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

[sonicby]

Can someone provide example request for api method
GET /trades/:symbol

https://api.bitfinex.com/v1/trades/btcusd?timestamp=1403014436
I wanna get old trades history, but timestamp parameter not work. 

[1714797859]

1714797859

[1714797859]

1714797859

[1714797859]

1714797859

[Deviant1]

Hey guys can someone tell me how much you can earn approximately by lending your coins to margin traders on Bitfinex.

Also, are these loans insured?

Thanks!

[Sukrim]

Hey guys can someone tell me how much you can earn approximately by lending your coins to margin traders on Bitfinex.

http://www.bfxdata.com/

Also, are these loans insured?

No, at least not externally. Bitfinex promises that they would cover lender's losses out of their own pockets. That's why they increased their fee by 50% some time ago. Still they can NOT cover all funds lent out (by far), so after a certain point they would just go bankrupt and you'd maybe get about 10 cents on the dollar. Most likely they would rather stop trading for some time before this happens (as they have done in the past).

[AdamSmith]

Hey guys can someone tell me how much you can earn approximately by lending your coins to margin traders on Bitfinex.

http://www.bfxdata.com/

Also, are these loans insured?

No, at least not externally. Bitfinex promises that they would cover lender's losses out of their own pockets. That's why they increased their fee by 50% some time ago. Still they can NOT cover all funds lent out (by far), so after a certain point they would just go bankrupt and you'd maybe get about 10 cents on the dollar. Most likely they would rather stop trading for some time before this happens (as they have done in the past).

They can insure all fund because they have the ability to reverse trade.

Any flash crash that affect lending or solvency of the company, they will just reverse all trades.

[PirateHatForTea]

This is only true/possible to the extent that price rebounds on other exchanges. If Bitcoin went into a non-reversed death spiral for example, or even just underwent a very large drop with cascades that did not bounce back to anywhere near levels before the crash, it is possible for lenders to lose their money.

There is also significant counterparty risk associated with placing your money on an exchange, for lending or otherwise. People hopefully learnt that lesson with Gox. Treat the loan of your money, and even the sending of it to BFX, as being like buying the riskiest of the risky of junk bonds. Do not send/lend more than you can afford to lose.

[AdamSmith]

They have auto liquidate function to liquidate over leveraged users also.

In the event that auto liquidate function not operated as intended, they also have the ability to partially reverse and forward the transactions started from certain point.

[itsproblem2]

Hello,

I try to put a flash return rate lending offer through the API. I read here and being told as well that for the rate of 0 the offer will be a frr one. I get "Offer rate must be positive." as a response when I try to do that.
Can anyone help me and knows how to do this?

Cheers

[PirateHatForTea]

I have the same experience as PirateHat.  I explicitly make a bid that matches an existing offer, and still don't get it.  I suspected that it was rounding errors on the rate, and bid 0.001% more than the offer, still no match.  After a while, the bid was met, though.  I cannot reproduce it on demand, sometimes things work, sometimes they do not appear to work.

I hadn't thought of rounding. That might explain the inconsistent behaviour I've seen - as I recently made an offer to match an existing bid and it was taken even though it only partially filled the bid, consistent with Ente's description.

[PirateHatForTea]

They have auto liquidate function to liquidate over leveraged users also.

In the event that auto liquidate function not operated as intended, they also have the ability to partially reverse and forward the transactions started from certain point.

I don't think you understand what I wrote. Of course they have ability to auto liquidate - it is a key component of margin trading. There is no guarantee that prices cannot fall so fast that when the liquidation is triggered, they haven't already falling past the point where liquidating would recover the lent amount. In fact this has already happened once, on Feb 10 2014.In that instance BFX rolled back the trades, justifying this action by the fact that they had lost the additional liquidity of Bitstamp (I think they ran out of BTC on stamp) and that the cascading margin calls on the resulting thin order book would have taken the price on BFX to zero and wiped everybody out.

Because the price on other exchanges (ie Stamp) never went so low, but remained around the 500s, after a trading halt BFX were able to resume at prices that did not result in underwater margin positions, so the liquidations could be avoided. However, if all exchanges had tanked, this would not have been possible, and many margin positions would have been liquidated, possibly at a loss.

There is nothing preventing a similar flash crash to that of 10 Feb from occurring. Bitcoin is incredibly volatile as we have seen, and nothing is off the table. Reversing trades is not a panacea - not only that but BFX will only do it when it is in THEIR interests to do so. They rolled back trades in Feb because doing otherwise would have killed the entire platform - as Raphael said at the time liquidating every position in the platform and filling the orderbook down to zero.

In the case of a real, market-wide crash, don't expect BFX to roll back trades (how can they when the market has moved on without them?). And don't expect them to reimburse out-of-pocket lenders. They simply don't have the money to be able to do so, and their extremely vague promise to insure loans appears nowhere in the site terms and conditions or other binding contract. This would leave lenders to enforce such a promise through legal action (hint: google promissory estoppel), but then tell me, who do you sue? And where?

I see the promise to insure all loans as motivated by two reasons:
1) To remove the hassle of offering the (mostly useless due to extremely small pool size) optional insurance on loans
2) Needing to justify their desire to capture a greater share of the lending business profits, aka GREED
It is not a promise that is backed up by anything.

Finally, all this is before you even consider counterparty AND regulatory risk - there is still a very real possibility that something could go badly wrong at BFX, a hack, mismanagement, a court case, termination of banking relationships, government crackdown; the list goes on. This could lead to insolvency and loss of funds a la Gox and numerous other exchanges. This additional risk should not be understated.

So AGAIN: DON'T LEND (OR KEEP ON BFX) MORE THAN YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.

PS: BFX staff, I am just trying to highlight the risks inherent in dealing with a platform such as yours, no offense intended. I am actually quite a fan, and have used the platform for trading and lending for some time and am yet to find one better. But I always deal in amounts I'm willing to lose.

[yitingyou]

If authentication is not complete without mention now, but I don't give the authentication data.

[dadugan]

They have auto liquidate function to liquidate over leveraged users also.

In the event that auto liquidate function not operated as intended, they also have the ability to partially reverse and forward the transactions started from certain point.

I don't think you understand what I wrote. Of course they have ability to auto liquidate - it is a key component of margin trading. There is no guarantee that prices cannot fall so fast that when the liquidation is triggered, they haven't already falling past the point where liquidating would recover the lent amount. In fact this has already happened once, on Feb 10 2014.In that instance BFX rolled back the trades, justifying this action by the fact that they had lost the additional liquidity of Bitstamp (I think they ran out of BTC on stamp) and that the cascading margin calls on the resulting thin order book would have taken the price on BFX to zero and wiped everybody out.

Because the price on other exchanges (ie Stamp) never went so low, but remained around the 500s, after a trading halt BFX were able to resume at prices that did not result in underwater margin positions, so the liquidations could be avoided. However, if all exchanges had tanked, this would not have been possible, and many margin positions would have been liquidated, possibly at a loss.

There is nothing preventing a similar flash crash to that of 10 Feb from occurring. Bitcoin is incredibly volatile as we have seen, and nothing is off the table. Reversing trades is not a panacea - not only that but BFX will only do it when it is in THEIR interests to do so. They rolled back trades in Feb because doing otherwise would have killed the entire platform - as Raphael said at the time liquidating every position in the platform and filling the orderbook down to zero.

In the case of a real, market-wide crash, don't expect BFX to roll back trades (how can they when the market has moved on without them?). And don't expect them to reimburse out-of-pocket lenders. They simply don't have the money to be able to do so, and their extremely vague promise to insure loans appears nowhere in the site terms and conditions or other binding contract. This would leave lenders to enforce such a promise through legal action (hint: google promissory estoppel), but then tell me, who do you sue? And where?

I see the promise to insure all loans as motivated by two reasons:
1) To remove the hassle of offering the (mostly useless due to extremely small pool size) optional insurance on loans
2) Needing to justify their desire to capture a greater share of the lending business profits, aka GREED
It is not a promise that is backed up by anything.

Finally, all this is before you even consider counterparty AND regulatory risk - there is still a very real possibility that something could go badly wrong at BFX, a hack, mismanagement, a court case, termination of banking relationships, government crackdown; the list goes on. This could lead to insolvency and loss of funds a la Gox and numerous other exchanges. This additional risk should not be understated.

So AGAIN: DON'T LEND (OR KEEP ON BFX) MORE THAN YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.

PS: BFX staff, I am just trying to highlight the risks inherent in dealing with a platform such as yours, no offense intended. I am actually quite a fan, and have used the platform for trading and lending for some time and am yet to find one better. But I always deal in amounts I'm willing to lose.

Good explanation.

Since they keep all fiat and most of the bitcoin in cold wallet, they can ALWAYS reverse all transactions to the previous stable state and pretend nothing happen. Total fiat and total btc still remain in their control. Swap can be settled using remaining cash and bitcoin in the trader account.

Leverage ratio is 2:1, any flash crash that is less than 50% is non-issue. In case of big crashes, insolvent traders will pay back lender(partially) using bitcoin in their account.

[m5j0r]

Does anyone have any experience with their support team?
Are they reachable quickly via e-mail?

Thinking of doing more trading over there. Fast, good support if ever needed would be great.

[urwhatuknow]

They have auto liquidate function to liquidate over leveraged users also.

In the event that auto liquidate function not operated as intended, they also have the ability to partially reverse and forward the transactions started from certain point.

I don't think you understand what I wrote. Of course they have ability to auto liquidate - it is a key component of margin trading. There is no guarantee that prices cannot fall so fast that when the liquidation is triggered, they haven't already falling past the point where liquidating would recover the lent amount. In fact this has already happened once, on Feb 10 2014.In that instance BFX rolled back the trades, justifying this action by the fact that they had lost the additional liquidity of Bitstamp (I think they ran out of BTC on stamp) and that the cascading margin calls on the resulting thin order book would have taken the price on BFX to zero and wiped everybody out.

Because the price on other exchanges (ie Stamp) never went so low, but remained around the 500s, after a trading halt BFX were able to resume at prices that did not result in underwater margin positions, so the liquidations could be avoided. However, if all exchanges had tanked, this would not have been possible, and many margin positions would have been liquidated, possibly at a loss.

There is nothing preventing a similar flash crash to that of 10 Feb from occurring. Bitcoin is incredibly volatile as we have seen, and nothing is off the table. Reversing trades is not a panacea - not only that but BFX will only do it when it is in THEIR interests to do so. They rolled back trades in Feb because doing otherwise would have killed the entire platform - as Raphael said at the time liquidating every position in the platform and filling the orderbook down to zero.

In the case of a real, market-wide crash, don't expect BFX to roll back trades (how can they when the market has moved on without them?). And don't expect them to reimburse out-of-pocket lenders. They simply don't have the money to be able to do so, and their extremely vague promise to insure loans appears nowhere in the site terms and conditions or other binding contract. This would leave lenders to enforce such a promise through legal action (hint: google promissory estoppel), but then tell me, who do you sue? And where?

I see the promise to insure all loans as motivated by two reasons:
1) To remove the hassle of offering the (mostly useless due to extremely small pool size) optional insurance on loans
2) Needing to justify their desire to capture a greater share of the lending business profits, aka GREED
It is not a promise that is backed up by anything.

Finally, all this is before you even consider counterparty AND regulatory risk - there is still a very real possibility that something could go badly wrong at BFX, a hack, mismanagement, a court case, termination of banking relationships, government crackdown; the list goes on. This could lead to insolvency and loss of funds a la Gox and numerous other exchanges. This additional risk should not be understated.

So AGAIN: DON'T LEND (OR KEEP ON BFX) MORE THAN YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.

PS: BFX staff, I am just trying to highlight the risks inherent in dealing with a platform such as yours, no offense intended. I am actually quite a fan, and have used the platform for trading and lending for some time and am yet to find one better. But I always deal in amounts I'm willing to lose.

Thanks for the wise analysis.
What you write makes a lot of sense.
For the sake of clarity: on February 10th transactions were not cancelled because Bitfinex run out of funds on Bitstamp, but because a smart ass found out a way to artificially push the ticker price to very high levels ( over 10,000 usd per btc) and this caused some people to take leveraged positions that should never have occurred.
As this erratic behavior was due to a technical problem and not to a normal market condition we decided to revert the transactions.

This is common practice also in major markets, such as the NYSE or the NASDAQ.

You can find more details about it if you go back to that date on this thread.

I hope this helps

Have a good day

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team
 

[PirateHatForTea]

Ah whoops sorry in that case I was referring to the windback after the post Gox-FUD announcement crash. The one where price spiked down to 100. That must have been later in Feb.

I remember the other crash, when BFX was bugged and we all had insane tradeable balances, and some kook decided to use it to try and squeeze the order book, becuase I made a tonne of money trading LTCUSD and BTCUSD as it random-walked all over that thin order book. Then watched it all get handed back with the rollback

I still supported the rollback even though it cost me a couple grand, it was clearly some whack shot going on and being deliberately perpetrated.

I also remember the flash crash post Gox. That one was pure terror - I has an open margin position and watched it going heavily into the red, praying we wouldn't go below 400 or so (we started at 800ish!) . I remember watching that spike down to 100 and feeling my gut lurch with it as I knew I must have been totally wiped out. I supported that rollback too; though I thought it was a bit more dubious, I was very glad not to have lost 5 figures to the crash!

In general I think BFX management have made admirable decisions.

[urwhatuknow]

Ah whoops sorry in that case I was referring to the windback after the post Gox-FUD announcement crash. The one where price spiked down to 100. That must have been later in Feb.

I remember the other crash, when BFX was bugged and we all had insane tradeable balances, and some kook decided to use it to try and squeeze the order book, becuase I made a tonne of money trading LTCUSD and BTCUSD as it random-walked all over that thin order book. Then watched it all get handed back with the rollback

I still supported the rollback even though it cost me a couple grand, it was clearly some whack shot going on and being deliberately perpetrated.

I also remember the flash crash post Gox. That one was pure terror - I has an open margin position and watched it going heavily into the red, praying we wouldn't go below 400 or so (we started at 800ish!) . I remember watching that spike down to 100 and feeling my gut lurch with it as I knew I must have been totally wiped out. I supported that rollback too; though I thought it was a bit more dubious, I was very glad not to have lost 5 figures to the crash!

In general I think BFX management have made admirable decisions.

Thanks a lot for your words of appreciation and for having been with us for such a long time.

Have a good day

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

[whatthesith]

Does anyone have difficulties with withdrawal using phone authentication?

[whatthesith]

Does anyone have difficulties with withdrawal using phone authentication?

Seems okay now.

[sporksuit]

Does anyone know the rate limit for the API? I'm trying to build software that regularly queries the /pubticker and /trades endpoints, but I don't want to get my users' IP addresses banned.

Bonus: do the public and authenticated APIs have different rate limits?

[Xiaoxiao]

Wow bitfinex added DRK!!!!

[fr33d0miz3r]

Wow bitfinex added DRK!!!!

Yeah!