Bitcoinica - Advanced Bitcoin Trading Platform

[zhoutong]

Mt. Gox and TradeHill are like stock markets, which are okay for a relatively small market like Bitcoin. But what if we want to make it larger? This is how abstraction comes in.

My design approach is to take out the noise: If Bitcoin is really a currency, why should we care so much about BTCUSD's volume? Why should we even see the order book? I know these are two important components for every market, but it's not important to everyone. Here, Bitcoinica guarantees liquidity, gives people the opportunities to use margin and do short selling, and giving quotes with acceptable spreads.

The reason brokerages exist in the stock / forex markets is because the exchanges charge large fees to have a seat at the table. Since the Bitcoin exchanges are free for everyone to use, this reduces the role of a brokerage. Now, you are providing a valuable service to people by allowing short and long positions as well as the different types of orders. I think you will have success with your clients, but there is a shade of mistruth about what you do.

My position is one of a fundamental philosophical difference. I think that short selling should actually produce an effect on the market. I think that every order should touch the market. If someone sells short, you are not actually lending them the Bitcoin as happens in the stock markets. If someone gets a margin call from you, it's not because your clearing institution is asking you to settle your account before close of business.

Without touching the market, it's all just numbers in your database.

That's not really true. We hedge most of the transactions in Mt. Gox. However, I do have to use a bit of smartness to write an algorithm to manage the hedging. I can see the actual trading data of Bitcoinica - way too many people are transacting at different directions nearlyat the same time. I also checked my Mt Gox account history, even with the algorithm, I'm still selling to myself most of the time.

I would rather save these commissions and offer lower spreads by taking a little bit of risk. I'm okay with losing money on some transactions while making them back on others. In the long run, we may  offer better rates than any other exchange. This will be a competitive edge for Bitcoinica.

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[2112]

What's so special about the country I'm living in? And what? "financial fraud"?

While I don't really understand what you mean, I have to say that the Bitcoin market is open for all, and new ideas are coming out every day. I urge you to look at the product itself instead of judging by other factors.

I'm not interested in unethically making other Bitcoin fans' money in this united community. What we want is to enlarge and enrich the Bitcoin market and Bitcoinica does the job of bringing in Forex traders.

Zhoutong, I truely think that you are a genius. It so just happens that you seem to have an innate ability to come up with evil schemes. I truely believe you when you are saying that you don't know what I'm talking about.

Wikipedia has a good introduction to bucket shop concept and why it is considered a fraud in most of the civilized world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

Jesse Livermore was the most famous bucket shop promoter, although he never was a bucket shop operator. In fact the actual bucket shop operators went to the extreme to avoid being associated with him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lauriston_Livermore

Your country is significant in my mind, because the South East Asia was/is a heaven for bucket shops. In not sure about Singapore, but Hong Kong and Macau have a long and continuous history of fly-by-night hole-in-the-wall financial "exchanges". You have extended the long tradition with your offer of accepting single USD accounts to allow wagering on bitcoin.

[2112]

Zhoutong... I'm very impressed with what you've created so quickly. People are understandably skeptical, but I'm sure you'll be proving yourself over time. Bitcoin is much stronger because there are ambitious people like you building new systems. Keep it up!

If my Dwolla clears into MtGox today I might try out some of this margin stuff on your site

The "Boy plunger of Netherlands" endorses the "Boy plunger of Singapore"!

I always disliked Something Awfull forum posters, but they do get at least one thing right: bitcoin community continously delivers excellent entertainment in terms of human folly, abuse, fraud and plain stupidity.

[zhoutong]

What's so special about the country I'm living in? And what? "financial fraud"?

While I don't really understand what you mean, I have to say that the Bitcoin market is open for all, and new ideas are coming out every day. I urge you to look at the product itself instead of judging by other factors.

I'm not interested in unethically making other Bitcoin fans' money in this united community. What we want is to enlarge and enrich the Bitcoin market and Bitcoinica does the job of bringing in Forex traders.

Zhoutong, I truely think that you are a genius. It so just happens that you seem to have an innate ability to come up with evil schemes. I truely believe you when you are saying that you don't know what I'm talking about.

Wikipedia has a good introduction to bucket shop concept and why it is considered a fraud in most of the civilized world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

Jesse Livermore was the most famous bucket shop promoter, although he never was a bucket shop operator. In fact the actual bucket shop operators went to the extreme to avoid being associated with him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lauriston_Livermore

Your country is significant in my mind, because the South East Asia was/is a heaven for bucket shops. In not sure about Singapore, but Hong Kong and Macau have a long and continuous history of fly-by-night hole-in-the-wall financial "exchanges". You have extended the long tradition with your offer of accepting single USD accounts to allow wagering on bitcoin.

Thanks for the explanation. However,

1. Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, it's a brokerage. All the hedging will take place if our clients place orders in a particular direction. The spread seems high now, but will be eventually lower.

2. We don't bet against our clients. We never want them to lose. There's no incentive to do that.

3. There are large scale transactions coming in Bitcoinica. First day we got 3700+ BTC, ranked number 3 among all trading platforms. Bitcoinica has more than 5% of total Bitcoin/USD trades. A bucket shop can't survive this amount of volume.

4. Because of stop orders and margin calls, we are partly responsible for the crash. Our orders are already influencing the market.

5. I'm not a Singapore citizen. I just live here. Thank you for teaching me the culture.

[2112]

Thanks for the explanation. However,

1. Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, it's a brokerage. All the hedging will take place if our clients place orders in a particular direction. The spread seems high now, but will be eventually lower.

2. We don't bet against our clients. We never want them to lose. There's no incentive to do that.

3. There are large scale transactions coming in Bitcoinica. First day we got 3700+ BTC, ranked number 3 among all trading platforms. Bitcoinica has more than 5% of total Bitcoin/USD trades. A bucket shop can't survive this amount of volume.

4. Because of stop orders and margin calls, we are partly responsible for the crash. Our orders are already influencing the market.

5. I'm not a Singapore citizen. I just live here. Thank you for teaching me the culture.

I have nothing to add, I just wanted to preserve the above post in a quote agains possible later editions. As the item (4) shows, we now have an official "Boy plunger of Singapore (but not a citizen of Singapore)", who had engineered one of the bigest daily percentage drops in the history of BTC vs. USD trading.

[alfred]

Interesting stuff... well done...

[FreeMoney]

It seems pretty bizarre that I can't start trading by sending you some bitcoins. And am I blind, where are the options?

[Maria]

Made 1 Deposit and 1 withdrawal with 500.00 MTGOX USD Profit. Both instant. LOVE YOUR SERVICE.

Maria.

[ovidiusoft]

So, let me see if I understood correctly. You people are ok with sending USD (since BTC is not accepted) to a guy you don't know, running untested code? Without even checking country of residence, name/address, checking that he has a company that operates legally, investigating means of litigation and costs for said litigation?

Well, in this case, everybody please send me all their money. I won't even lie to you, I am telling you to your face that you're not getting them back. (Note: this is a joke, I am not a scammer and no, I don't want your money.)

[tsupp4]

We don't operate a Bitcoin wallet. All our funds are stored in Mt. Gox and our bank accounts.

Does it mean, whenever Mt.Gox is offline, your service doesn't work?

[ovidiusoft]

@Matthew, I believe you are wrong. Fast-launching something on the market should *never* be done illegaly. If you need to have permision to open a certain kind of company, you do it. If you're afraid someone would do it before you and you'll waste effort, just don't do it. Period. Anyway, why do you think that launching later is bad? As long as it's good competition, the market will embrace it.

I believe we have such a large amount of professional scams in Bitcoin (not talking about people not returning a 5 BTC loan from IBB) because customers are willing to take insane amounts of risk without even blinking. I also believe this is hurting the Bitcoin economy as a whole. Do we really want Bitcoin to be branded forever as the easy way to buy drugs and a scammer's paradise?

Note: I am not implying OP is a scammer. But, until he proves he owns a company operating legally acording to his local laws, I believe he should not be trusted, no matter how "cool" his services are.

[Andrew Vorobyov]

17 years old made it??? Holy shit. You must be genius, zhoutong.

Very impressive!

My daughter is 2.5 old. She barely speaks but handles my Nexus S... its called evolution.
What you have achieved as knowledge is built-in in your kids.

[Andrew Vorobyov]

My design approach is to take out the noise: If Bitcoin is really a currency, why should we care so much about BTCUSD's volume? Why should we even see the order book? I know these are two important components for every market, but it's not important to everyone.

I still appreciate your coding skills but... we are making new economy here and you are selling "sugar water" or gambling site...

[ovidiusoft]

I know, and I agree mostly. Didn't mean to bite your head off. I really think if he's doing it out of love, we should support him. Whatever feelings we have, lets keep them in adult and advise him. This group is way too eager to yell scammer and run away cackling at the aftermath.

I would definitely support anyone planning to launch a Bitcoin product, during development and testing phases. Unfortunately, OP didn't ask for development support/testing/advice, he presented Bitcoinica as a finished and launched product. At this stage, I would stop considering myself a beta tester and start being a customer. As a customer, I want to see company papers and IDs.

OP, please state the status of the project. Is it a launched, open for customers service? If so, can you provide company papers and proof that you operate legally? Can you provide either source code (under NDA is ok, I think) or proof that a respected company audited your source code? Can you provide us with hosting/operation details so that we decide if your setup is safe enough?

[zhoutong]

My design approach is to take out the noise: If Bitcoin is really a currency, why should we care so much about BTCUSD's volume? Why should we even see the order book? I know these are two important components for every market, but it's not important to everyone.

I still appreciate your coding skills but... we are making new economy here and you are selling "sugar water" or gambling site...

I hope you have at least read Bitcoinica's About and FAQ or have tried out the service.

I'm personally a Libertarian Anarchist (free-market advocate) and I take Economics courses. Bitcoinica gives everyone more power to trade, while helping miners to hedge against their losses when Bitcoin is dropping. Majority of the trades will be directed to the spot market and to increase liquidity.

I believe that Bitcoinica should have added value to the community.

[zhoutong]

I know, and I agree mostly. Didn't mean to bite your head off. I really think if he's doing it out of love, we should support him. Whatever feelings we have, lets keep them in adult and advise him. This group is way too eager to yell scammer and run away cackling at the aftermath.

I would definitely support anyone planning to launch a Bitcoin product, during development and testing phases. Unfortunately, OP didn't ask for development support/testing/advice, he presented Bitcoinica as a finished and launched product. At this stage, I would stop considering myself a beta tester and start being a customer. As a customer, I want to see company papers and IDs.

OP, please state the status of the project. Is it a launched, open for customers service? If so, can you provide company papers and proof that you operate legally? Can you provide either source code (under NDA is ok, I think) or proof that a respected company audited your source code? Can you provide us with hosting/operation details so that we decide if your setup is safe enough?

- This service is officially launched. We currently accept customer service by email. We reply most emails in a few hours.

- Total trading volume has exceeded 10,000 BTC. We will disclose the exact data via our API after 1-2 weeks.

- Bitcoinica is under xWaylab Inc., a registered corporation in United States. While I'm living in Singapore, xWaylab Inc. currently provides e-commerce solutions to some of our clients, and I'm not the sole shareholder. I'm responsible for Bitcoinica product development, with the help of two adults graduated with Finance / Accountancy degrees and several years of Forex brokering experience.

- We are applying for SSL Certificate with Extended Validation (our current certificate is secure only at the domain level), which means that the corporate information will be validated by a major CA. This may take a few weeks while they gather our corporate documents. We will announce the results soon.

- Bitcoinica is closed source. We will arrange for security auditing soon. I have a few contacts who are security professionals and I'm in the process of negotiating the details.

- Bitcoinica is hosted by Heroku, a Platform-as-a-Service provider. Servers are located in Amazon Web Services datacenters. Both Amazon AWS and Heroku have passed PCI Level 1 Compliance and they host thousands of popular websites.

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

No response from them in 12 hours so far.. It's given me the same error with different amounts when I try to withdraw funds. I'm a bit frustrated.

[zhoutong]

No response from them in 12 hours so far.. It's given me the same error with different amounts when I try to withdraw funds. I'm a bit frustrated.

Sorry, your previous email went into my junk box so I didn't see it.

I really apologize for the error. I have already replied to your email and asked for your BTC withdrawal details but you haven't responded yet.

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

No response from them in 12 hours so far.. It's given me the same error with different amounts when I try to withdraw funds. I'm a bit frustrated.

Sorry, your previous email went into my junk box so I didn't see it.

I really apologize for the error. I have already replied to your email and asked for your BTC withdrawal details but you haven't responded yet.

Awesome. I'll reply to your email from here, and give you my receiving address publicly so that there's transparency in the error resolution. Ok?

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'd like to leave $100 in there.

The BTC equivalent of the 86.10 should go to

Address: 191npMfngRLgheQHDUzTAgi9Q8mH8FfHyL

Thanks again, and awesome site! I can't wait for the spread to narrow a bit

-Jonathan

[zhoutong]

No response from them in 12 hours so far.. It's given me the same error with different amounts when I try to withdraw funds. I'm a bit frustrated.

Sorry, your previous email went into my junk box so I didn't see it.

I really apologize for the error. I have already replied to your email and asked for your BTC withdrawal details but you haven't responded yet.

Awesome. I'll reply to your email from here, and give you my receiving address publicly so that there's transparency in the error resolution. Ok?

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'd like to leave $100 in there.

The BTC equivalent of the 86.10 should go to

Address: 191npMfngRLgheQHDUzTAgi9Q8mH8FfHyL

Thanks again, and awesome site! I can't wait for the spread to narrow a bit

-Jonathan

I have placed a Market order on your behalf for this withdrawal.

BTCUSD 14.38    MARKET    —    EXECUTED @ 5.9805   

It costs $85.99959. This amount was deducted from your account.

Then I sent 14.38 BTC to your address.

Bitcoin Transaction: 68661f544cd0e7a7dd85d7fa7abcc10a9365c4bb542d2c5eb23d373dc51c4bc9

Thank you for your business!