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

[Sukrim]

Yes, and I also much rather have a kinda usable platform that is built on a solid basis instead of a bunch of hacks and the most glamorous UI instead.

Seems like current VIR is now displayed, thanks!

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[myself]

Yes, and I also much rather have a kinda usable platform that is built on a solid basis instead of a bunch of hacks and the most glamorous UI instead.

woah one on my side, each time R say something about UI or eye candy i am like "noooooooooooooooooooooo" first more features and things like that.

[GCInc.]

When I have doubt about withdrawals I send email to the user, but it may not always be the case in the future, as we are getting more and more withdrawals each day.

Could you just implement a simple switchable auto email confirmation link for withdrawals please? Many people like me don't have Android or Blackberry phone, and having funds accessible with the plain login details is indeed unacceptably risky. As it seems now I need to reserve first trading profits for purchasing such phone ASAP to be able to use Google authenticator - this will still take time and is stupid as I have a perfectly suitable Symbian smartphone.

Locking withdrawal address is traditionally used at many sites, but it cannot be done here because of MtGox codes (?).

[Sukrim]

Google authenticator is also available for PC operating systems...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Authenticator

[Rygon]

Hello everyone,

First, legal news. If you go to http://www.icris.cr.gov.hk/csci/ (the official Hong-Kong registry site), you will find us under the name "Bitfinex Limited" (search as a unregistered user).

The reason we didn't announce it yet is that the company has not yet official taken over the activity of the website, and we are still in the process of finding a bank account. This is unexpectedly hard, and to be honest, this is driving me mad. Anyway I'll probably fly myself to Hong-Kong to get things done...

Furthermore, MTGOX code deposit don't always work, for some reason (related to timeout it seems). So you can be assured that we are doing everything we can to speed up the process a finding a bank account to accept deposit. I'll update the website to reflect this last changes.

Now, about the lending page: to compact offers a bit, I've decided to group them by 10% rate asked. Now the fact that I round them to the upper 10% for loans demands is maybe not the wisest choice, I'll see if I can change that.
If you don't find it more useful than the previous page, just tell me and I can reverse the change;

Best regards,
Raphael

IMO, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do this for BTC lending since interest rates are less than 20%.

On another note, I have a hard time figuring out how best to maximize returns on lending BTC's using limit orders. I usually have BTC available at rates that are equal to or less than the VIR, yet those offers are rarely taken. Logically, I would expect that borrowers would want to have a lower interest rate than the VIR, and we could establish a more accurate market price. But I'm new to the site, so I'm still learning about how it works. Perhaps there is an advantage for borrowers that I don't know about that makes it beneficial to take the VIR even though it has a higher rate.

[GCInc.]

Google authenticator is also available for PC operating systems...

Thanks! Strange that Google doesn't mention that on their authenticator page.

What might have just happened to our numerous lended positions at bitfinex, all got closed at once? Very difficult to secure the 1800% APY again... 

[runeks]

I'm having problems getting Google Authenticator to work with my account. I've tried both via the QR code and by writing in the key manually. I always get the

Your one-time token was incorrect. Please try again.

message.
I want to use the text-based code, and not the QR code, since I want to be able to back up the code on a piece of paper so I still have it in case my phone decides to die on me (has already happened once, had to wait two weeks for Mt. Gox to reset my account).
If I enter the displayed code with capital letters, it's the same as that created by scanning the QR code, but the site still says it's invalid.

Can the reason be that I'm taking too long to enter the code?

[oakpacific]

Besides Gox lag, another risk maybe the loss of access to Bitfinex itself, which somehow happened last night when I was desperately trying to return my loans. Losing access for a considerable period of time when the market is volatile may even result in many margin positions unable to be closed until it's too late, something potentially fatal to both the user and the site.

I understand such risk maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but want to discuss what can possibly be done to improve the status quo.

[Spaceman_Spiff]

That one auto-renewed but the other ones just went to my lendable balance.

cancel the offer and post them again .... i dont have any other idea :S

I am new to bitfinex, so maybe I am doing something wrong, but my loans did not seem to auto-renew either.
EDIT: last one did auto-renew

[Sukrim]

Over night, BTC jumped from ~79 to ~85 USD. That's ~7% a day. That's ~2500% a year. VIR still lingers at ~250% APR (and one has to deduct 10% of that for Bitfinex) a year...
Also my daily interest went back (due to having to lend out at VIR) to ~1/3 (117% APR) of what it was during the rally from 70 to 75 (which was smaller...).

Just to give people an idea which rates are possible and to make them think which are fair or not. At least now it seems there is a bit more liquidity in USD lending, so rates go down a bit as well. In different news somebody finally dared to borrow a few of my BTC... not a bad move, considering that the weekend is coming!

@runeks:
The 16 character code is your secret, the code (one-time token) to be entered is 6 digits long and consists only of numbers (0-9). This one changes every 30 seconds and is generated by your Google Authenticator program.

[unclescrooge]

a proposal for an improved VIR calculation.

Why are we trying to squeeze all into one factor? My observation is that actually we try to achieve two different things

• we want the VIR rates to reflect the integrated market situation. When demand is high, VIR should go up.
• we want to protect ourselves against excessive VIR rates.

Thus the idea is to create the actual VIR out of two factors, which correspond to these goals.
The protective factor could be choosen as a function, which is "hard" at the borders and "soft" in the center. I have a variation of a bell function exp(-k*x*x) in mind. That is, we have kind of a standard derivation; maybe we apply this in a way that VIR is at a "medium value" and can will remain within e.g. 3 times that value or 1/3 of that value with more than 99% probability. This way, that protective factor would create a channel. Within that channel, we apply the market demand factor, which reacts more quickly to the current market situation.

For example, the protective factor...

So why not just add in how long the loan has been outstanding over the last 30 days into the equation.  Then the only way a stupid rate will effect the price is if someone not only takes one out but keeps it for a few days.  The interest cost to them wouldn't be worth it.

...so we could use such an 1 month moving average, which weights each contribution both by the size and the duration it was actually taken. This would give us a quite rigid channel.

Within that channel we could use another, shorter time-base  average, which reacts way more sensible to the current market situation.

(as a plus, the protective factor, which is more expensive to calculate, could be updated with a slower rate, e.g. 4 times a day)


Thus, when the market behaves like this night, we would get a channel centered at the long term average, say 250% APY, but the current high demand would drive that temporarily up to maximally -- say -- 3* 250%

Hello Ichtyo,

Thanks for the proposition. I think it is better than the current one. I'll see how to implement it although it is not urgent right now. It's true the the rate decreased a bit yesterday due to someone taking (a lot of profit) and returning a lot of margin to lenders. I think your proposal has the merit of reflecting better the market, so I note him on the dev list.

How high is this "reasonable" number? Depending on the time frame you look at, BTCUSD goes up in annual numbers I would deem "unreasonable".

Maybe you could just calculate VIR like this:

For every atomic time unit (seconds?) calculate the following number:
Total amount of interest paid on loans (either USD or BTC) / Total amount of USD/BTC currently in active loans

Then either take the arithmethic mean or (if you're really worried about outliers) the median value of these and call it the average interest of the hour/day/week...
Lenders then can choose to either lend out at the average value of the last X hours/days/weeks or enter their own offers into the engine.

This makes sure 1 USD lent out at a few million% doesn't change interest rates that much. I still wonder if you really do a weighted average (over a few days!) how VIR can still vary that much even over 1 day. My suspicion is still that VIR itself is not factored in, only fixed rate loans (of which there might be fewer).


In general about lending:
* Grouping offers/demands makes 0 sense, if you then can't fill 'em! I click the check box next to a loan demand, some numbers get pre-filled and still have NO idea how high the real demand was, as I can't trust the interest rate displayed at all. Also even though I tried to use all information available to me, I still have to guess numbers, as "10%" means "0.0001%-10.0000%". I have no clear way to fill loan demand at the moment. Imagine placing offers with ONLY the MarketDepth chart on http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html available...

* It is hard to have this additional 3rd measurement (offer time) next to amount and APR. Maybe instead of clustering by APR, you could cluster by time? (Offers between 1-10 days, 11-31, 32-61, 62+)

* To also get a few trades on your platform going you might offer the setting that interest received from lending out BTC/USD gets automatically converted to the other currency (or only BTC/USD) via an automatic market trade on either the internal or MtGox market, whatever yields more (e.g. on internal I get 0.5 BTC after fees for my 40 USD, on MtGox 0.52 --> trade on MtGox). You might even offer a split (keep 10% of interest in USD to fight fiat inflation, convert rest to BTC because you're "cowardly long" on BTC )

* Please display offers as they were entered somewhere - it might be fine to display a grouping for overview (graphics might be even better...) but there should be some kind of advanced page where you can find exact numbers (maybe with some filters?) to post/fill offers.

* Please display the current (I think it's valid for 15 minutes, right?) APR next to "V.I.R." in brackets, something like "V.I.R. (currently 234.5678%)".

Also giving a few numbers on how much profit your traders + lenders make might be interesting and be good PR (as far as I've seen, most users should have profited quite a bit from the recent rally, even through some growing pains and MtGox lags!).

All in all thanks for addressing issues quite quickly so far and constantly communicating/looking for suggestions/solutions! This still is beta and especially the current issues in lending are probably also just display issues that need to be figured out (show each single offer of a few cents vs. when to group while still making sure offers can be actually filled and not spamming the page).

Let's just say the VIR can still go up a lot from what it is today. And thanks to your proposal too, I like how you help find the good balance

I tried to improve the lending page a bit by grouping loans offers by 1% increment. Tell me if it's better.

The automatic interests conversion is something another user asked us. Why not, this could be a good way for lenders to get great rates while taking profit in BTC for example.

When I have doubt about withdrawals I send email to the user, but it may not always be the case in the future, as we are getting more and more withdrawals each day.

Could you just implement a simple switchable auto email confirmation link for withdrawals please? Many people like me don't have Android or Blackberry phone, and having funds accessible with the plain login details is indeed unacceptably risky. As it seems now I need to reserve first trading profits for purchasing such phone ASAP to be able to use Google authenticator - this will still take time and is stupid as I have a perfectly suitable Symbian smartphone.

Locking withdrawal address is traditionally used at many sites, but it cannot be done here because of MtGox codes (?).

Locking a withdrawal address is something I'll do soon. When someone make a high withdrawal request without having OTP enabled, I am not too comfortable I have to say.

[unclescrooge]

I'm having problems getting Google Authenticator to work with my account. I've tried both via the QR code and by writing in the key manually. I always get the

Your one-time token was incorrect. Please try again.

message.
I want to use the text-based code, and not the QR code, since I want to be able to back up the code on a piece of paper so I still have it in case my phone decides to die on me (has already happened once, had to wait two weeks for Mt. Gox to reset my account).
If I enter the displayed code with capital letters, it's the same as that created by scanning the QR code, but the site still says it's invalid.

Can the reason be that I'm taking too long to enter the code?

Hello Runeks,

Could you check your timezone? It's maybe related to that.

Thanks
Raphael

[unclescrooge]

Besides Gox lag, another risk maybe the loss of access to Bitfinex itself, which somehow happened last night when I was desperately trying to return my loans. Losing access for a considerable period of time when the market is volatile may even result in many margin positions unable to be closed until it's too late, something potentially fatal to both the user and the site.

I understand such risk maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but want to discuss what can possibly be done to improve the status quo.

Hi Oakpacific,

Was Bitfinex unaccessible last night? Did you have an error message or was it just a timeoiut (loading forever)? This is a very serious issue, we have to make sure Bitfinex is always available.

About this issue, you have to know that the backend server (trading engine, margin check,...) is on another server than the front-end one. So even if the front-end site is somehow unresponsive, the backend server continue to work and close positions if they have to be closed.

Also, we are curently taking steps to prevent too much losses in case of a flash crash. I can't get too much details right now, but this will be an insurance for us that the traders never end up with a negative balance. More later.

best regards,
Raphael

[oakpacific]

Besides Gox lag, another risk maybe the loss of access to Bitfinex itself, which somehow happened last night when I was desperately trying to return my loans. Losing access for a considerable period of time when the market is volatile may even result in many margin positions unable to be closed until it's too late, something potentially fatal to both the user and the site.

I understand such risk maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but want to discuss what can possibly be done to improve the status quo.

Hi Oakpacific,

Was Bitfinex unaccessible last night? Did you have an error message or was it just a timeoiut (loading forever)? This is a very serious issue, we have to make sure Bitfinex is always available.

About this issue, you have to know that the backend server (trading engine, margin check,...) is on another server than the front-end one. So even if the front-end site is somehow unresponsive, the backend server continue to work and close positions if they have to be closed.

Also, we are curently taking steps to prevent too much losses in case of a flash crash. I can't get too much details right now, but this will be an insurance for us that the traders never end up with a negative balance. More later.

best regards,
Raphael

Well, it was about GMT last afternoon that I saw an error message(something like there was an error and you have been notified, I can't remember) when trying to access the lending page, I tried clearing the cache, refresh the page, log out and back in, etc, still the same. I have to wait until I woke up next morning, about GMT 0:00 to return the unused funds(before then I exchange a email with you), which may havemade me paying a few scores of cents more, I am fine with that though.

What I meant by unable to close positions is what would happen if a margin trader tries to close his position when he sees the price he wants, but the trading page is not available, and he has to wait until it becomes available again, by that time the price may have moved so much that he gets liquidated with a great loss. I am happy to hear about the no negative-balance guarantee though.

The solution I can think of is to allow traders to close their positions with formatted messages using E-mails, not sure how hard it would be to implement.

[unclescrooge]

Ok, thanks for the precision.

We were actually aware of this error that some users had and corrected it quickly. Sorry about any inconvenience it may have caused.

Raphael

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Besides Gox lag, another risk maybe the loss of access to Bitfinex itself, which somehow happened last night when I was desperately trying to return my loans. Losing access for a considerable period of time when the market is volatile may even result in many margin positions unable to be closed until it's too late, something potentially fatal to both the user and the site.

I understand such risk maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but want to discuss what can possibly be done to improve the status quo.

Hi Oakpacific,

Was Bitfinex unaccessible last night? Did you have an error message or was it just a timeoiut (loading forever)? This is a very serious issue, we have to make sure Bitfinex is always available.

About this issue, you have to know that the backend server (trading engine, margin check,...) is on another server than the front-end one. So even if the front-end site is somehow unresponsive, the backend server continue to work and close positions if they have to be closed.

Also, we are curently taking steps to prevent too much losses in case of a flash crash. I can't get too much details right now, but this will be an insurance for us that the traders never end up with a negative balance. More later.

best regards,
Raphael

I don't know how technically feasible or desirable this is (I am not an IT guy), but perhaps it is a good idea to have 2 redundant backend servers that communicate with eachother (so 1 is like a backup server that is being constantly updated).  Should the main server crash, the second one can take over the margin calls etc.

[unclescrooge]

Hello Spaceman_Spiff,

This is totally possible and desirable. And will be done along with the growth of our activity (so it will be done soon)

Raphael

[superbit]

Here appears to be a glitch:  

Whenever my offers auto re-new they don't appear in the offers list:

Unfilled credit demand/offers
#    Currency    Type    Amount    Rate (% per 365 days) *    Maximum lending time (days)    Placed    Auto-renew    Status    
24066    USD    Lend Limit    200.0    490.0%    90    about 1 hour ago    Yes    active    Cancel   Will notify
24065    USD    Lend Limit    272.99    470.0%    90    about 1 hour ago    Yes    active    Cancel   Will notify

And here are the offers:

USD Lending offers
   Maximum lending time (days)    Rate (% per 365 days) *    Amount    Offer count
      0    Variable Interest Rate (current: 263.7%)    2111.29    6
      2    270.0%    30.0    1
      2    310.0%    199.24    1
      2    350.0%    30.44    1
      2    370.0%    130.49    1
      2    400.0%    3076.1    3
      90    410.0%    3460.07    1
      30    460.0%    2094.8    2
      60    470.0%    627.33    2
      60    480.0%    249.98    1
      60    490.0%    54.07    1
      2    500.0%    2043.32    8


So at 490% it is only showing 54.07 available max time 60 days.  I am offering $200 at 90 days.  Same goes for my other loan.

[molecular]

Yes, and I also much rather have a kinda usable platform that is built on a solid basis instead of a bunch of hacks and the most glamorous UI instead.

woah one on my side, each time R say something about UI or eye candy i am like "noooooooooooooooooooooo" first more features and things like that.

except when it's usability-related. You should consider then. If it's just cosmetics... fuck it, I don't care.

[Sukrim]

Yeah, or create a less-eyecandy version for the geeks (I would be happy with even just a JSON file with all exact lending offers/demands - but then without rounding, grouping etc. and with IDs so I can assess how far my orders are actually in the queue).