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

[venomdog]

Too much price rise and drop in span of half minutes earlier, that went up to 230 plus and now down to 226.
I bought on leverage some BTC and although I placed long order on 228 I see my order is executed and I have since then $228.0917 as base price and swap cost is increasing not hourly but for some reason quite quickly now it stand at -0.05 in spam of 1 hr.

I thought I understand this marginal trading but I learn something new everyday. For some reason I will never understand this Claim, did anyone tried it ?

Also, how to place Trailing Stop order for longing (buying) or is it only applicable for Shorting ?

[noggin-scratcher]

For some reason I will never understand this Claim, did anyone tried it ?

Ordinarily you would start with a deposit of USD, use that and some more borrowed dollars to buy BTC, then when you close the trade you sell all the BTC back into USD, repay the borrowed amount, then keep the remaining USD as profit.

If you 'claim' instead of 'close' you would only sell as much BTC as you need to, to cover the borrowed USD, and then keep the remaining BTC as profit.

Also, how to place Trailing Stop order for longing (buying) or is it only applicable for Shorting ?

If you set a Trailing Stop Buy with a distance of $10, the trigger price will start at $10 above the current price and follow the market when it moves down (so that you'll buy at a lower price), but stay stationary when the price moves up, so that if it ever goes $10 higher than the prior low-point then the Stop will trigger and buy coins, to either open a Long or close a Short.

If you set a Trailing Stop Sell with a distance of $10, the trigger price will start at $10 below the current price and follow the market when it moves up (so that you'll sell at a higher price), but stay stationary when the price moves down, so that if it ever goes $10 lower than the previous high-point then the Stop will trigger and sell coins, to either open a Short or close a Long.

[atlosas]

Why there is 1 minute delay on orders?

[fonzie]

Bitfinex protection mode activated! Everyone is about to get burned!

[SebastianJu]

Bitfinex protection mode activated! Everyone is about to get burned!

Can you explain? I dont see what you mean.

[adaseb]

Hello

How does the maintenance margin work exactly? Its at 15%

Means if you open a short with $100 to sell $330 worth of BTC, the position can't go more then $50 against you?

If you are -$50 the position automatically closes?

[noggin-scratcher]

How does the maintenance margin work exactly? Its at 15%

If you use maximum leverage, your initial margin is 30% - out of your total position size, you pay for 30% yourself and take out swap to pay for the other 70%. The amount you owe to the swap provider remains fixed, so as the price goes against you and the total value of your position shrinks, the percentage of it that's marked as "owed" increases, and the amount that you own "yourself" shrinks. If that part shrank to 0% you'd have a position worth exactly what you owe and would absolutely have to be liquidated immediately to avoid loss. For safety, the margin call comes when 'your' portion is 15%

So if you started out with the price at $200, with $100/0.5BTC of your own, you'd be able to borrow and sell another 1.166BTC to get $233, bringing you up to a total of $333 of which you provided $100 (30%). You'll continue to owe your swap provider 1.166BTC, so your position remains open until the position as a whole is worth 1.372BTC - at that point you have 1.166 owed and 1.372-1.166 = ~0.2BTC owned, (and 0.2 is 15% of 1.372, or at least it is when you use the exact numbers rather than these rounded versions)

Since you have $333, the specific price point where that's worth 1.372BTC is $242/BTC, but the maximum distance from your starting price will vary - it'll be the same percentage difference each time, so long as you always use the same degree of leverage, and it'll be more "forgiving" (further away) if you use less leverage, since you then start out owning a larger percentage of your position, so it takes longer to shrink down to 15%

tl;dr: Your margin call comes when (Position value - Swap debt)/Position value ≤ 15%

Or to rearrange that a bit, when Position value = Swap debt/0.85 (since your swap debt is a fixed quantity you can calculate that one ahead of time and work out what pricepoint implies that position value)

[abercrombie]

Chinese New Year coming up and Bitfinex's bank CATHAY UNITED will be closed from Feb 18 through Feb 23.

Will there be an alternative setup just like last year?   

Just want to plan accordingly.

[slacknation]

Keep getting invalid bitcoin address when trying to withdraw.

Can anyone look into it?


Thank you

check for spaces?

[mjr]

Good stuff, I will try to give some information.

Thanks to all who helped out people with questions. Remember you can also look at this link:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/support

or this link:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/howitworks

where pretty much all of those questions have been answered.

In regards to the margin questions, here is what those sources would say:

"You will receive a margin call when the net value of your account reaches the required margin. When the net value falls below the required margin the position will be forced liquidated. The drop after which you can be liquidated depends on your leverage. When you have a margin position, you will see an estimated liquidation price (the price at which you would be liquidated)."

I appreciate those who explained this perhaps more clearly.

As far as lag, we are very aware of this. We put in place some optimizations to try and reduce the lag on the current system, and we are working very hard to get the new system up and running. It is pretty close, and we are basically just testing it very thoroughly to ensure that there are no unexpected problems when we go live. Ideally, we should be able to transition with no noticeable differences to the user, besides hopefully a much faster execution time. Of course, this is a really big change, and better safe than sorry. We worked really hard to get where we are, and we are still growing so rapidly, but we don't want to jeopardize any of our customers, so we are taking a very cautious approach. We are hoping and expecting to be ready the end of February, but you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men...

To those who are spamming negative comments, I appreciated HowardF's response about greener pastures. We are doing our best to provide a good fair exchange where people can access very deep pools of liquidity, and some cool features and tools. Obviously, we can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time, and we are sorry for that. We greatly appreciate those who have given us volume of 2,136,517.89 bitcoins over the last 30 days. We are setting new records on volume all the time now, and rushing to keep up. 2015 will be a big year for us, and once we have our new trading engine in place, expect to see a lot of cool new features and ways to access our market.

So, hopefully that addresses some of what was posted recently. Of course, I look forward to reading your comments.

[mjr]

Keep getting invalid bitcoin address when trying to withdraw.

Can anyone look into it?


Thank you

check for spaces?

That is probably the problem. Look for trailing whitespace in the address, but if that is not the problem, try looking the address up on blockchain.info or one of the other blockexplorers. If you don't have any problem there, open a support ticket. Bitcoin addresses have a built in checksum so any typos can usually be caught, and this gives a little safety when sending non-reversible transactions.

[venomdog]

Is it any good of a position how can I improve further. I am holding on the coins since two days now and loosing a lot in swap cost that's eating up my earlier profit.
Some of my strategies :
1. I only buy limit orders never tried any other order types. I do understand them theoretically.
2. I am only trading BTC/USD and I just buy when price is low and sell when its high, but I never shy to take risk.
3. I never receive swaps and let the BFX give me on best possible rate.
4. This is my first ever trading experience and I started last month.

Questions :
Can I add trailing stop for selling my coins or still stick to limit orders not to mention limit order will not give me best benefit if price rises. And if I do add trailing short orders how to do so.

What is your most used order types, do you try different orders as well and when to use what, say when price is rising and you think it will go 2-3$ high.
Is it stupid for me to add too many BTC long order?

And here is my position : http://gyazo.com/39bc1c6880e0edf2f6f0ba77a1986c11

[Ente]

Is it any good of a position how can I improve further. I am holding on the coins since two days now and loosing a lot in swap cost that's eating up my earlier profit.
Some of my strategies :
1. I only buy limit orders never tried any other order types. I do understand them theoretically.
2. I am only trading BTC/USD and I just buy when price is low and sell when its high, but I never shy to take risk.
3. I never receive swaps and let the BFX give me on best possible rate.
4. This is my first ever trading experience and I started last month.

Questions :
Can I add trailing stop for selling my coins or still stick to limit orders not to mention limit order will not give me best benefit if price rises. And if I do add trailing short orders how to do so.

What is your most used order types, do you try different orders as well and when to use what, say when price is rising and you think it will go 2-3$ high.
Is it stupid for me to add too many BTC long order?

And here is my position : http://gyazo.com/39bc1c6880e0edf2f6f0ba77a1986c11

Your swap costs are just a bit over 1%, nothing to worry. Volatility is much higher than that, so you "just" have to pick the right direction, up or down ;-)
(I picked down, by the way)

You can manually replace your swaps with better offers, both for longer runtime or lower costs. That is, when better swap offers are available.

Training stop (both up or down, depending on your position) is a "stop loss". You can, for example, say "okay, if it goes down another $20, sell my long position" with a stop-loss or training stop.

I have some stops set, for security, and some regular orders, to catch spikes. That's it, I do regular stuff manually when staring at charts.

Raalok

[venomdog]

Is it any good of a position how can I improve further. I am holding on the coins since two days now and loosing a lot in swap cost that's eating up my earlier profit.
Some of my strategies :
1. I only buy limit orders never tried any other order types. I do understand them theoretically.
2. I am only trading BTC/USD and I just buy when price is low and sell when its high, but I never shy to take risk.
3. I never receive swaps and let the BFX give me on best possible rate.
4. This is my first ever trading experience and I started last month.

Questions :
Can I add trailing stop for selling my coins or still stick to limit orders not to mention limit order will not give me best benefit if price rises. And if I do add trailing short orders how to do so.

What is your most used order types, do you try different orders as well and when to use what, say when price is rising and you think it will go 2-3$ high.
Is it stupid for me to add too many BTC long order?

And here is my position : http://gyazo.com/39bc1c6880e0edf2f6f0ba77a1986c11

Your swap costs are just a bit over 1%, nothing to worry. Volatility is much higher than that, so you "just" have to pick the right direction, up or down ;-)
(I picked down, by the way)

You can manually replace your swaps with better offers, both for longer runtime or lower costs. That is, when better swap offers are available.

Training stop (both up or down, depending on your position) is a "stop loss". You can, for example, say "okay, if it goes down another $20, sell my long position" with a stop-loss or training stop.

I have some stops set, for security, and some regular orders, to catch spikes. That's it, I do regular stuff manually when staring at charts.

Raalok

Gr8 insight helped me a lot. Followed your suggestion of going for swaps and placed some offers for receive. Cheers.

[jabetizo]

Any news about EUR support?

[sangaman]

I have a question regarding deposit addresses. If you generate a new deposit address, are previous addresses still valid? Would a bitcoin sent to any one of your previous deposit addresses show up in your bitfinex account?

I'm mainly interested in the /deposit/new API call, which returns a new deposit address. Does calling this invalidate any previous deposit addresses?

[0x3d]

I have a question regarding deposit addresses. If you generate a new deposit address, are previous addresses still valid? Would a bitcoin sent to any one of your previous deposit addresses show up in your bitfinex account?

I'm mainly interested in the /deposit/new API call, which returns a new deposit address. Does calling this invalidate any previous deposit addresses?

They remain valid.

[sangaman]

I have a question regarding deposit addresses. If you generate a new deposit address, are previous addresses still valid? Would a bitcoin sent to any one of your previous deposit addresses show up in your bitfinex account?

I'm mainly interested in the /deposit/new API call, which returns a new deposit address. Does calling this invalidate any previous deposit addresses?

They remain valid.

Thank you very much. This is what I'd expected but I couldn't find a clear answer anywhere.

[0x3d]

I have a question regarding deposit addresses. If you generate a new deposit address, are previous addresses still valid? Would a bitcoin sent to any one of your previous deposit addresses show up in your bitfinex account?

I'm mainly interested in the /deposit/new API call, which returns a new deposit address. Does calling this invalidate any previous deposit addresses?

They remain valid.

Thank you very much. This is what I'd expected but I couldn't find a clear answer anywhere.

Oh, seems I was wrong, sorry. It says in their FAQ under "Can I deposit or withdraw in Bitcoins/Litecoins?":

"Please note that you should only deposit to the address displayed on the "Deposit" page. Previous deposits addresses are not available for security reasons."

But I'm sure I messed up once and sent a payment to an old address I had on record. It went through nevertheless so there seem to have been some changes lately.

mjr, care to enlighten us?

[sangaman]

I have a question regarding deposit addresses. If you generate a new deposit address, are previous addresses still valid? Would a bitcoin sent to any one of your previous deposit addresses show up in your bitfinex account?

I'm mainly interested in the /deposit/new API call, which returns a new deposit address. Does calling this invalidate any previous deposit addresses?

They remain valid.

Thank you very much. This is what I'd expected but I couldn't find a clear answer anywhere.

Oh, seems I was wrong, sorry. It says in their FAQ under "Can I deposit or withdraw in Bitcoins/Litecoins?":

"Please note that you should only deposit to the address displayed on the "Deposit" page. Previous deposits addresses are not available for security reasons."

But I'm sure I messed up once and sent a payment to an old address I had on record. It went through nevertheless so there seem to have been some changes lately.

mjr, care to enlighten us?

Oh wow good catch. It might be that "not available" means that they won't display previous addresses on your deposit page, but that they would still accept deposits to those addresses. That would make sense at least. I will definitely wait to hear from someone within Bitfinex about this.

Another question I have: Will we ever get an API method to withdraw cryptocurrency? Currently I don't see any call in the API documentation that does this.

If I don't get a response here in the next day or two I will try e-mailing support with these questions and post the answer I get here.