ICBIT Derivatives Market (USD/BTC futures trading) - LIVE

[killerstorm]

I believe, in this case, a STAT would determine if the order was accepted or not.

I believe STAT wouldn't be aware of packets which are in flight but haven't yet reached servers.

But this is largely a theoretical problem since you can simply wait a bit to make sure that all data in flight either arrived or died peacefully.

Also I hope that if MPex sees two identical orders it would ignore duplicate, so even if you submit twice it is not a problem.(?)

[1714071443]

1714071443

[smickles]

I believe, in this case, a STAT would determine if the order was accepted or not.

I believe STAT wouldn't be aware of packets which are in flight but haven't yet reached servers.

But this is largely a theoretical problem since you can simply wait a bit to make sure that all data in flight either arrived or died peacefully.

Also I hope that if MPex sees two identical orders it would ignore duplicate, so even if you submit twice it is not a problem.(?)

Yeah, if you submit the same data twice, it rejects the duplicate. It must be duplicate data tho, not just 'the same order'.

EDIT: so basically, don't resign a 'new' order, just resend the same signed/encrypted message as you did originally.

SECOND EDIT: This is all horribly off topic, isn't it?

[Fireball]

SECOND EDIT: This is all horribly off topic, isn't it?

I'm concerned with rude spam by MPOE-PR (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102333.0 ).
Other related people (smickles) are behaving quite good, and we had useful discussions over support email.

I will consult with [Tycho] about further actions.

[MPOE-PR]

I'm concerned with rude spam by MPOE-PR (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102333.0 ).
Other related people (smickles) are behaving quite good, and we had useful discussions over support email.

I will consult with [Tycho] about further actions.

I'm concerned with you behaving like a scammer, on top of actually being one.

You were caught scamming. Your sorry attempts to avoid that discussion by making ciuciu-esque attacks won't save you, you'll just end up with egg on your face on top of the original problem of having been caught scamming.

I'm rather bored with this discussion. You are dense. I'll try to spell it out for you one more time, but this is the last time...

I may be dense, but I do notice you've conveniently ignored the question of your own involvement with the icbit scamsite. So no, you're not bored. Anything BUT bored.

Suppose it was time sensitive like it was with smickles order. How is MPex going to explain why order wasn't accepted immediately? Most likely response is "oh maybe the connection failed we'll investigate": connection failure is indeed the most likely cause, but it is a good idea to check server logs.

Nope. If the order made it then it's on the books. If it didn't make it then it's on the customer, it's his job to get his order to MPEx, not MPEx's.

There's in no case absolutely anything to investigate: if MPEx is down (which hasn't happened yet) then nobody is getting orders through. If MPEx is up and the customer fails to talk to it he picks up his phone and talks to his ISP support hotline or w/e.

This is quite different from the scamsite behavior, wherein customer can see his account, can see the volume move, can see other orders for "other customers" being executed but his orders are ignored. Repeatedly. For the obvious reason that if the scamsite allowed actual customers to place orders in that magical interval it wouldn't be able to fix absurd prices. Duh.

In that case we can a situation like this: 1) user clicks "stop" button in browser, but it doesn't stop packets which are already in flight; 2) user checks state, it says that order is not accepted; 3) now those packets which are in flight arrive to server and it actually accepts the offer. Whoopsie.

You'd probably look a lot less ridiculous if instead of sitting here and puking mental experiments you actually took the time and checked things out.

Notice the difference here. MP checked out the icbit.se site, has proof that it's a scamsite. You're talking theories about your understanding about how things may be. Quite a very different thing (not that I'm not impressed you sometimes use ssh, don't take this the wrong way).

Practically: if MPEx says you can't repeat an order, then it has your order on record. If it doesn't then it never saw it.

It is completely independent from transparency issues, I agree that use of PGP signatures and full transaction log are desired features.

Desired, eh?

No, they're both necessary for trading and impossible for a scamsite. The beauty of this is that the Fireball character, though he continues to lie about it, did take the site down for maintenance and made some changes mere hours upon being called out for his little scam. Those changes, while probably temporary, are a little more in line with his declared intentions, and magically the "future" contract is almost in line with reasonable economic expectation.

Isn't it fascinating how the big bad evil mean and mysterious manipulator suddenly got scared and left cause Mr. P wrote something on his blog? Isn't it grand how caught in between the rock of the article and the hard place of everyone being able to verify it for themselves the next day Fireball suddenly fixed the "exchange"? Tsk tsk.

So you know...desired. Myeah. Call them imposed.

Anyway, you need to learn a bit more about how networking works

Alternatively, I need to stop entertaining pompous shills. How is it that all you idiots sing from the same book?

Nov 17 19:57:25 <_Fireball>   honestly, by reading your blog post, I  see that you have little idea how futures exchanges work
Nov 17 19:57:32 <mircea_popescu>   that's fine.
Nov 17 19:57:42 <_Fireball>   and I'm explaining it to you ;-)
Nov 17 19:58:23 <_Fireball>   so, would you be a man and write an apology?
Nov 17 19:58:35 <mircea_popescu>   you're joking, right ?

Get your heads out of your asses, both of you. You're here to learn, not to teach, and you're doing an usagi-level job of it. The nerve of you people!

15NOV12 19:59 At 30 seconds until close, I saw the expected sell order. It was larger than I had expected, leaving about 450 contracts on the book at 10.025. Notwithstanding the fact that his order would not overcome this, I dutifully placed the order Mircea had asked me too.

I expected to see the results of Mircea's order within the next few seconds as server load could be expected to be higher than earlier in the day.

At 10 seconds until close I had not seen any evidence of the order taking effect.

Hurriedly, I began repeating the order as many times as I could before close, knowing that, should each of these orders go through, some of my own funds would be used and entered into a position which I did not really want to take. However, I felt it better to potentially sacrifice some of my own funds to fulfill my word. I was able to repeat the order at least three times before close.

That is what you need to explain. Tried the "it's the ISP", it didn't stick, tried the "we'll investigate", nobody cares, tried whatever else, that didn't stick either. You were caught manipulating the close price, period.

[picobit]

You were caught scamming. Your sorry attempts to avoid that discussion by making ciuciu-esque attacks won't save you, you'll just end up with egg on your face on top of the original problem of having been caught scamming.

No.  You saw behavior that you find consistent with scamming.  Others saw otherwise - at least your proof is far from convincing.  It may be convincing what you saw, but certainly not what has been posted here or on the blog.

This is quite different from the scamsite behavior, wherein customer can see his account, can see the volume move, can see other orders for "other customers" being executed but his orders are ignored. Repeatedly. For the obvious reason that if the scamsite allowed actual customers to place orders in that magical interval it wouldn't be able to fix absurd prices. Duh.

I am an actual customer.  I have been able to place orders during these manipulation incidents.  And yes, I have also been in situations where I have not been able to place orders for a minute or so while other people obviously were.  But since absolutely nothing interesting happened during those times, I assume it was some kind of network problem.

If Fireball was behind these manipulations, why would he have undone them by an extra clearing one of the first times it happened?   I lost a significant amount due to a manipulation, but instead of liquidating my position (although I was below the limit for a margin call), a second clearing occurred "due to high volatility" half an hour or an hour later.  You can probably still find the announcement in the Twitter feed.  Fireball quickly stopped doing this, probably he realised that this kind of ad-hoc manual interventions are not a good idea. 

Isn't it fascinating how the big bad evil mean and mysterious manipulator suddenly got scared and left cause Mr. P wrote something on his blog? Isn't it grand how caught in between the rock of the article and the hard place of everyone being able to verify it for themselves the next day Fireball suddenly fixed the "exchange"? Tsk tsk.

That is indeed one interpretation.  Another one is that more and more people (including me) were trying to get a profit from the predictable manipulations, and the same day the spot market price moved against the manipulator.  In combination, this made it too expensive to continue manipulating the market - the manipulator lost a lot that evening!  Of course it did not help him that the clearing was delayed due to maintenance - whether that maintenance was real or just Fireball's excuse for thwarting him.

I'm concerned with rude spam by MPOE-PR (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102333.0 ).
Other related people (smickles) are behaving quite good, and we had useful discussions over support email.

I will consult with [Tycho] about further actions.

Don't bother, the moderators will not do anything.  MPOE is entitled to her opinions, and is entitled to post them here.  We are entitled to disagree (and the shrill tone of her posts certainly don't help, even if her points were valid - which they might be!)

It would be very bad indeed if the moderators started censoring people calling a scam - even if they appear to be wrong!!!

[killerstorm]

I may be dense, but I do notice you've conveniently ignored the question of your own involvement with the icbit scamsite.

I didn't ignore it, I described it in all details.

As you're dense, I can repeat: my involvement is limited to:

1. Being a customer, I played with ICBIT a bit since last Friday. With sum less than 5 BTC.
2. I had a discussion with Fireball more than 1 year ago, in summer of 2011. We have considered making futures exchange together. But I abandoned this idea, and we were not communicating up to last Friday.

That's all, there is no other involvement. I've answered your question, please mark it in your notebook, you seem to be forgetful.

Just because you want to uncover scam it doesn't mean scam exists, OK?

Nope. If the order made it then it's on the books. If it didn't make it then it's on the customer, it's his job to get his order to MPEx, not MPEx's.

Same is true for ICBIT: it's customer's job to get his order to ICBIT. There is no evidence that smickles coped with it, all we know that he clicked some button in his browser, but that's not enough. There is no tcpdump log.

There's in no case absolutely anything to investigate: if MPEx is down (which hasn't happened yet) then nobody is getting orders through. If MPEx is up and the customer fails to talk to it he picks up his phone and talks to his ISP support hotline or w/e.

It looks like you have very vague ideas about network and software engineering.

ALL sorts of problem are always theoretically possible, and moreover they happen all the time, even with very important servers.

If MPEx is not made out of pixie dust it might be vulnerable too. Denying this just shows your ignorance.

Here's an example of network problem which can happen: http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-sometimes-couldnt.html

There was a problem with one of routers several hops away to a data center. Connections which were routed via it predictably failed. But even if you repeatably try to connect, sometimes it works. And, of course, if you're connecting from a different location there is no problem.

So it is an undeniable fact that site might be down for some people, and not down for others. Moreover, problem might be stochastic, i.e. one out of 100 connections fail. Moreover, problem might be somewhere between customer's ISP and your ISP, usually there are many hops.

These are basics, if you understand it you know nothing.

And exactly same kind of unpredictability can happen on server side. I won't bother explaining it to you in all details, but it is very well possible that overloaded server will drop some connections while processing other. E.g. check SPECweb2005 benchmark, as you see there is such thing as "tolerable error level", even when people run it in controlled environment and can retry as many times as they want: http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/res2009q2/web2005-20090520-00138.html

This is quite different from the scamsite behavior, wherein customer can see his account, can see the volume move, can see other orders for "other customers" being executed but his orders are ignored. Repeatedly. For the obvious reason that if the scamsite allowed actual customers to place orders in that magical interval it wouldn't be able to fix absurd prices. Duh.

I agree that people should demand more transparency from ICBIT, but that does not mean that MPEx is made out of pixie dust, OK?

Do not make bold statements like "we can never fail", they simply show your incompetence, and that's all.

Notice the difference here. MP checked out the icbit.se site, has proof that it's a scamsite. You're talking theories about your understanding about how things may be. Quite a very different thing (not that I'm not impressed you sometimes use ssh, don't take this the wrong way).

I was simply replying to your statements that MPEx cannot fail. It can. It doesn't mean that it DOES fail, I never claimed that. I simply outlined how it is possible, so your statement is provably false.

You do not understand how technology works and you are boasting and making invalid statements. I'm trying to correct you. This is totally unrelated to ICBIT being a scamsite.

No, they're both necessary for trading and impossible for a scamsite.

Yet another bullshit statement from you. It is possible to implement a scam site which would give PGP-signed receipts.

It is not a slightly misleading statement, you're implying that if if PGP receipts are given then site is definitely not scam, which can mislead people into believing to scam sites which use crypto.

It is only secure when it is done via blockchain.

Alternatively, I need to stop entertaining pompous shills.

That's a good idea, actually.

[Fireball]

I lost a significant amount due to a manipulation, but instead of liquidating my position (although I was below the limit for a margin call), a second clearing occurred "due to high volatility" half an hour or an hour later.  You can probably still find the announcement in the Twitter feed.  Fireball quickly stopped doing this, probably he realised that this kind of ad-hoc manual interventions are not a good idea. 

Additional clearings are normal when market conditions are rapidly changing. They are pre-announced via official Twitter channel (displayed on the site's frontpage). I did an additional clearing because the market went too much against spot market and when the rate returned back (thanks to arbitragers) I did the additional clearing to move trading range back. No margin calls happened during that period because that would be greatly unfair to our clients.

[picobit]

I lost a significant amount due to a manipulation, but instead of liquidating my position (although I was below the limit for a margin call), a second clearing occurred "due to high volatility" half an hour or an hour later.  You can probably still find the announcement in the Twitter feed.  Fireball quickly stopped doing this, probably he realised that this kind of ad-hoc manual interventions are not a good idea. 

Additional clearings are normal when market conditions are rapidly changing. They are pre-announced via official Twitter channel (displayed on the site's frontpage). I did an additional clearing because the market went too much against spot market and when the rate returned back (thanks to arbitragers) I did the additional clearing to move trading range back. No margin calls happened during that period because that would be greatly unfair to our clients.

I don't complain!!

I just thought you stopped doing it because any kind of manual intervention opens you to being attacked for being biased.  But I agree it was a good thing when it happened.

[Fireball]

I don't complain!!

I was explaining so other could understand why it's needed. I did not even think you complained :-)

[MPOE-PR]

If Fireball was behind these manipulations, why would he have undone them by an extra clearing one of the first times it happened?   I lost a significant amount due to a manipulation, but instead of liquidating my position (although I was below the limit for a margin call), a second clearing occurred "due to high volatility" half an hour or an hour later.  You can probably still find the announcement in the Twitter feed.  Fireball quickly stopped doing this, probably he realised that this kind of ad-hoc manual interventions are not a good idea. 

So Fireball has to your knowledge intervened to fix the price to a different level than the market showed, and this you bring as an argument against the otherwise clearly proven fact that he...is fixing the price. You were thrown a bone by your own declaration and would like to be thrown more in the future. You're not a "customer", by this, you're a client. In the old, Latin sense of that word.

As far as I'm concerned the point has been clearly proven. If any fools want to part with their money from this point onwards they're welcome to do it, but they won't be able to claim that they "couldn't have known". Simple as that.

[picobit]

I think Fireballs explanation makes sense.

As far as I'm concerned the point has been clearly proven. If any fools want to part with their money from this point onwards they're welcome to do it, but they won't be able to claim that they "couldn't have known". Simple as that.

Nobody can place money at any exchange and claim that they "couldn't have known" if the site runs off with the money.  Unfortunately.  That severely limits how much money I place anywhere. 

With ICBIT, the risk that they run off with my money is real.  So is the risk that they are closed by the authorities, or are hacked.  I still think the largest risk to my money is the trades I make.   

[killerstorm]

So Fireball has to your knowledge intervened to fix the price to a different level than the market showed, and this you bring as an argument against the otherwise clearly proven fact that he...is fixing the price.

You aren't attentive. Fireball did not manipulate the price, he did clearing after price changed. Margin calls were postponed and positions were not forcibly closed.

You're again trying to mis-represent the facts.

And, obviously, if he could simply manipulate the price he wouldn't have needed that additional clearing.

[segabtc]

wow MPOE is first on my ignore list. It seems you watch for a day or two and you know everything about what is happening, and it seems you shit on any thread that MIGHT be a competitor of MPOE. So you are officially on the shit list. As far as proof and facts, "I don't think you know what that word means" ie inego montoya  . what proof? an order did get processed, how is that proof. Maybe its like your sites sez, if you mess up your order, you just made a DONATION to MPOE.

[picobit]

I missed the "fun" tonight by around 15 min.

Has the evil manipulator returned, or is everything calm and serene?

[segabtc]

no fun tonight, bear didnt show up tonight, kinda boring and no activity, no big trades one way or the other. all is calm on the front, sleep tight tonight.

[Fireball]

I added experimental Depth of the Market (DOM) chart, it's available via tabs additionally to the price chart. The price chart also got slightly reconfigured, to prevent it from displaying negative values on the left axis (to be tested how good it performs, though).

The DOM chart automatically updates, so there is no need to hit refresh button in your webbrowser. Please let me know if it helps, and anything you wish to be improved.

[ThePok]

Wow, an 9000 shares big bit at 10.7 usd!
Good we can see it now I dont think an other crazy marketmanipulater can break that one

[smickles]

I added experimental Depth of the Market (DOM) chart, it's available via tabs additionally to the price chart. The price chart also got slightly reconfigured, to prevent it from displaying negative values on the left axis (to be tested how good it performs, though).

The DOM chart automatically updates, so there is no need to hit refresh button in your webbrowser. Please let me know if it helps, and anything you wish to be improved.

This is a great improvement

[segabtc]

I added experimental Depth of the Market (DOM) chart, it's available via tabs additionally to the price chart. The price chart also got slightly reconfigured, to prevent it from displaying negative values on the left axis (to be tested how good it performs, though).

The DOM chart automatically updates, so there is no need to hit refresh button in your webbrowser. Please let me know if it helps, and anything you wish to be improved.

This is a great improvement

+1 I like this, one more suggestion for the tabs, how about a tab for the last 50 or 100 trades with timestamps, maybe even a scrolling last trade kinda thing, but I do like how the site is improving daily! Looking good, nice UI.

[picobit]

+1 I like this, one more suggestion for the tabs, how about a tab for the last 50 or 100 trades with timestamps, maybe even a scrolling last trade kinda thing, but I do like how the site is improving daily! Looking good, nice UI.

I second this!  Both the +1 and the suggestion.

In fact, I think the trading history could be published in a way that would make it easier to refute at least some future attacks on your site's honesty. 

There could be a link generating a list of all transactions in the last week, with timestamps, amount and prices, and all clearings done.  The list should be autogenerated on the fly so it contains even the last transaction, and it should be cryptographically signed.  Then after trading, users could in principle download the list, verify that their trades are present and as expect - and later verify against a newer list that the logs have not been tampered with in between.  The cryptographic signature prevents a malicious user from altering the list and claiming tampering.