Intersango exchange (formerly Britcoin)

[sonba]

Good luck, genjix! If we can help you somehow give us a shout

[1713955207]

1713955207

[Pontius]

Any plans to make withdrawals, deposits and IOC/FOK orders available through the API?

[phantomcircuit]

Any plans to make withdrawals, deposits and IOC/FOK orders available through the API?

withdrawals, deposits, and IOC/FOK orders are all available through the API

currently only paxum and bitcoin withdrawals can be created through the API though

https://bitcoinconsultancy.com/wiki/Intersango/API

[genjix]

The bank account is now operational. Apologies for the delay this week. It was a technical error on the side of the bank and has been fixed.

Deposits and withdrawals from this week have been completed.

I think a bunch of banks have experienced technical faults this week and it may be worth your time to inquire as you might be viable for compensation. A friend told me this:

>> my bank called and they still haven't figured out why my transfers were rejected
>> my bank manager passed it on to customer relations for "obvious compensation" because the technical faults department have been handling similar issues for a week without giving him a reason.

Details of the technical error:

In the UK there are 3 payment types between banks called BACS, FPS and CHAPS. CHAPS is for high end payments (like moving a million or more) so we will ignore that. BACS is the old transfer type and usually takes 5 working business days. FPS is a newer government mandated inter-bank standard that makes payments within 1-2 business days but usually within a few hours.

A payment within the same bank is a transfer (TFR) so we'll ignore that.

The UK government has mandated that all banks have to move to FPS by the end of this year (IIRC), and has given optional guidelines to the banks. Lloyds probably disabled BACS from a whole bunch of accounts including Intersango's account (Interteni).

We had a few BACS payments which caused some problems for them when they did the migration (due to our transaction volume it might have been tricky). This is what they meant when our transactions have caused a problem in the processing queue. That we had submitted payments using BACS from our account, then BACS was disabled from our account but they still had the payments to be processed on the queue which caused an error.

BACS transfers no longer exist for Intersango. Most banks should have them deprecated now. This should not affect the majority of users and we have emailed the affected individuals.

[yogi]

Glad to hear you got everything working again genjix.

Keep up the good work!

[Pontius]

[...]
https://bitcoinconsultancy.com/wiki/Intersango/API

Ah, didn't know about this page. I only knew about https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Intersango/API and there's nothing about FOK/IOC/withdrawals.
Anyway thanks a lot for pointing me to the right place.

[realnowhereman]

Please take the following in the spirit it's intended: feedback from a customer, not an attack.

This is a shame:

In a week however, we will be monetizing and charging a small 0.65% fee on trades as of 2012-02-03 24:00 GMT to keep Intersango running.

Not because of a fee being introduced; that was only to be expected.  It's a shame that the fee is so high (despite the out-of-character marketing speak addition of "small" in the announcement).  I like Intersango; but I was hoping that when fees were introduced they would be competitive (given that they were already running the very attractive 0%).

Consider that your competition is Mt.Gox; compared to them you have:

• Reduced features (placing orders is, as I described above, still a calculator-requiring job; and you still have no "pending funds" state possible for prepared orders.)
• No live chart/order book.
• Considerably lower volume.
• Considerably wider spread.

And you're adding to that list... "considerably higher fees" and "no economy of scale fee schedule".  Mt.Gox fees already sting a bit at 0.4%-0.5%.  I'm not a huge volume trader, and my rate hovers around 0.4%.  So your "small" fee of of 0.65% is 62% higher than your competitor.

I have tended to move £1,000 at a time through the bitcoin system to dollars (or dollars to pounds).  The spreads can cost me (depending on the day), 1-2% (that's not your problem, that's the market.  FYI: at time of writing it's -4.8% versus FOREX to go via bitcoin from pounds to dollars); Mt.Gox is 0.4%; now Intersango is 0.65% and there is no volume to allow quick finalisation (alternatively, I can close at market and suffer 4-5% spread loss).  It can easily be higher than just using the banking system (or spit, spit, paypal).

I understand completely that you have to have a profitable business; you can't operate for free forever.  I'm merely offering my perspective as a customer that these fees are too high to make it sensible for me to use as a service (of course these things aren't binary; it's a continuum.  I'll still use Intersango, but the barrier is higher now).  Certainly until the trade volume and spreads get more favourable on Intersango (the addition of fees is certainly not going help that situation, though).

I wonder if it's not going to be a choice for you of "0.65% of nothing" or "0.3% of something"?

I absolutely want Intersango to become a viable business.  That means operating on more than the good will of bitcoin enthusiasts though.  And I'm afraid that with such high fees, that that is the only source of income.

The 20% rule is you've got to be 20% better; 20% faster or 20% nicer than your competition to steal customers.  You are quite a nice company; so I hope that's enough.

[Seal]

Please take the following in the spirit it's intended: feedback from a customer, not an attack.

This is a shame:

In a week however, we will be monetizing and charging a small 0.65% fee on trades as of 2012-02-03 24:00 GMT to keep Intersango running.

Not because of a fee being introduced; that was only to be expected.  It's a shame that the fee is so high (despite the out-of-character marketing speak addition of "small" in the announcement).  I like Intersango; but I was hoping that when fees were introduced they would be competitive (given that they were already running the very attractive 0%).

Consider that your competition is Mt.Gox; compared to them you have:

• Reduced features (placing orders is, as I described above, still a calculator-requiring job; and you still have no "pending funds" state possible for prepared orders.)
• No live chart/order book.
• Considerably lower volume.
• Considerably wider spread.

And you're adding to that list... "considerably higher fees" and "no economy of scale fee schedule".  Mt.Gox fees already sting a bit at 0.4%-0.5%.  I'm not a huge volume trader, and my rate hovers around 0.4%.  So your "small" fee of of 0.65% is 62% higher than your competitor.

I have tended to move £1,000 at a time through the bitcoin system to dollars (or dollars to pounds).  The spreads can cost me (depending on the day), 1-2% (that's not your problem, that's the market.  FYI: at time of writing it's -4.8% versus FOREX to go via bitcoin from pounds to dollars); Mt.Gox is 0.4%; now Intersango is 0.65% and there is no volume to allow quick finalisation (alternatively, I can close at market and suffer 4-5% spread loss).  It can easily be higher than just using the banking system (or spit, spit, paypal).

I understand completely that you have to have a profitable business; you can't operate for free forever.  I'm merely offering my perspective as a customer that these fees are too high to make it sensible for me to use as a service (of course these things aren't binary; it's a continuum.  I'll still use Intersango, but the barrier is higher now).  Certainly until the trade volume and spreads get more favourable on Intersango (the addition of fees is certainly not going help that situation, though).

I wonder if it's not going to be a choice for you of "0.65% of nothing" or "0.3% of something"?

I absolutely want Intersango to become a viable business.  That means operating on more than the good will of bitcoin enthusiasts though.  And I'm afraid that with such high fees, that that is the only source of income.

The 20% rule is you've got to be 20% better; 20% faster or 20% nicer than your competition to steal customers.  You are quite a nice company; so I hope that's enough.

+1

I'm totally behind you on this one realnowhereman.

Intersango: I think your service is great, I too acknowledge that charging fees is an important way to raise funds to run the business and knew this was inevitable. I am however disappointed that high volume traders are not rewarded with any sort of discount. Are there any plans to offer frequent traders discounts on trading volume? I'd respectfully like to suggest:

- A slightly lower fee across the board. 0.65% is at the top end of what I'd expect and I imagine this may end up damaging Intersango's own business by massively reducing liquidity.
- A system like MtGox's (although I'd hate to compare you to them) whereby discounts are offered based upon trade volume.
- If you are set on charging 0.65% across the board, then how about a 3 phase introduction, for example, initially charging 0.2% for a month, then 0.4% for another month, then the full 0.65%. Going from 0%, to 0.65% with 1 weeks notice is quite a risky move which certainly took me by surprise.

[phantomcircuit]

We've heard from a few users over the last few days in regards to the new fee schedule.  In response we will be implementing a loyalty program to reward our higher volume clients.  Details of the program will be released in the next few days.

In the mean time we suggest you look at the costs of transfer to and from Intersango as opposed to just the trading commission. You will find that in many ways Intersango's rates are much lower than any competition.

[Seal]

We've heard from a few users over the last few days in regards to the new fee schedule.  In response we will be implementing a loyalty program to reward our higher volume clients.  Details of the program will be released in the next few days.

In the mean time we suggest you look at the costs of transfer to and from Intersango as opposed to just the trading commission. You will find that in many ways Intersango's rates are much lower than any competition.

+1 to Intersango. Respect.

[realnowhereman]

We've heard from a few users over the last few days in regards to the new fee schedule.  In response we will be implementing a loyalty program to reward our higher volume clients.  Details of the program will be released in the next few days.

In the mean time we suggest you look at the costs of transfer to and from Intersango as opposed to just the trading commission. You will find that in many ways Intersango's rates are much lower than any competition.

Good news on the volume discounts, but bear in mind that for a trader, the transfer fee applies once, the trading fee applies again and again.

[muyuu]

New user since yesterday, just found out about the fees... so basically I have just one day to trade without fees. I signed up here for that reason in the first place.

Consider adopting 0.4% instead, this way you can get more users and justify not jumping over to MtGox. Honestly, I don't think you can afford to be more expensive than the reference market.

In any case, if you go ahead I will just operate on both giving priority to MtGox, since their fee does go down... anyway I should be calculating all expenses carefully and now I have another incentive to do so.

[phantomcircuit]

New user since yesterday, just found out about the fees... so basically I have just one day to trade without fees. I signed up here for that reason in the first place.

Consider adopting 0.4% instead, this way you can get more users and justify not jumping over to MtGox. Honestly, I don't think you can afford to be more expensive than the reference market.

In any case, if you go ahead I will just operate on both giving priority to MtGox, since their fee does go down... anyway I should be calculating all expenses carefully and now I have another incentive to do so.

Our fee schedule will be rapidly evolving to better suit our users needs.

[genjix]

We will be switching to a new bank soon. Banking with Lloyds is not a sustainable situation. We have 2 bank accounts ready, and we're going to go ahead with those. The Lloyds account will be closed by the end of this month. More details once I know more.

[thirdlight]

Can I make a suggestion with regard to fees?

Charge only for fiat withdrawals.

Depositing & withdrawing btc must be free - lack of fee is a huge selling point for the system.
Trading should be free - encourages use & liquidity.
Depositing fiat should be as close to free as possible, maybe with a minimum desposit - encourages money, and new users, into the system.
Withdrawing fiat can be taxed - discourage money leaving the system. This part has the least elasticity of demand, so is a good target.

I mainly use Intersango to sell btc for £ to pay electricity & hardware, so this schedule would disadvantage me, but advantage bitcoin generally.

Just my 0.076btc worth.

[genjix]

Charge only for fiat withdrawals.

I had this idea too. It would encourage people to trade more, and encourage people to hold bitcoins. I'm going to ask the others why they decided against this (can't remember).

[muyuu]

We will be switching to a new bank soon. Banking with Lloyds is not a sustainable situation. We have 2 bank accounts ready, and we're going to go ahead with those. The Lloyds account will be closed by the end of this month. More details once I know more.

Is this why my transfer from yesterday isn't fulfilled yet?

[Timo Y]

Charge only for fiat withdrawals.

I had this idea too. It would encourage people to trade more, and encourage people to hold bitcoins. I'm going to ask the others why they decided against this (can't remember).

The problem with free trading is that allows people to open multiple accounts and trade with themselves in order to manipulate volume data, at practically zero cost.

Such a manipulator would still face the risk of another user snatching up one of their bids, but if they trade with extremely high frequency and keep their amount of currency in bids and asks at any given times as small as possible, this risk can be minimized.

Free trading also does nothing to prevent an arms race of spammy high frequency trading algorithms which would eventually overload the server.

That's why a minimal trading fee is a good idea, though it could be probably be smaller than 0.6% to prevent the above.

[BTCurious]

The problem with free trading is that allows people to open multiple accounts and trade with themselves in order to manipulate volume data, at practically zero cost.

Such a manipulator would still face the risk of another user snatching up one of their bids, but if they trade with extremely high frequency and keep their amount of currency in bids and asks at any given times as small as possible, this risk can be minimized.

Free trading also does nothing to prevent an arms race of spammy high frequency trading algorithms which would eventually overload the server.

That's why a minimal trading fee is a good idea, though it could be probably be smaller than 0.6% to prevent the above.

If that's the only reason to introduce fees, then a fee of 0.1% would prevent that, while regaining your previously very competitive pricing.

Alternatively you could just do throttling per account to a maximum of ~2 commands per second. This would prevent any high frequency trading bots from operating.

[Seal]

Charge only for fiat withdrawals.

I had this idea too. It would encourage people to trade more, and encourage people to hold bitcoins. I'm going to ask the others why they decided against this (can't remember).

The problem with free trading is that allows people to open multiple accounts and trade with themselves in order to manipulate volume data, at practically zero cost.

Such a manipulator would still face the risk of another user snatching up one of their bids, but if they trade with extremely high frequency and keep their amount of currency in bids and asks at any given times as small as possible, this risk can be minimized.

Free trading also does nothing to prevent an arms race of spammy high frequency trading algorithms which would eventually overload the server.

That's why a minimal trading fee is a good idea, though it could be probably be smaller than 0.6% to prevent the above.

Agree with all including BTCurious. I'm not a fan of the suggestion to charge for Fiat withdrawals as I could see this adding up and also penalise low volume first time traders who just want to dabble (or cash out on their week's mining efforts). However everyone makes valid points. Lower trade fees (or zero) will encourage more liquidity which is a win win situation for everybody.

Going along with the suggestions, how about a fee structure where you charge a small amount for fiat withdrawals... and at the same time have a small (smaller than 0.6%) trading fee with a reduced fee for higher volume traders.