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

[warsame]

PLEASE ANSWER EVERYONE
How long does it take from the day you request a USD withdrawal until you receive the payment? What's your experience (regular & not express) with Bitfinex withdrawal times?

Thanks in advance.

I picked the regular route. The request was processed in two days within BFX and I received the payment in my bank account the next day after it was approved.

[Bagpipe]

Another bug report:

I placed a market BUY order. It came out in the public trade history as SELL order. (red)
So, I placed another one 15 seconds later.
That one came out as SELL order as well!

What the heck?!

You have some VERY confused computers!
P.S. the limit orders to which my market buy orders were matched with were nowhere to be seen in the orderbook either. But that can be explained by lag, but what you did with the reporting can't. Certainly it may be a bug in bitcoinwisdom, but I doubt it.

[aumusxou]

Another bug report:

I placed a market BUY order. It came out in the public trade history as SELL order. (red)
So, I placed another one 15 seconds later.
That one came out as SELL order as well!

What the heck?!

You have some VERY confused computers!
P.S. the limit orders to which my market buy orders were matched with were nowhere to be seen in the orderbook either. But that can be explained by lag, but what you did with the reporting can't. Certainly it may be a bug in bitcoinwisdom, but I doubt it.

Nothing is wrong with BFX.   The "problem" is how bitcoinwisdom displays buys/sells, ie not intuitively, as you just proved...

I believe BCW goes by the method of: if last price is lower than previous price, mark as a sell, even if it's a buy.  Does that make sense?  (Therefore, I don't rely on the red/green indication on bitcoinwisdom.  I like their site, but not how order history is displayed.)

Regarding "not displayed in order book", do you know what hidden orders are?

Check this out: http://bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd.php  Maybe they display buy/sells better.

[Bagpipe]

Regarding "not displayed in order book", do you know what hidden orders are?

Check this out: http://bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd.php  Maybe they display buy/sells better.

You mean that MY OWN order has for some MYSTERIOUS reason become HIDDEN?
No, I don't buy THAT. The problem of the reporting is the same: the orderbook was unchanged in case of some 'unimportant' either market or limit orders and the result of those orders was not known for many seconds; and when the results came back, they were the worst possible outcome for me.

Seriously, I was putting market buy orders at prices that were 3-4 USD lower than what I received in the end of those 15-18 seconds. Which means that I was either trading on old data or somebody intentionally used deformation of the timely reporting to rob me off those 1-1.5%. And I wasn't the only one.

I mention it because that is how NYSE HFT bots do it; I see no reason why finex should support such methods as well. (or directly create it)

[aumusxou]

Regarding "not displayed in order book", do you know what hidden orders are?

Check this out: http://bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd.php  Maybe they display buy/sells better.

You mean that MY OWN order has for some MYSTERIOUS reason become HIDDEN?
No, I don't buy THAT. The problem of the reporting is the same: the orderbook was unchanged in case of some 'unimportant' either market or limit orders and the result of those orders was not known for many seconds; and when the results came back, they were the worst possible outcome for me.

Seriously, I was putting market buy orders at prices that were 3-4 USD lower than what I received in the end of those 15-18 seconds. Which means that I was either trading on old data or somebody intentionally used deformation of the timely reporting to rob me off those 1-1.5%. And I wasn't the only one.

I mention it because that is how NYSE HFT bots do it; I see no reason why finex should support such methods as well. (or directly create it)

No, I didn't say your "OWN order has for some MYSTERIOUS reason become HIDDEN".  Do you know what a hidden order is?  It hides the matching order in the orderbook, like I thought you explained is what happened. 

"The limit orders to which my market buy orders were matched with were nowhere to be seen in the orderbook ". 

A hidden order (that absorbs your order) will show in the public ledger after it's done, but never before.

Does bitfinex "officially" publish the trade history somewhere (besides their site and API)?  Are you referring to a 3rd party like bitcoinwisdom displaying the history as "lagging"?  How can you refer to a 3rd party as being laggy? They depend on their own resources to access the API.

[HowardF]

So now people keep undercutting the FRR and there's no way to lend at FRR. It would be nice to be able to autorenew with a market order or something like that. I don't really want to be monitoring my account all the time to make sure that all the USD are lent.

I'd also point out, people have been undercutting the FRR since FRR was introduced.   This isn't a new thing.

[btcisreal]

PLEASE ANSWER EVERYONE
How long does it take from the day you request a USD withdrawal until you receive the payment? What's your experience (regular & not express) with Bitfinex withdrawal times?

Thanks in advance.

I picked the regular route. The request was processed in two days within BFX and I received the payment in my bank account the next day after it was approved.

Thanks for your reply my friend.

[Timetwister]

So now people keep undercutting the FRR and there's no way to lend at FRR. It would be nice to be able to autorenew with a market order or something like that. I don't really want to be monitoring my account all the time to make sure that all the USD are lent.

I'd also point out, people have been undercutting the FRR since FRR was introduced.   This isn't a new thing.

Maybe, the new thing is having to wait many hours to lend my USD at the FRR. I'd like to have an option for automatically renewing at FRR-0.0001% (or whatever I choose).

[HowardF]

Maybe, the new thing is having to wait many hours to lend my USD at the FRR. I'd like to have an option for automatically renewing at FRR-0.0001% (or whatever I choose).

The only way you're ever going to get an option like that is to use a bot.  If they added it to the site, everyone would just choose that otpotion and it would become the new FRR wall effectively.

Also, I wouldn't call the FRR wait time a "new thing".  If you read, I dunno, the last 50 or so pages of this forum thread, its full of people talking about how broken FRR lending is.

[noggin-scratcher]

So now people keep undercutting the FRR and there's no way to lend at FRR. It would be nice to be able to autorenew with a market order or something like that. I don't really want to be monitoring my account all the time to make sure that all the USD are lent.

[...]

Maybe, the new thing is having to wait many hours to lend my USD at the FRR. I'd like to have an option for automatically renewing at FRR-0.0001% (or whatever I choose).

If you had that option, everyone else would have that option, and then not only would manual fixed-rate swaps be undercutting you, but automatic "FRR minus 0.0002%" (or 0.0001% less than whatever you set it to) swaps would be too. Hell, even if no-one were 'under-cutting' you, you'd still be waiting for $3M worth of swaps to be taken before your spot in the FRR queue came to the front.

Your choices are simple: actively manage your account to ensure your money is taken, or let your funds idle on auto-mode until there's enough demand to take it along with every dollar offered under it.

[Timetwister]

So now people keep undercutting the FRR and there's no way to lend at FRR. It would be nice to be able to autorenew with a market order or something like that. I don't really want to be monitoring my account all the time to make sure that all the USD are lent.

[...]

Maybe, the new thing is having to wait many hours to lend my USD at the FRR. I'd like to have an option for automatically renewing at FRR-0.0001% (or whatever I choose).

If you had that option, everyone else would have that option, and then not only would manual fixed-rate swaps be undercutting you, but automatic "FRR minus 0.0002%" (or 0.0001% less than whatever you set it to) swaps would be too. Hell, even if no-one were 'under-cutting' you, you'd still be waiting for $3M worth of swaps to be taken before your spot in the FRR queue came to the front.

Your choices are simple: actively manage your account to ensure your money is taken, or let your funds idle on auto-mode until there's enough demand to take it along with every dollar offered under it.

Others are already undercutting the FRR, I don't know if manually or using a bot. With that option, I'd be able to also automatically undercut them. It would also be better for people taking loans, as there would be more competition for lending.

[HowardF]

Your choices are simple: actively manage your account to ensure your money is taken, or let your funds idle on auto-mode until there's enough demand to take it along with every dollar offered under it.

Or run a bot like MarginBot  

[Bagpipe]

Regarding "not displayed in order book", do you know what hidden orders are?

Check this out: http://bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd.php  Maybe they display buy/sells better.

No, I didn't say your "OWN order has for some MYSTERIOUS reason become HIDDEN".  Do you know what a hidden order is?  It hides the matching order in the orderbook, like I thought you explained is what happened.  

"The limit orders to which my market buy orders were matched with were nowhere to be seen in the orderbook ".  

A hidden order (that absorbs your order) will show in the public ledger after it's done, but never before.

Does bitfinex "officially" publish the trade history somewhere (besides their site and API)?  Are you referring to a 3rd party like bitcoinwisdom displaying the history as "lagging"?  How can you refer to a 3rd party as being laggy? They depend on their own resources to access the API.

or this has just happened: I placed sell orders at 388 and389 and such and 10-30 seconds later the price climbs up to 390 and NONE of my sell orders were touched, even.

I'M TOUCHED!

The earliest was the order
139003936 at around 385

Basically, this would imply that the Bitfinex order matching engine has a lag or 30-90 seconds, which quite beats the purpose of online trading, you can make a trade by making a phone call to the trade floor in that time.

the 390 came WELL AFTER THAT!

P.S. There is a total of 1352 sell orders right now: let's see how many can a 286/10MHz match up in 100 miliseconds.
...basically, an 286/10MHz would be a slight bit great deal faster while running the software in Microsoft Quickbasic doing this task than bitfinex is currently now. It is easy to see that btc-e has order matching performance somewhere between 100x and 1000x greater than bitfinex. This is amazing and a reason to use btc-e.

[noggin-scratcher]

Others are already undercutting the FRR, I don't know if manually or using a bot. With that option, I'd be able to also automatically undercut them. It would also be better for people taking loans, as there would be more competition for lending.

You're missing my point. Whatever you set your auto-lend to, others will react to the presence of your swap offer and undercut you if they so choose. That's just the nature of the beast... it's a market, people want their offers filled, so undercutting happens all the time. You set your rate to be "FRR minus 0.1", some other guy will set his to be "FRR minus 0.1001" and a fixed rate offer will pop up just below that. The only way you're going to be able to avoid being undercut by other offers is by taking an active hand in placing your offers, or running a bot to do so for you.

Source: I am undercutting you constantly by manually placing fixed-rate offers.

[Timetwister]

You're missing my point. Whatever you set your auto-lend to, others will react to the presence of your swap offer and undercut you if they so choose. That's just the nature of the beast... it's a market, people want their offers filled, so undercutting happens all the time. You set your rate to be "FRR minus 0.1", some other guy will set his to be "FRR minus 0.1001" and a fixed rate offer will pop up just below that. The only way you're going to be able to avoid being undercut by other offers is by taking an active hand in placing your offers, or running a bot to do so for you.

Source: I am undercutting you constantly by manually placing fixed-rate offers.

You are assuming that every lender is willing to accept the same interest rate, which is false. I may be willing to undercut more than others to get my offer filled. Or less, and see my offer waiting (like it happens now with FRR).

[mjr]

Maybe, the new thing is having to wait many hours to lend my USD at the FRR. I'd like to have an option for automatically renewing at FRR-0.0001% (or whatever I choose).

The only way you're ever going to get an option like that is to use a bot.  If they added it to the site, everyone would just choose that otpotion and it would become the new FRR wall effectively.

Also, I wouldn't call the FRR wait time a "new thing".  If you read, I dunno, the last 50 or so pages of this forum thread, its full of people talking about how broken FRR lending is.

First off, this was my suggestion a while ago, and NO, that is not what would happen at all, because why would EVERYONE pick '-0.0001%'? Some people would pick  '-0.01%' or -0.02%', and I still don't think that the "wall" is a valid complaint. It means that here is a bunch of offers which NOBODY TOOK. That means someone else's offer was taken. It means that all those using the FRR are NOT competing because they don't have active swaps. I love how people keep saying "you aren't going to get good rates using FRR, you should actively manage or use a bot", and then say that they can't compete with the FRR. If the returns using the FRR are not great, and you can do substantially better by using a bot, then you simply have a situation where the more effort you put in, the better your returns are, which is awesome. Tons of people simply think that "something is better than nothing". I know we all miss the "good old days" when you could offer for much higher rates, but anytime something is very popular like that, the swarm of other people jumping in will always make the returns much lower. Compare the size of the swaps market then with its size now. It continues to grow, because in my opinion, it offers an extremely great risk to reward ratio.

Secondly, is there any way you could add your own FRR calculation to your bot? For example, could I either create or modify a bot that simply duplicates the current FRR calculation and offers at that rate? Again, I think it is interesting, because if everyone simply chose to use that calculation (as they ARE doing right now), the situation would be identical (besides the floating of the rate) and you would still get a "wall". I just think that the "wall" that people are complaining about will always exist in that there are a lot of people competing for a fixed amount of demand, the people willing to go the lowest are the ones who make ANY return, and right now, you have people who are using the FRR in order to passively gain returns staying OUT of that competition at least some of the time (whenever there is a wall). Lastly, if people think that people "undercutting" the FRR "wall" is lowering the rate, they are right, since that would factor into the calculation. Easy, simply enter it above the FRR, and once it gets eaten up, you will get even higher and it keeps rising. This doesn't happen because people are displaying their TRUE minimums and they are much higher than their STATED minimums. If no one wanted to offer a swap underneath the FRR, their would be no offers. So even though some people might complain, others seem to be jumping in front to push that rate lower...

[mjr]

Regarding "not displayed in order book", do you know what hidden orders are?

Check this out: http://bfxdata.com/orderbooks/btcusd.php  Maybe they display buy/sells better.

No, I didn't say your "OWN order has for some MYSTERIOUS reason become HIDDEN".  Do you know what a hidden order is?  It hides the matching order in the orderbook, like I thought you explained is what happened.  

"The limit orders to which my market buy orders were matched with were nowhere to be seen in the orderbook ".  

A hidden order (that absorbs your order) will show in the public ledger after it's done, but never before.

Does bitfinex "officially" publish the trade history somewhere (besides their site and API)?  Are you referring to a 3rd party like bitcoinwisdom displaying the history as "lagging"?  How can you refer to a 3rd party as being laggy? They depend on their own resources to access the API.

or this has just happened: I placed sell orders at 388 and389 and such and 10-30 seconds later the price climbs up to 390 and NONE of my sell orders were touched, even.

I'M TOUCHED!

The earliest was the order
139003936 at around 385

Basically, this would imply that the Bitfinex order matching engine has a lag or 30-90 seconds, which quite beats the purpose of online trading, you can make a trade by making a phone call to the trade floor in that time.

the 390 came WELL AFTER THAT!

P.S. There is a total of 1352 sell orders right now: let's see how many can a 286/10MHz match up in 100 miliseconds.
...basically, an 286/10MHz would be a slight bit great deal faster while running the software in Microsoft Quickbasic doing this task than bitfinex is currently now. It is easy to see that btc-e has order matching performance somewhere between 100x and 1000x greater than bitfinex. This is amazing and a reason to use btc-e.

This doesn't imply that at all, what it does imply is that the site that you are using to receive market data may not display it in real time. Secondly, where is this "trade floor" that you can call using a telephone? I have not heard of it, though I did start Satoshi Square in New York, and that was probably the closest there has been to a trading pit. Also, I don't think Microsoft Quickbasic is a matching engine, but I could be wrong about that, I don't use it.

Either way, we have a major upgrade in the works, which has been announced, and should put us solidly in the lead as far as speed, but to be fair, it isn't hard to be fast when you have such low volume...

[HowardF]

First off, this was my suggestion a while ago, and NO, that is not what would happen at all, because why would EVERYONE pick '-0.0001%'? Some people would pick  '-0.01%' or -0.02%', and I still don't think that the "wall" is a valid complaint. It means that here is a bunch of offers which NOBODY TOOK. That means someone else's offer was taken. It means that all those using the FRR are NOT competing because they don't have active swaps. I love how people keep saying "you aren't going to get good rates using FRR, you should actively manage or use a bot", and then say that they can't compete with the FRR.

The problem with the FRR is that it creates a ton of offers at a very specific price point ( the wall ), which becomes so large that any active lenders are going to specifically target that number to undercut (otherwise we simply can't make enough money to be worthwhile).  That means that unless there is a HUGH flash run, the FRR will constantly go down, because all the lends going out are below THAT SPECIFIC point.  By spreading pending loans out along a much wider range, even with millions in pending loans, each specific price point would likely have very little waiting, so active traders would have more flexibility in choosing a target to undercut.  This would create a much more natural moving average, up in heavy demand, down in light demand.  As it is right now, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of loans are always taken out just a few point below the FRR, which isn't a natural price flow at all, but a permanent strong downward pressure, regardless of current demand.

Secondly, is there any way you could add your own FRR calculation to your bot? For example, could I either create or modify a bot that simply duplicates the current FRR calculation and offers at that rate? Again, I think it is interesting, because if everyone simply chose to use that calculation (as they ARE doing right now), the situation would be identical (besides the floating of the rate) and you would still get a "wall".

I wouldn't be able to create my own FRR unless I had access to all active loans via the API. Well, I could probably fudge something pretty close together based on historic market data, etc, but why would I want to?  I'm only interested in algorithms that spread out offers, so loans can go out in a more natural spread.

I just think that the "wall" that people are complaining about will always exist in that there are a lot of people competing for a fixed amount of demand, the people willing to go the lowest are the ones who make ANY return, and right now, you have people who are using the FRR in order to passively gain returns staying OUT of that competition at least some of the time (whenever there is a wall).

I disagree completely.  If there would "always be a wall", then why doesn't this carry over to buying and selling coins?  I don't always see walls on the orderbooks, yet we're competing for limited supply and  demand there.  Walls are not common in a traditional market, and are almost always the result of a single entity attempting to manipulate  the market.  Its just in relation to FRR, Bitfinx itself is the manipulator.

So even though some people might complain, others seem to be jumping in front to push that rate lower...

We're complaining about the fact that the market feels very controlled and manipulated.  If it were a natural flow market, even if the rates went lower as a result, I wouldn't complain.  I would be happy to compete in a natural market, whatever the result.

It continues to grow, because in my opinion, it offers an extremely great risk to reward ratio.

Despite my complaints above, I agree with this completely.   That's why I'm still here, and its why I care.  I'd hate to see this become untrue... 

[2586]

I just think that the "wall" that people are complaining about will always exist in that there are a lot of people competing for a fixed amount of demand, the people willing to go the lowest are the ones who make ANY return, and right now, you have people who are using the FRR in order to passively gain returns staying OUT of that competition at least some of the time (whenever there is a wall).

Do you understand the point of having a well-filled order book, In general? You don't seem to.

Margin traders should really be the ones taking you guys to task for this, since they're affected far more than lenders are. The issue is just more visible to lenders.

[mjr]

First off, this was my suggestion a while ago, and NO, that is not what would happen at all, because why would EVERYONE pick '-0.0001%'? Some people would pick  '-0.01%' or -0.02%', and I still don't think that the "wall" is a valid complaint. It means that here is a bunch of offers which NOBODY TOOK. That means someone else's offer was taken. It means that all those using the FRR are NOT competing because they don't have active swaps. I love how people keep saying "you aren't going to get good rates using FRR, you should actively manage or use a bot", and then say that they can't compete with the FRR.

The problem with the FRR is that it creates a ton of offers at a very specific price point ( the wall ), which becomes so large that any active lenders are going to specifically target that number to undercut (otherwise we simply can't make enough money to be worthwhile).  That means that unless there is a HUGH flash run, the FRR will constantly go down, because all the lends going out are below THAT SPECIFIC point.  By spreading pending loans out along a much wider range, even with millions in pending loans, each specific price point would likely have very little waiting, so active traders would have more flexibility in choosing a target to undercut.  This would create a much more natural moving average, up in heavy demand, down in light demand.  As it is right now, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of loans are always taken out just a few point below the FRR, which isn't a natural price flow at all, but a permanent strong downward pressure, regardless of current demand.

Secondly, is there any way you could add your own FRR calculation to your bot? For example, could I either create or modify a bot that simply duplicates the current FRR calculation and offers at that rate? Again, I think it is interesting, because if everyone simply chose to use that calculation (as they ARE doing right now), the situation would be identical (besides the floating of the rate) and you would still get a "wall".

I wouldn't be able to create my own FRR unless I had access to all active loans via the API. Well, I could probably fudge something pretty close together based on historic market data, etc, but why would I want to?  I'm only interested in algorithms that spread out offers, so loans can go out in a more natural spread.

I just think that the "wall" that people are complaining about will always exist in that there are a lot of people competing for a fixed amount of demand, the people willing to go the lowest are the ones who make ANY return, and right now, you have people who are using the FRR in order to passively gain returns staying OUT of that competition at least some of the time (whenever there is a wall).

I disagree completely.  If there would "always be a wall", then why doesn't this carry over to buying and selling coins?  I don't always see walls on the orderbooks, yet we're competing for limited supply and  demand there.  Walls are not common in a traditional market, and are almost always the result of a single entity attempting to manipulate  the market.  Its just in relation to FRR, Bitfinx itself is the manipulator.

So even though some people might complain, others seem to be jumping in front to push that rate lower...

We're complaining about the fact that the market feels very controlled and manipulated.  If it were a natural flow market, even if the rates went lower as a result, I wouldn't complain.  I would be happy to compete in a natural market, whatever the result.

It continues to grow, because in my opinion, it offers an extremely great risk to reward ratio.

Despite my complaints above, I agree with this completely.   That's why I'm still here, and its why I care.  I'd hate to see this become untrue... 

I agree with your points, and I am really glad you are part of this discussion now. That is the most concisely someone has summed up the current problems with the FRR, and it was why I suggested allowing a delta to offset from this current number. The other side of it that we are working on, is creating an FRR that moves more fluidly, this would mean that you couldn't just "set it and forget it" underneath the FRR, because that number would change every hour, and track the market better.

The part that always frustrates me, and why I like your comment, is because you don't have a rate agenda in mind. If the rate lowers without the FRR, you are ok with that. So, it is the most intellectually honest critique. Just wanted to say thanks.