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

[urwhatuknow]

Beware: Bitfinex is now using a TAIWAN bank.

CATHAY UNITED BANK, 3/F, No 65, Guan Chien Rd, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

Official BFX story from https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/announcements

"Please note that the deposit bank has changed. All verified customers can find the new bank details on the deposit page.

Wires sent to our previous bank accounts starting from tomorrow may be returned"

Anyone know if this bank is safe?

I don't anything about the bank, but this is clearly a sign of increased risk on the customers side. This is the third banking change in a few months which is alarming.
The second concern I have is no reason for the change was given, which forces us to assume the reason is a negative one.  We are dealing with money here and we must demand the most up to date and accurate information.   Secondly they didn't post a notice here on the forum.
Please someone from Bitfinex explain the reason for the sudden change of banks.

I really don't want to sound rude, especially after some absence from writing on this thread, but sometimes I wonder if people read or don't read the news.

In the last days I believe it was almost impossible to read anything related to Cryptocurrencies without running into an article about how China is closing down on BTC.
Some Chinese platforms already announced they will shut down their operations and almost all the others said they will relocate somewhere else.

We at Bitfinex are proud of having a reputation for always acting proactively in the best interest of our customers.

Let me remind you that we decided to pull out of MtGox 9 months before it imploded.
At that time we were surrounded by critics and we suffered some volume losses because some people didn't believe trading there was risky and took their business somewhere else.
Time proved we were right in our assumption.

Based on the same approach we decided to open up a new relationship with a Taiwanese bank that offers the best guarantee to protect your funds in this moment.
We will relentlessly open new bank accounts all over the world, with banks that show to understand the ingenuity of Bitcoin and do not simply stick their head under the sand.
Even if we all know Hong Kong is not China, it is better for us to start looking around in order to get multiple licensing in various jurisdictions around the world that are in this moment proving to be more positive about this new technology.

Be reassured the Bitfinex management team will always put the customer security first.

I hope this helps

Thank you and have a good day

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

[medicine]

Excellent.  Thank you.

[wilfried]

anyone got an explanation for that crazy bot buying high, selling low 0,01 chunks ?

[TwinWinNerD]

What's the current status on BitFinex verification process? Is 2 ID's (for some reason) still required? What if 1 only owns a passport?
Kinda weird to asume that everyone have $$ to pay for a drivers license.

Staff, is 2 ID's mandatory or not?

I don't know which country you live in, but most have a national ID and a passport.

[Dalmar]

I was just glossing over the speakers of the Bitcoin 2014 event in Amsterdam and noticed Bitfinex isn't represented.

http://bitcoin2014.com/#speakers

How come Bitfinex does not attend major bitcoin events when they are the 2nd largest BTC-USD exchange? Even Kraken and BTCChina who are much smaller tend to go to these conferences. I can understand why anonymous BTC-e wouldn't go to these places, but why does Bitfinex not have a more public presence?

[urwhatuknow]

I was just looking at the speakers of the Bitcoin 2014 event in Amsterdam and noticed Bitfinex isn't represented.

http://bitcoin2014.com/#speakers

How come Bitfinex does not attend major bitcoin events when they are the 2nd largest USD exchange? Even Kraken and BTCChina who are much smaller tend to go to these conferences. I can understand why anonymous BTC-e wouldn't go to these places, but why does Bitfinex not have a more public presence?

We will be attending the conference, but our company policy doesn't allow us to speak in public or to give interviews until when the regulatory framework will be a little less uncertain.
Keeping a low profile and focusing on our customer's experience has been paying well so far, as our marketshare has been increasing thru the last months.
We believe happy customers word of mouth to be a much more powerful way to get good advertisement than a lot of media exposure.

I hope that this helps

Thanks and have a good morning/afternoon/evening

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

[Dalmar]

We will be attending the conference, but our company policy doesn't allow us to speak in public or to give interviews until when the regulatory framework will be a little less uncertain.
Keeping a low profile and focusing on our customer's experience has been paying well so far, as our marketshare has been increasing thru the last months.
We believe happy customers word of mouth to be a much more powerful way to get good advertisement than a lot of media exposure.

I hope that this helps

Thanks and have a good morning/afternoon/evening

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

Thanks for clearing that up. 

[birr]

Also, regarding verification, Bitfinex requests a utility bill or phone bill.
I have no utility bills, so I must use a phone bill.  Does it matter whether the bill comes from a legacy landline provider, or a cellular provider?
I actually have two phone bills, one is for a flip phone (voice) and the other is a tablet (data).  But I don't use a traditional landline telephone.

[BitBits]

Also, regarding verification, Bitfinex requests a utility bill or phone bill.
I have no utility bills, so I must use a phone bill.  Does it matter whether the bill comes from a legacy landline provider, or a cellular provider?
I actually have two phone bills, one is for a flip phone (voice) and the other is a tablet (data).  But I don't use a traditional landline telephone.

Utility bill is for address verification, so it doesn't matter which.

[bjornw]

Just came across this post at reddit, thought you might find it intresting as well:

Bitfinex Swap Rate Manupulation 101

At 15.25 UTC someone took a BTC Swap of ~2000 BTC pushing Bitfinex BTC Swap rates to 0.99% per day: (Exhibit A) https://i.imgur.com/AKTJ1cQ.png) and (Exhibit B) https://i.imgur.com/22cBkAt.png

Within a hour the swap was closed (see Exhibit A https://i.imgur.com/AKTJ1cQ.png). But strangely no margin trade of ~2k BTC was done during the time the swap was active. See here (Exhibit C) https://i.imgur.com/696xtZi.png
(The 24h Bitfinex BTC volume is only ~1900 BTC!).

So what happened here? someone made a mistake? probably not. Look at this:

Because of this transaction FRR rose to 0.11239 % per day (= average rate on all active BTC Swaps, this is the rate most margin traders will take swaps for) and stayed at that rate for 4 hours now (was 0.03274 before this transaction…) (Exhibit D) https://i.imgur.com/oSb7G7H.png

Shortly after closing the swap, someone added a bunch of Swap offers ( ~2000 BTC worth) to the Bitfinex Lendbook @ 0.1122 % (FRR) per day  at 17.04 UTC.  (Exhibit E) https://i.imgur.com/1zqHChf.png (I checked the bitfinex api)

So First take a 2K Swap -> Swap rate rises close to 1 % per day -> FRR rises to ~0.11 -> close the Swap -> offer the same 2K BTC at FRR (0.1122%) and have them active for a few hours, or maybe days. You probably make more than it had cost you to pull of this action...

Charts from http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25hfx8/bitfinex_swap_rate_manupulation_101/
This was posted yesterday, BTC FRR remained @ ~0.11 for the last 12 hours, just starting to decline again a bit...

[Sukrim]

A bit difficult to pull off, if you don't already have a lot of FRR BTC loans out there - they take quite a while to be re-taken in BTC as there is huge volume available at FRR. Also you have to pay interest on that 2k loan (0.99% per day for 1 hour = 0.825 BTC!). Not that I'm going to complain, FRRs are far too low on any market anyways, still it is a bit hard to profit from that doubling in FRR without having at least a few hundred coins extra already in FRR loans.

[bjornw]

A bit difficult to pull off, if you don't already have a lot of FRR BTC loans out there - they take quite a while to be re-taken in BTC as there is huge volume available at FRR. Also you have to pay interest on that 2k loan (0.99% per day for 1 hour = 0.825 BTC!). Not that I'm going to complain, FRRs are far too low on any market anyways, still it is a bit hard to profit from that doubling in FRR without having at least a few hundred coins extra already in FRR loans.

maybe there were a lot of offers at low rates when these 2K BTCs were swapped, can't check anymore, but roughly the rate this person payed on the 2k swap for 1 hour will be in the middle between 0.03% (rate before the swap) and 0.99 (after the swap) so ~0.51% so only 0.412 BTC (maybe even less if there was a large amount of low rate swap offers). so if this person had a lot of FRR swaps open a profit isn't out of the question I think.

I think short margin traders will be a bit less happy with this doubling in FRR rate, although it is returning back to 'normal' as I write this.

[Sukrim]

Not very hard to pull off by the way, since you do NOT need 2k BTC to do this, only ~1 BTC to cover the interest. The 2k BTC that were posted at FRR later are not related to the 2k BTC that were being borrowed before. This is a usual strategy to kick out people with low interest rate offers that do not have Autorenew active.

[BitBits]

One technically cannot post any swap offer at Bitfinex, if there is not enough funds on the account to back such offer. This used to be possible in early days, but not today.

[bjornw]

This is a usual strategy to kick out people with low interest rate offers that do not have Autorenew active.

could well be, Still you need 800 BTC in your account, right (2.5 leverage) as BitBits suggested

[Gambiman]

I have sent e-mails to compliance and support but no answer yet... When I want to verify account I have an error message saying that documents are missing or in wrong format (ID, KYC form etc...) They are all in pdf or jpeg as stated at the end of the verification page.. How come this is happening?

Still nothing.. It's been quite a while now. Anyone from support?

[BitBits]

I have sent e-mails to compliance and support but no answer yet... When I want to verify account I have an error message saying that documents are missing or in wrong format (ID, KYC form etc...) They are all in pdf or jpeg as stated at the end of the verification page.. How come this is happening?

Still nothing.. It's been quite a while now. Anyone from support?

Sounds like something on your side. Try clearing your web browser's cache and cookies (Google this), restart the browser and then try again. Do such cleaning often.

[richardweiming]

Any support here？
Why stop using your HSBC account then switch to a nobody know taiwan bank?
You HSBC account is banned by government? Can you give an explaination?

[8fold]

Any support here？
Why stop using your HSBC account then switch to a nobody know taiwan bank?
You HSBC account is banned by government? Can you give an explaination?

See here.

[DoubleSwapper]

Does somebody have any idea about why the swap rate keeps exploding like this? We were at like 0.065 and in seconds it increases over sixfold? This has happen in the past and looks very, very artificial to me. Could it simply be liquidity drying up or is there more to it? Someone has posted about possible manipulation of the btc frr rate. Is this happening to USD as well?