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

[bahamapascal]

Guys can any of you help me?

So I am starting to play around with margin trading. Yesterday I went short at 430, when price fell to 410 levels I would have liked to closed the short with a ask order at 410. Unfortunately I had no Idea how to do that and had to market close it, which then got me the closing price of 414

Is it possible to close a short with an limit order? If so, how?

Thanks!

Just put in a limit long order the size of your short. Also, REALLY FUCKING BAD TIME to try out margin trading at the moment. You can be easily fucked over by BFX shitty trading engine without actually making any mistakes.

Ah cool, so if the size of the long order is exactly the same as the short order, it will just cancel the short order (if my limit order is met) and I won't have any positions open?

And thanks for the warning...well I am yust playing with 30$ to learn how the system works and get a feel for it. If they are lost It wouldn't hurt to much. Thanks for the warning thogh!

@noggin-scratcher: Thanks to you too

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[DoubleSwapper]

LMFAO111

Anybody seen that guy who put in a 100k swap offer at 0.09% haha. That's what happens if you have to deal with spreads that are literally ten times their size apart.

[DoubleSwapper]

Guys can any of you help me?

So I am starting to play around with margin trading. Yesterday I went short at 430, when price fell to 410 levels I would have liked to closed the short with a ask order at 410. Unfortunately I had no Idea how to do that and had to market close it, which then got me the closing price of 414

Is it possible to close a short with an limit order? If so, how?

Thanks!

Just put in a limit long order the size of your short. Also, REALLY FUCKING BAD TIME to try out margin trading at the moment. You can be easily fucked over by BFX shitty trading engine without actually making any mistakes.

Ah cool, so if the size of the long order is exactly the same as the short order, it will just cancel the short order (if my limit order is met) and I won't have any positions open?

And thanks for the warning...well I am yust playing with 30$ to learn how the system works and get a feel for it. If they are lost It wouldn't hurt to much. Thanks for the warning thogh!

@noggin-scratcher: Thanks to you too

Normally yes. That's why the position sizes are denominated in bitcoin so so you won't have to think too long about it.

[bahamapascal]

Guys can any of you help me?

So I am starting to play around with margin trading. Yesterday I went short at 430, when price fell to 410 levels I would have liked to closed the short with a ask order at 410. Unfortunately I had no Idea how to do that and had to market close it, which then got me the closing price of 414

Is it possible to close a short with an limit order? If so, how?

Thanks!

Just put in a limit long order the size of your short. Also, REALLY FUCKING BAD TIME to try out margin trading at the moment. You can be easily fucked over by BFX shitty trading engine without actually making any mistakes.

Ah cool, so if the size of the long order is exactly the same as the short order, it will just cancel the short order (if my limit order is met) and I won't have any positions open?

And thanks for the warning...well I am yust playing with 30$ to learn how the system works and get a feel for it. If they are lost It wouldn't hurt to much. Thanks for the warning thogh!

@noggin-scratcher: Thanks to you too

Normally yes. That's why the position sizes are denominated in bitcoin so so you won't have to think too long about it.

Thanks

[Sukrim]

What sucks more is the artificial ceiling at 1%/day. Bitcoin can be (as shown AGAIN today!) be FAR more volatile than this. Either remove FRR from auto-taking offers (so FRR needs to be taken manually, an easy fix to the whole "my fixed rate does not get taken" issue) or remove the 1% ceiling on auto-taking offers, so the FRR can rise faster.

[DoubleSwapper]

What sucks more is the artificial ceiling at 1%/day. Bitcoin can be (as shown AGAIN today!) be FAR more volatile than this. Either remove FRR from auto-taking offers (so FRR needs to be taken manually, an easy fix to the whole "my fixed rate does not get taken" issue) or remove the 1% ceiling on auto-taking offers, so the FRR can rise faster.

I think a cap is sensible though. What if you borrow, there is a spike and you suddenly end up taking a 50% loan or something. With this insane FRR walling nobody has any incentive to fill the Grand Canyon wide gap between the super low FRR and the ceiling though and you'll always end up with these spikes as soon as the FRR is chopped down.

[Sukrim]

I think a cap is sensible though. What if you borrow, there is a spike and you suddenly end up taking a 50% loan or something.

So what? I tried to offer some rates manually just now, they were quickly taken but returned as soon as someone was even a little bit cheaper.

With FRR it's at least relatively safe to assume that loans are not just for 10 minutes... I would sit next to the PC and watch the market if I could make profits from this somewhere close to traders - fighting over making an additional cent today though is not worth my time.

Also if FRR wasn't taken automatically but only manually (just like >=1% offers), then there would be a more healthy fixed rate market. Currently fixed rates only make sense if you are underbidding FRR or want a chance to earn 1h profit of a close to 1% loan (that get returned quickly) in case the FRR wall goes down.

[mjr]

What the hell?!?!
That the hell is wrong with the user interface?!?!!
You evil stupid bastards! You have cost me 300 dollars or more!

When I click "cancel all orders" I expect all orders to be cancelled!
When I click "buy", I expect order to be executed!

It took a minute or so until the system accepted that I demanded for the orders to be cancelled and then several eons until I was able to type in a simple MARKET ORDER for which there is NO BUTTON; but anyway, the price has run away by more than 15 dollars in the mean time, so I wish you many nightmares.

Seriously.

You must be kidding!

P.S. I already heard some wealthy people complaining about your buggy system and only now I understand what did they mean. Of course, they are no longer on bitfinex.

OK, while I have no interest in responding to you, because I find you rude, in the interest of giving information to others, I will.

Clicking "cancel all orders" does in fact cancel all orders. It first asks you if you are sure that you want to do so. This is a protection in case you accidentally hit it, and then find you have canceled potentially dozens of orders which you have to re enter. When you are creating an order, you can create orders of different types. If the button said "buy right now no matter the price", you would be justified in assuming that pressing that button would execute immediately. This is also not the strategy that most professional traders would use. So, when crafting your order, we allow you to send a limit order, because if the price is at 425, but the next order is at 500, we don't think it is ideal to have your order instantly execute at 500, when most people wouldn't expect that. If you want to buy at literally ANY price, with a market order, you are free to do so, by changing the type of the order from "limit" to "market".

If you haven't figured out how to use the tool you are using, it might be better to learn how to use it before needing it suddenly. Anyone who has traded on Bitfinex for more than a day, realizes that the order types is in the drop down, and you can change it for your style of trading.

So, have a good day.

[mjr]

We are still doing backtesting on a proposed change to the calculation of the FRR.

Ooh, interesting. Don't know whether it was mentioned before, but I'm curious; which proposal are you testing?

We are testing a few different formulas, mainly centered on making the FRR more responsive to more current changes. One of them is an exponential weighted average. This is a potentially big change, so we want to avoid disruption and are being cautious. That being said, I don't think that we may get it perfect on the first try, and I see it potentially needing to be tweaked further.

[mjr]

What sucks more is the artificial ceiling at 1%/day. Bitcoin can be (as shown AGAIN today!) be FAR more volatile than this. Either remove FRR from auto-taking offers (so FRR needs to be taken manually, an easy fix to the whole "my fixed rate does not get taken" issue) or remove the 1% ceiling on auto-taking offers, so the FRR can rise faster.

OK, if we did that "so the FRR can rise faster" it would accomplish the goal of helping the FRR to rise faster, that is not our goal. The issue is not "how can we make people offering swaps more money", that is up to your strategy. What we want to do, is make a more responsive instrument to try and figure out an average rate at which people would be ok with providing a swap. I built a bot that can easily keep my funds constantly active, and it is not very hard to do. The main issue is finding out what rate you need in order to find it worthwhile. If your funds are returned, you should put them out again for the best offer. The issue is that those people who are closing their swaps in order to get a better rate are the exception, and most traders simply take whatever the lowest rate is. Traders can pick from two pools of funds (fixed rate offers) and (fixed rate offers + FRR), so if the traders didn't want to take funds at the FRR, they can. So far most people want access to the largest pool of funds, and they accept funds from the larger pool.

Secondly, the FRR is not supposed to match the returns or volatility of bitcoin. The 1% cap, which is an insanely high rate to pay, first off, has not even been close to being reached. So I don't see, how it is an artificial ceiling, when no one has come close to it. The fact of the matter is that there will probably always be someone willing to undercut your offer, and take .07, and that is what we are typically seeing. If you want to match the rate of bitcoin, you should trade bitcoin. The FRR was conceived originally to allow persons offering swaps to participate somewhat in rising markets, but never to make it equivalent to bitcoin. The main issue we have right now, is that it doesn't respond fast enough, which is why we are testing changes to the formula.

I constantly get the feeling, when discussing the FRR, that the people who hate it, hate it because they think they can charge traders more for swaps and they won't notice, that they are "leaving money on the table". This isn't the case, the swap market is competing amongst itself to provide swaps for whatever amount of volume we have. The people who pick the smallest number win. So, I don't think you will see, even if we remove the FRR a huge increase in the rates. The rates will stay as low as the person who wants it the most is willing to go.

Anyway, I think that for the amount of time people are spending writing on this forum about this issue, if they put that amount of time into writing a bot to manage their swaps, they would be much happier. You can probably get a basic bot working in like 2 hours, I would estimate, if you have experience with the API. You could then monitor the FRR, and make sure your offer was always in front of it.

[gog1]

Haven't been back for a while.  Finally nice to see someone who believes FRR is broken.

[eneloop]

@mjr
In future version, the "performance summary" is improved too? For e.g., I'd like to know my interest earned since beginning or on a montly basis.

[noggin-scratcher]

I constantly get the feeling, when discussing the FRR, that the people who hate it, hate it because they think they can charge traders more for swaps and they won't notice, that they are "leaving money on the table". This isn't the case, the swap market is competing amongst itself to provide swaps for whatever amount of volume we have. The people who pick the smallest number win. So, I don't think you will see, even if we remove the FRR a huge increase in the rates. The rates will stay as low as the person who wants it the most is willing to go.

I see what you're saying, and I'll admit... the current setup seems very good at keeping rates low most of the time and as a lender I'd love to see them higher, but all the same, I'm skeptical of the idea that the swap market is as efficient as you seem to think. From what I've seen there seems to be (1) a large pool of people who take swaps in the course of trading without looking at them and without much caring what the rate is unless it was ludicrously high; the difference between (say) 0.1% and 0.11% wouldn't register as important enough to pay attention to, and also (2) a large pool of people who lend on 'full auto' or near to it, not wanting to devote time to figuring out an optimal rate and willing to lend at almost any rate down to near-zero.

If you graphed out a supply/demand curve for that, I'm imagining a long segment on both curve where they're close to horizontal - varying the rate having almost no effect on how much demand there is (because demand is primarily driven by traders wanting to capitalise on price movements, unrelated to the rate) or how much supply there is (because depositing/withdrawing fiat is enough of a hassle that it's easier to just 'let it ride' even when rates dip down). If anything supply is likely to vary most by people taking cash out of swaps to trade with or vice versa, again correlating it mostly with price movements in the bitcoin market.

So in a 'pure' market there would be outcomes where the amount of supply/demand at those horizontal segments are significantly unequal, and the rate either skyrockets or crashes depending on which is the largest, and a somewhat less well defined outcome if they're approximately equal, where the horizontal segments intersect and the rate can just freely wander around at random between the point where traders as a whole start to strongly notice their swap costs and the point where lenders as a whole decide it's no longer worth bothering with at all, which is a huge range.

The FRR acts to pick a rate in that range and cluster everyone around it... for all the lip service to a supply/demand market, most of the time the FRR is the rate that everything happens around and your method of picking it makes it slow to react to upward movement but faster to react to downward movement (longs become more in demand => FRR wall absorbs all the extra demand without raising rates for absolutely as long as it possibly can, longs become less in demand => traders cancel their more expensive swaps and the average rate craters).

I feel like the impression you're getting of everyone just wanting higher rates is a result of the simple fact that people who want rates held low have nothing to complain about because the system we have is already doing that so effectively. You seem a little dismissive on that basis but I'd be wary of setting aside complaints just because the people making them seem 'whiny'. People are always going to complain, and always going to be biased, but it'd be nice if there were approximately equal numbers of complaints coming from both sides.

[Winky]

Why has Bitfinex changed BTC deposits to 3 confirmations before it get credited? This sucks!!! 

[gog1]

I actually believe BFX has a vested interest in ensuring the interest rate is high - they get a cut of it.  In theory, the high interest will cause more trading as "buy-and-hold", if they are any of those holders left after the fall to $280, get prohibitively expensive.  Trading also generate more fees & volume!!!

I have actually stated that in the past.

[HowardF]

Anyone else notice withdraws going slower than normal today?  I requested a withdraw more than an hour ago and its still processing.  Usually it takes less than 10 minutes to get coins out...

[ghibly79]

Same here, sent an email to support, a bit ago, but thought it was only an issue with my account. Withdrawals stuck in processing, one for over 2 hours now. These kind of issues have been pretty rare and they usually solve them quickly, let's hope cause it's causing me problems.

[HowardF]

Yeah, I've never had a problem in the past, and their support has always been really responsive, so I'm guessing it will be fixed quickly.  The volatility over the last few days probably ate away at their hot wallet, causing them to have to start pulling coins from cold storage.  I just hope there isn't  a huge drop in the next hour while I'm waiting to get coins to coinbase..... 

[ghibly79]

Update: they went through now. "Only" a slowness issue it seems. Still problematic ^^'

[TwinWinNerD]

I made >100s of BTC withdrawals from Bitfinex in the last months and it took more than 2 minutes in maybe 1-2 cases. I can definately state, that they are not "getting slower" or anything. Probably a whale cashed out and cleared the hot wallet.