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

[urwhatuknow]

Guys

there are currently about 100 new users joining our community every day.
This slows down the system during peak hours, especially during evening EU time.
The most used pages can return an error message but it's enough to re-load them and everything will be ok.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is acceptable, I'm saying we are working on it, together with some other important things that you also required us to do.
But we are not Microsoft, we are just a startup with limited even though very skillful resources
We apologize for the temporary inconvenient, we are working to upgrade the system with something much more robust and powerful, but unfortunately this takes some time.
Servers migration to Hong Kong is scheduled some time next week.
It took MtGox months to upgrade their systems, please allow us some days to get things done.

We are working on it.

Thanks again for your understanding

Giancarlo
Customers Relations
The Bitfinex Team


 

[Ichthyo]

The most used pages can return an error message but it's enough to re-load them and everything will be ok.

After what amount of time could I expect to be able to re-access the trading page.

I am trying to access it with some intermissions now since 1 hour and was never able to get it to load. Logged out multiple times. Closed my browser. Can this still be considered just server overload, or might there be a problem with data specific to my trading session?


Also, do other people also have problems to access the public trading history?




PS: we really appreciate your commitment!

[nrd525]

Trading and public log are down for me as well.

[Ichthyo]

I was able to get in just some minutes ago. The page had been inaccessible for more than 2 hours for me.
But in the end, it seems to be just too much load on the front-end server.

Basically a good sign, growing pains..... 


In these two hours, I could have made a bit more profit, but I didn't loose anything and my position wasn't endangered --

If there is one lesson to learn: always place stop loss orders at the point of the maximal loss you're willing to take for any position. I mean really allways, even if you open the positions just to take some quick gains. Don't think, "I am sitting in front of my computer and logged into the page, why bother".

[Freakshow]

I would advise everyone to USE "STOP's"...  Especially, in light of the pages not working correctly. 

[Ichthyo]

...and while we're at this topic, I'd like to remind everyone of the accelerating effect when your margin is made up largely from bitcoins.
When the market goes up, your available trading amount is magnified, but when the market drops, your margin's value drops too; when holding a loosing long position, this might lead to forced liquidation way sooner than you'd expect.

[Freakshow]

Maybe R. should limit the new people till the new servers are up because right now if it is un-usable for people, then what good does it do anyone?

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Wait a minute...does Bitfinex use floating point to represent money? If this is so, it's very very bad...I have 0.01 BTC, yet I cannot use it...this only happens when rounding is working behind the scene.

Also, your website is slower than my P4 machine running Crysis, what the hell??

[Ichthyo]

Wait a minute...does Bitfinex use floating point to represent money? If this is so, it's very very bad...I have 0.01 BTC, yet I cannot use it...this only happens when rounding is working behind the scene.

Floating point as such is not evil. (*)
Only using floating point types with too less precision is dangerous. And rounding numbers without clue and reason is dangerous.

According to the statements of Bitfinex staff, they're using some extended precision or big decimal type for their value calculations.



(*) Often people are frighted by the fact that a simple fraction of 10 can not be represented exactly with binary floating point numbers.
But please consider that such a simple thing as 1/3 can not be represened exactly with decimal numbers, and in practice this doesn't cause much problems either.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Wait a minute...does Bitfinex use floating point to represent money? If this is so, it's very very bad...I have 0.01 BTC, yet I cannot use it...this only happens when rounding is working behind the scene.

Floating point as such is not evil. (*)
Only using floating point types with too less precision is dangerous. And rounding numbers without clue and reason is dangerous.

According to the statements of Bitfinex staff, they're using some extended precision or big decimal type for their value calculations.



(*) Often people are frighted by the fact that a simple fraction of 10 can not be represented exactly with binary floating point numbers.
But please consider that such a simple thing as 1/3 can not be represened exactly with decimal numbers, and in practice this doesn't cause much problems either.

Bitcoin uses big integers to represent smaller amounts. And in need of even more precision, just up the integer.

For instance, 50 bitcoins are reprsented as 50*1000000.

Also, on Bitfinex we need precision up to 8 decimal places, why isn't it like that? There is apparent rounding there.

[nrd525]

In some cases Bitfinex overdoes the decimal places. For instance in market statistics.  And I forget if they are still doing this but loan rates offers and demands used to have many decimal places - at most you should have one.

[Ichthyo]

Also, on Bitfinex we need precision up to 8 decimal places, why isn't it like that? There is apparent rounding there.

Is there a single exchange out there which gives you access to the full precision of bitcoin amounts?
All of the major exchanges employ some additional rounding, e.g. to 5 or 6 decimal numbers. This is annoying, but IMHO not really a problem, as long as there is a uniform and coherent policy used throughout the whole site (which also means that rounding has to be done once, and at the logically correct point, which is when actually a deal happens)

PS: of course it is acceptable to round figures just for the purpose of presentation in the UI

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Also, on Bitfinex we need precision up to 8 decimal places, why isn't it like that? There is apparent rounding there.

Is there a single exchange out there which gives you access to the full precision of bitcoin amounts?
All of the major exchanges employ some additional rounding, e.g. to 5 or 6 decimal numbers. This is annoying, but IMHO not really a problem, as long as there is a uniform and coherent policy used throughout the whole site (which also means that rounding has to be done once, and at the logically correct point, which is when actually a deal happens)

PS: of course it is acceptable to round figures just for the purpose of presentation in the UI

Btc-e allows use of all 8 decimal places. Gox does that too.

[wamatt]

how many employees work at BFX?

[oakpacific]

Seriously, you guys may need to consider add trading through E-mails. In high traffic high volatility times it's going to help both us and you if we can close our margin positions with E-mail, it's becoming quite a bit intolerable right now.

[drawingthesun]

Seriously, you guys may need to consider add trading through E-mails. In high traffic high volatility times it's going to help both us and you if we can close our margin positions with E-mail, it's becoming quite a bit intolerable right now.

An API would be more reliable. All the exchanges use a API except for Bitfinex.

[oakpacific]

Seriously, you guys may need to consider add trading through E-mails. In high traffic high volatility times it's going to help both us and you if we can close our margin positions with E-mail, it's becoming quite a bit intolerable right now.

An API would be more reliable. All the exchanges use a API except for Bitfinex.

There may be large traders who are not technically sophisticated enough to use APIs. What we're looking at is not some icing on the cake, unable to close margin positions at the right time maybe a life-and-death problem, for both customers and the exchange, given the gox lag. You can't just implement it in a "think you may like it" sort of way, everyone must be able to use it. But of course APIs should still be made available.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Bitfinex isn't really real-time much. I have clarkmoody open where I can see the price in real-time, and significantly differs from the one displayed on bitfinex.

[unclescrooge]

Hello everyone,

So first of all, we are working on upgrading the platform right now. We will update you as the process goes.

Secondly, Remember, indeed we do not offer real time data from Mtgox. The only real-time data are orders from BFX. There is no plan to change that in the near future, as our plan is to grow internal liquidity rather than external one.

Let me know if you have any other questions
Best regards
Raphael
Bitfinex team

[molecular]

something I don't quite understand happened. ~1.5 days ago my position looked like this:


(this screenshot was taken apr 18th 6:04 GMT

now it looks like this:



it seems I automatically repayed all my loans and had to sell btc to do it, but why?

Also there's nothing in the history about this, no sell as I would expect:



could someone help me understand, please?