Important message about recent changes.Our rules are in effect starting from this night:
https://icbit.se/rulesMost statements were already de facto in effect, and our main goal was to cover all possible situations, so we will add more explanations should any uncertainty arise.
Additional margin (see rule 3.3.1.2):
I expect that approximately half of our players would be very upset with new additional margin, but you should understand that this is the only one possible way to deal with current situation. Base margin for all contracts only covers any movements within the trading range, but no more, so there is no way we could settle a contract with 100% contango if just ~10% is covered by a margin.
100% contango is a severe condition and it was even rising instead of contracting, so we had to implement this additional margin to be able to manage settlement of this instrument.
Other half of those positions, who were shorting, will understand that we did it to be able to pay all shorts.
We also get messages from possible big traders telling us that it's just absolutely not serious to keep such a low margin and that they wouldn't trade here knowing that their profit may be not paid due to longs defaulting.
It's still not the end of the world, and
we won't issue margin calls in this and next trading session so you can either reduce/close your position or add funds.
Yes, we also had a proposal to deploy additional margin gradually, by a few percents per day, but as our estimation shows, this would cause much more damage.
It turns out that some players with long positions were intentionally exploiting this low-margin situation, buying more contracts at the price higher than they ever expected spot to reach at the settlement.
Summary: we know that this a very unpopular change and we expect lots of scam accusations with negative feedback, but 1) we had no choice, this is the only way to be able to settle our BTC/USD instruments, either this or stopping our operations, 2) this change makes our trading much more secure and we decided that it's more important than possible negative feedback. It's not a completely sudden change, we posted the proposal in the trollbox many times during the last 3 weeks, even personally to some long position holders, but didn't received a lot of alternative solutions. And yes, we understand that trollbox is for informal communications, not official announcements.
Technical issues and withdrawals/deposits today:
We experienced some bad luck today and have to move/switch some servers due to hardware problems, this includes our Bitcoin interface too, so bitcoin operations may be delayed while this server is offline. Don't worry, your bitcoins are safe and we will continue operations soon. As I said before, no margin calls will be issued during this and next trading sessions.
New rules:
If you think that our rules do not cover some important aspect of the exchange, please comment here and we will add clarifications. It's important to cover all possible situations there.
Your safety is our priority.
