I have found a nasty bug with BitFinex order book depth but even after many emails exchanged with them, with screenshots, reasoning and explanations why it is a bug nothing realy happened. They do not want to admit something is wrong and that makes me very pissed. Mainly because I am active trader there, partialy using order book depth when making decisions about my trades, but also because other traders might not be paying enough attention thus make wrong trades that might cause financial losses for me even though my positions were just fine!
Flash-crashes might happen, all it takes is someone with a lot of money panic, mislead by order book depth.Email debate started at time when BTC was slightly above 10k, see the first screenshot with explanation I have sent to BitFinex
It is fine, works as intended, they said. Wait, I will actualy copy and paste the last email they sent me:
" It is simply a different represenation of the same data. The numbers are the same and can be used to make a comparison of depth on both sides, so I disagree that there is anything misleading here. That certainly is not our intention nor do we stand anything to gain from it. There are different approaches to showing an order book and there are arguments for and against any of them. I am sorry that you disagree with the approach that we have chosen and have passed on those comments, but we reject the assertion that there is anything misleading about our order book."
No amount of reasoning and explanation helped. I even pointed to them to check other (crypto)exchanges or trading software. But it seems to me they are just not listening and ignore the fact their order book depth might cause a flash-crash. And it actualy already happened there, maybe not because bug in question here but there surely is a possibility that bug caused it all and not faking orders and liquidity as some belive, see the link below:
https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/fake-it-till-you-make-it-when-bitfinex-themselves-used-to-spoof-their-entire-orderbook-18294585338Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Go to BTC/USD trading pair at BitFinex
2. Scroll down to order book and press small "Decrease Precision" button 1, 2, 3 or more times, depending on current price.
This is how it looks right now, at the time of publishing this post, precision decreased 3 times:
Sell and buy sides looks nicely balanced, not perfectly but just fine, nothing to worry about. Well, it is so until you realise that buy side shows range from 7300 to 9600 USD but sell side shows range from 9700 to 30000 USD! So a true depth is not 7298 USD for buys and 9075 USD for sells but 4303 USD for sells, up to 12000 USD instead of 30000 USD. Which paints a different picture than if quickly checking depth, without actualy looking at range and stepping. One might think there are less buys than sells and make a wrong decision, sell at the time when there are actualy almost 2x more buys than sells! Happened to me at least a few times, at the time when I was not so experienced trader. And yes, it actualy took me a few years to REALY look at order book depth at BitFinex and realise it is wrong. Or you think it is just fine? Post your thoughts, thanks!!!
