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

[Ichthyo]

wouldn't it be fairer and and make more sense, to just link bfnx to btce?

this was discussed a lot in the past. It would totally make sense, but Bitfinex wants to operate in a clear legal framework, and they need a real collaboration with such a partner; as far as I understood this basically rules out BTC-e (or similarly bitcoin china or other "interesting" possibilities)

[vokain]

wouldn't it be fairer and and make more sense, to just link bfnx to btce?

this was discussed a lot in the past. It would totally make sense, but Bitfinex wants to operate in a clear legal framework, and they need a real collaboration with such a partner; as far as I understood this basically rules out BTC-e (or similarly bitcoin china or other "interesting" possibilities)

more people just need to start trading at BFX

[Helix]

wouldn't it be fairer and and make more sense, to just link bfnx to btce?

this was discussed a lot in the past. It would totally make sense, but Bitfinex wants to operate in a clear legal framework, and they need a real collaboration with such a partner; as far as I understood this basically rules out BTC-e (or similarly bitcoin china or other "interesting" possibilities)

more people just need to start trading at BFX

And understand the opportunities and PITFALLS!!! of trading with leverage...

[whatthesith]

I believe there is some bugs in the Lending API of bitfinex. I was unable to make a new lending offer by POST method to https://api.bitfinex.com/v1/offer/new. Here are the situations.

1. The API documentation stated that insurance_option is optional. However, when this parameter is omitted, HTTP 500 error is returned.

2. I can get a response with insurance_option specified, but the response is always "Invalid offer: not enough balance". I have checked using the wallet balances API to make sure there is enough balance and also make sure that the amount is greater than the minimum lending amount (100USD).

Any updates on this? I have contacted support@bitfinex.com 2 times on this issue and so far no response for a few weeks.

[kitkat007]

I have read in this topic, that a lot of people bought lots of this litecoins, at a very bargain price (like 3$, 1$ or 0,1$ )
Its a madness that the automatical system of bitfinex sold this 79852 litecoin as a market order, when the order book of bitfinex
is too much tiny to assume this sale.

 Situation like this make me suspect it is an inside job. Only people who have knowledge of how the trade engine work and how the auto liquidate function work and when to execute a large sell (when everyone is asleep and no one watching) can pull this kind of things off.

Accusations like this one clearly qualify the IQ of the writer.
Believe me, if we wanted to scam somebody we would have much more efficient ways to do it.
Luckily for you, we are not what you suspect we are, i.e. scammers.
And if you really suspected this, why would you want to keep trading on our platform?
If you really mean it, then please take your assets somewhere else.
Bitfinex is not for you and you are not for Bitfinex.
I know it's Christmas and I should be nice to people, but you should really think twice before you start typing something on your keyboard.
People read your posts and they might grow an opinion that you are either a fudder or an idiot.

Merry Christmas to everybody

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

This is not how support should react :\ even if they are bullshit accusations.

btw still waiting on reply on my mail last week.

[Wassupia]

I have read in this topic, that a lot of people bought lots of this litecoins, at a very bargain price (like 3$, 1$ or 0,1$ )
Its a madness that the automatical system of bitfinex sold this 79852 litecoin as a market order, when the order book of bitfinex
is too much tiny to assume this sale.

This should be considered a glitch of the system. The exchange should bust the trade and use other method to deal with this situation.


Obviously, the only people who will object to busting the trade is the people who bought at rock bottom price. Situation like this make me suspect it is an inside job. Only people who have knowledge of how the trade engine work and how the auto liquidate function work and when to execute a large sell (when everyone is asleep and no one watching) can pull this kind of things off.

I don't understand this, why has this (and other peolpe's) BUY been reversed
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=229438.msg4040300#msg4040300

but the SELL/liquidation of "liteguy" has not?
------------------------------

Another question: In the event that bitfinex for some reason disconnects from bitstamp (eg bitstamp api down), and someone sells +- 6k coins on bitfinex to bring the price down to 174$. But before doing so, he places a huge buy order on 173$. Liquidations of xxxxxbtc (lendusd/btc price would be 18k BTC) coins would take place, and lenders lose most of their money, traders would lose all. The manipulator didn't do anything illegal.
 and his profit for this setup: >8-25k btc?

Is this setup possible?

A lot of things are still unclear to me, I doubt I'm the only one. Hence the high interest rates I suppose?

[Ente]

Liteguy, I feel with you. Really. It's a lot of money, and moreover you say there were larger plans with it.

Still:
1)
Why on earth did you gamble with money which was meant for (charitable) projects to begin with? Why not go "under-leveraged", like only gamble with 1/10th worth of what is deposited as security?

2)
You had too high leverage, the exchange rate dropped too low, you were liquidated via margin call. End of story on your part. No matter what would happen next, you are out of all deposited money (in your trading wallet). Because you miscalculated the exchangerate.

2b)
Now it happened that you opened a large position, and liquidating it crashed the litecoin-price on BitFinex. This greatly reduced the money that BitFinex received from liquidating your position. But, remember, this money wasn't yours any more. If anyone, BitFinex should be sad/angry/terrified/whatever for nor receiving enough money, and (being in risk of) losing money which you, liteguy, spent on interest.
The transfer of wealth, in this situation, was from uninsured lenders (or BitFinex, if insured or if they pay losses voluntarily) to the people who had a buy order at <1 USD for Litecoins.

Sorry, but I think you misunderstand the events here. Explain me, maybe I see it wrong too?

And now implying "scamming" on any side isn't helpful *at all*.

And finally, you are asking for donations. But can't give any info out yet. Well, I didn't even calculate how large your margin-call-loss was, but with such an amount I am baffled that you prefer to keep info back? Even one percent donated to you should warrant to post info, compile official records, have full names published and verificable info on any official step you already did (registered non-profit? contracts? real company? anything?)
Well, maybe I got it all wrong, and the gambled and lost money only is a tiny part of the assets for this charity project. And maybe receiving a small part of this back on donations is not worth the effort and premature publishing of the whole project?

Sorry, again, as this is christmas. But somehow it all makes very little sense to me at the moment.

By the way, I was a hair away from being liquidated myself.

Ente

[Ente]

..and this surely needs its own post:

Merry christmas, Raphael, Giancarlo and the whole BitFinex team!
Thank you for your platform, great support and constant enhancements!

See you next year, with much and many business! :-)

Ente

[Indamuck]

Can someone explain this to me?

All of my funds are currently subject to 'Auto-loan' feature. All funds are currently loaned, except for this one amount:

Unfilled Credit/Demand Offers

Type: Lend Limit
Amount: 19,XXX
Rate/day: Flash Return Rate
Max length: 2 days
Placed: 24 Dec 23:45
Auto-renew: -
Status: Active

It is now 25 Dec at 11:06 ... has this money been 'unlent' for half a day here? Is it currently being offered as a renewal loan to the original borrower, or otherwise why isn't the amount lent yet? It appears the US$19k+ is unavailable to lend because it is currently on offer?

Just trying to figure out out how best to keep my funds busy, and at the best rate. Is this $19k sitting idle for half a day now? How to remedy?

Thanks all! Indamuck looooves BFX - thanks to the team there.

[rioshoosh]

Besides lending info I've added some stats on BTCUSD and LTCUSD (see links on top of the page): market depth + trade history.

Please feel free to give me feedbacK at: bfxdata@gmai.com

Your bitcoin address for donations is not a valid address.

[wilfried]

On, Wednesday morning i lost 79852 litecoin + 156 bitcoins + 94500 dollars , all I had in my account at the time of increased volatility after the very fast progress of the crash left me unable to react

Since he is asking for donations / coins from those lucky enough to buy LTC at sub $1 prices...

Any proof this is in fact the unlucky person? Could anyone from BFX confirm this?

Or perhaps liteguy has a screenshot of the history page at BFX or something else which would indicate that he is in fact the one who did this?

Also.. sorry for the person's loss, that's a whole lot of money lost.. :-/ sad to think about.

It is actually him.
I'm sorry about his loss, but there is not much we can do about it, as his loss was somebody else's gain.
I do appreciate his try though, it's Christmas and some of those people might actually be touched by his words.
Might this Christmas bring some rest to all of us.
We all need it (it has been a hell of a period in the last weeks with all this volatility and stuff), sometimes I wish BTC would be a little less volatile, but I guess it's too early to wish for this.

Thank you to all our customers for everything, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you.

Merry Christmas

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

hy giancarlo,
so the policy of bitfinex is that such orders are executed and thats it. one looses, others win. i am fine with that. but it doesnt quite fit with this post, where the buyer of cheap litecoins states that LTC 2000 was taken away from his account:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=229438.msg4040300#msg4040300

how does this match?
thx

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=229438.msg4040300#msg4040300

[jordan.dev]

Hello everybody,

I am writing after spare me a bit of the shock I had after losing everything  on my bitfinex account, and after an exchange of e-mails
with Raphael. (And Raphael can confirm this)
On, Wednesday morning i lost 79852 litecoin + 156 bitcoins + 94500 dollars , all I had in my account at the time of increased volatility after the very fast progress of the crash left me unable to react

Yes, most of the litecoins of this graph to 0.0001  was from my account.

At what prices did your LTC position get liquidated?
FYI, I had the $0.0001 bid and overall managed to get ~28k litecoins during the crash.
However, those coins soon disappeared from my account, I only got to keep ones I bought at $2, $4 etc.
According to Giancarlo: "I'm sorry about his loss, but there is not much we can do about it, as his loss was somebody else's gain."
This isn't necessarily true as I didn't get to keep the coins I bought at $0.0001.
So atleast some people must've got their ltc back after the crash.

I sent an email to bfx asking for more information but they haven't answered back yet.
An official statement on who got their ltc back etc. would be nice.

Liteguy: as an active trader on BFX like yourself, I can only assume you were one of the largest account holders on BFX given the holdings you described.

I've been in the same situation with the illiquidity of the LTC orderbook on BFX before (in my case, being force liquidated as a large short went against me when the price rose quickly in Oct.? Or Nov.?) So I can at least empathize with your situation. Once the margin call went into effect, I essentially emptied the orderbook and bought back LTC at any price people were willing to sell to me which more erased my deposits.

That being said, you were trading a very illiquid market with a lot of leverage (4x, I think most would agree is small for normal currency trading / commodity trading) but very large for something as volatile as Bitcoin/Litecoin. Well I cannot judge your risk tolerance, I know that at some points this market becomes akin to a casino with the lack of liquidity and a small loss can become a very big one very quickly and it's prudent to double or triple your expectations of price movement before participating.

I think for those whom are in your situation it would be good to describe trade by trade why you made the decisions you did, and help others learn to better trade. I don't know your background, but given the amount of money you accumulated trading you are either a professional trader or early adopter? That being said, I assume the latter: given I don't consider myself a professional to the degree, I still wouldn't be comfortable taking 4x leverage in such an illiquid market - or with money I couldn't afford to lose.

I don't want to be condescending, but trading illiquid markets is very much a zero-sum game, as Giancarlo mentioned. If there were enough participants or depth the market would move more slowly and the speculative nature of huge price swings wouldn't exist.

Tabi: I know I spoke with you during this period, and I'm not an arbiter by any sense of the imagination for BFX. I will suggest however, that now that liteguy has taken the hit to his pride to disclose what happened that perhaps a bit more of a statement from BFX would help.

[Basil]

I believe there is some bugs in the Lending API of bitfinex. I was unable to make a new lending offer by POST method to https://api.bitfinex.com/v1/offer/new. Here are the situations.

1. The API documentation stated that insurance_option is optional. However, when this parameter is omitted, HTTP 500 error is returned.

2. I can get a response with insurance_option specified, but the response is always "Invalid offer: not enough balance". I have checked using the wallet balances API to make sure there is enough balance and also make sure that the amount is greater than the minimum lending amount (100USD).

Any updates on this? I have contacted support@bitfinex.com 2 times on this issue and so far no response for a few weeks.

Hi All

I often watch the credits that I land, closed before closing time (2 days).

This happens after 2 hours or  a one day. In this case for the use of money to me no interest will accrue (although the money used for 12 hours and night).

Why is this happening? Is this normal?

Thank you

[vokain]

..and this surely needs its own post:

Merry christmas, Raphael, Giancarlo and the whole BitFinex team!
Thank you for your platform, great support and constant enhancements!

See you next year, with much and many business! :-)

Ente

Same wishes from me too! Merry Christmas to all!

And liteguy don't worry, you can work with me later if you really want to get into charity work

[kitkat007]

People dont close on trades with close (it will put a market order)


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT SUCKS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[rioshoosh]

trading illiquid markets is very much a zero-sum game, as Giancarlo mentioned.

Trading any currency or commodity, regardless of how liquid or illiquid it is, is a zero-sum game.
USD, EUR, Oil, Gold, Silver, whatever. It is all a zero sum game.

[vokain]

trading illiquid markets is very much a zero-sum game, as Giancarlo mentioned.

Trading any currency or commodity, regardless of how liquid or illiquid it is, is a zero-sum game.
USD, EUR, Oil, Gold, Silver, whatever. It is all a zero sum game.

but the ones who take commission/interest get a guaranteed positive sum

[EABEAB]

Appears the "Bitfinex Sentiment Index"
algorithm is not exactly accurate, it
read "Bearish" the night before Christmas
which lead me to stay in Fiat after exiting
a trade at 646, the next morning upon awaking
the market had rose to 658, then rose to 707
the same day, to now 718, and still to this moment
Bitfinex's Sentiment Index reads "BEARISH", go figure !

https://bitfinex.com/pages/stats

Waiting for market to crash now, just to be able
to get a decent entry point, don't think I'll be paying
much attention to the Bitfinex Sentiment Index anymore.

Thanks

[accord01]

Hello everybody,

I am writing after spare me a bit of the shock I had after losing everything  on my bitfinex account, and after an exchange of e-mails
with Raphael. (And Raphael can confirm this)
On, Wednesday morning i lost 79852 litecoin + 156 bitcoins + 94500 dollars , all I had in my account at the time of increased volatility after the very fast progress of the crash left me unable to react

Yes, most of the litecoins of this graph to 0.0001  was from my account.

At what prices did your LTC position get liquidated?
FYI, I had the $0.0001 bid and overall managed to get ~28k litecoins during the crash.
However, those coins soon disappeared from my account, I only got to keep ones I bought at $2, $4 etc.
According to Giancarlo: "I'm sorry about his loss, but there is not much we can do about it, as his loss was somebody else's gain."
This isn't necessarily true as I didn't get to keep the coins I bought at $0.0001.
So atleast some people must've got their ltc back after the crash.

I sent an email to bfx asking for more information but they haven't answered back yet.
An official statement on who got their ltc back etc. would be nice.

Liteguy: as an active trader on BFX like yourself, I can only assume you were one of the largest account holders on BFX given the holdings you described.

I've been in the same situation with the illiquidity of the LTC orderbook on BFX before (in my case, being force liquidated as a large short went against me when the price rose quickly in Oct.? Or Nov.?) So I can at least empathize with your situation. Once the margin call went into effect, I essentially emptied the orderbook and bought back LTC at any price people were willing to sell to me which more erased my deposits.

That being said, you were trading a very illiquid market with a lot of leverage (4x, I think most would agree is small for normal currency trading / commodity trading) but very large for something as volatile as Bitcoin/Litecoin. Well I cannot judge your risk tolerance, I know that at some points this market becomes akin to a casino with the lack of liquidity and a small loss can become a very big one very quickly and it's prudent to double or triple your expectations of price movement before participating.

I think for those whom are in your situation it would be good to describe trade by trade why you made the decisions you did, and help others learn to better trade. I don't know your background, but given the amount of money you accumulated trading you are either a professional trader or early adopter? That being said, I assume the latter: given I don't consider myself a professional to the degree, I still wouldn't be comfortable taking 4x leverage in such an illiquid market - or with money I couldn't afford to lose.

I don't want to be condescending, but trading illiquid markets is very much a zero-sum game, as Giancarlo mentioned. If there were enough participants or depth the market would move more slowly and the speculative nature of huge price swings wouldn't exist.

Tabi: I know I spoke with you during this period, and I'm not an arbiter by any sense of the imagination for BFX. I will suggest however, that now that liteguy has taken the hit to his pride to disclose what happened that perhaps a bit more of a statement from BFX would help.

I agree with the last part of this statement.  It is indeed strange that a sale of .02/ltc was made at a large amount.  Was it an error of the BFX platform or because of the illiquid ltc market at that time?  That's what I'm wondering.  BFX is a great service, but certainly lacks the man power for support and supervision of the platform.

Hence some of us users kind of act like helpers.

[urwhatuknow]

I believe there is some bugs in the Lending API of bitfinex. I was unable to make a new lending offer by POST method to https://api.bitfinex.com/v1/offer/new. Here are the situations.

1. The API documentation stated that insurance_option is optional. However, when this parameter is omitted, HTTP 500 error is returned.

2. I can get a response with insurance_option specified, but the response is always "Invalid offer: not enough balance". I have checked using the wallet balances API to make sure there is enough balance and also make sure that the amount is greater than the minimum lending amount (100USD).

Any updates on this? I have contacted support@bitfinex.com 2 times on this issue and so far no response for a few weeks.

The insurance option was set up after the April 10th crash in order to give full protection to liquidity providers (LP).
An LP that buys insurance pays an extra 20% commission ( 30% instead of 10%) but will be refunded also in case of a "black swan" event.
Should the BTC price collapse from the actual value to 0 within an eyeblink, insured LP will still get refunded in full.
Unfortunately the total amount is limited to about 55,000 usd ( it grows as 15% of the extra 20% taken as commission is re-invested in the fund, 5% goes to the person that set up the fund).
55,000 usd has to be considered in total, not per person.
First in, first served.
No need to say that this amount is always taken in full 99% of the time.
That is why you get the response "not enough balance".

The API documentation states that insurance is optional, not that the parameter can be omitted.

I hope this helps

Have a good day

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team