loans. A new milestone.

New features are coming soon, stay tuned.

Happy Easter
The Bitfinex team