Topic: [BETA]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 48. (Read 137528 times)

Leveraged trading cheat sheet:

I have	I believe the price in USD goes	I want to earn	I should do the following:
BTC	UP UP UP	BTC	Borrow USD (you need some USD to do that!), buy BTC now (you think they are cheap!), after the price goes up you sell enough BTC for USD to settle the loan + interest, keep remaining BTC
BTC	UP UP UP	USD	Borrow USD (you need some USD to do that!), buy BTC now (you think they are cheap!), after the price goes up sell all the BTC you bought for USD to settle the loan + interest, keep remaining USD
BTC	DOWN DOWN DOWN	BTC	Borrow more BTC, sell them for USD now (you think they are overpriced!), after the price goes down, you buy the BTC back with the USD you gained, pay back the loan + interest, keep remaining BTC
BTC	DOWN DOWN DOWN	USD	Borrow more BTC, sell them for USD now (you think they are overpriced!), after the price goes down, you buy just enough BTC back with the USD you gained, pay back the loan + interest, keep remaining USD
USD	UP UP UP	BTC	Borrow more USD, buy BTC now (you think they are cheap!), after the price goes up you sell enough BTC for USD to settle the loan + interest, keep remaining BTC
USD	UP UP UP	USD	Borrow more USD, buy BTC now (you think they are cheap!), after the price goes up sell all the BTC you bought for USD to settle the loan + interest, keep remaining USD
USD	DOWN DOWN DOWN	BTC	Borrow BTC (you need some BTC to do that!), sell them for USD now (you think they are overpriced!), after the price goes down, you buy the BTC back with the USD you gained, pay back the loan + interest, keep remaining BTC
USD	DOWN DOWN DOWN	USD	Borrow BTC (you need some BTC to do that!), sell them for USD now (you think they are overpriced!), after the price goes down, you buy just enough BTC back with the USD you gained, pay back the loan + interest, keep remaining USD

The problem is that if you have 0 USD but want to borrow USD, you need to have at least a few USD to start with - since the market might move in the other direction, you need to be able to pay the interest and buy back the USD or BTC you borrowed at a loss. Same way with having no BTC and wanting to borrow them. There is no way to transfer funds between accounts on Bitfinex (yet?), so the easiest/fastest way to get a balance on both sides would be to either use MtGox codes (USD codes will go away soon!) or just transfer BTC on Bitfinex and trade them for a few USD, the fees are lower than a lot of other exchanges anyways. In the future bank transfers might also work, though BTC+trade probably beats these in speed by a magnitude.

If you want to lend out funds, you also see when you'll make profits: People will borrow your USD if they think that 1 BTC will be worth more USD than now in the future and they will borrow your BTC if they think prices will fall. Believing prices rise is also called "bullish", believing prices go down "bearish".

PS: Someone seems to just have borrowed ~400 BTC (mine amongst them), so I'm happy.

Yeah, lending out BTC for the last 5 days was not really a big thing at all (I still have a 12% loan open with some of my coins that nets me at least a small profit).

USD on the other hand are soaring atm. and even though it sometimes takes longer than I'd like to lend them out again, they return more than I hoped for (after 4 days 1.2% increase on deposit... ). Having USD and BTC on the platform I hope that I'll balance out bull and bear markets, I can live with profits in either currency anyways.

I had some Ruby error messages when logging in via 2FA by the way, but after trying a second time, they were not really reproducible and I logged in just fine.

Other than that (I tend to critizise more than praise) I really have to say that the experience so far was really nice!
Oh, and I have quite a few positions still up for grabs - go for it, trade and take my money, damnit!

Neat site. Totally one-sided in the bull/bear spectrum though, lol. Either the bears in the market are nearly extinct, or they don't want to borrow through that website for one reason or another.

Having a flexible min. time would make it even harder to directly match lending offers and demands... I agree though that the "5 minute positions" are sometimes a pain in the rear end - especially since I'm not entirely sure if it does cause you to fall back with the rest of your offer in the lending queue.

Example (using VIR, the largest queue usually):

A, B and C lend 100 USD for 10 days each. A put the offer 2 days ago, B yesterday and C today. All have autolend active.

D takes 0.1 USD of A's position and pays it back 10 minutes later. A now has a 99.9 USD offer from 2 days ago and 0.1 USD today. I suspect that autolend in it's struggle to keep only 1 position open cancels the 99.9 position and lends out 100 USD again once the 0.1 USD are paid back. If it doesn't, D in his speedtrading "wisdom" would fragment the lending offers quite quickly - something that I don't see happening.

On the other hand, if the 0.1 USD get added to the old position again, it means B and C will never get a chance to lend even once, even if D borrows over 9000 USD over time, as A's old position always gets refilled.


Probably we just don't see these effects/problems a lot, because queues are cycled through so quickly over the day. Still a minimum interest (even if it is only 1 hour!) would be nice to have, especially if a tiny loan really causes a cycle (it seems to be somewhere in between - autolend opened a few new positions for me, on the other hand, they get partally filled with several different offers sometimes as well...) and pushes you to the end of the queue.

Would it be possible to get a "Minimum time" for loans? Right now if I have seen some loans open and close very quickly. All the time that my money is not lent out (even for short periods of time) cuts into my overall APY.

The way I would see it is that when a loan is accepted, the borrower would immediately pay all the interest up to the minimum time for the loan. Up until the minimum time is reached, no more interest would be paid. Once the minimum time has been passed, the borrower would resume normal interest payments.

I would recommend the default minimum time be a percent of the maximum time, but either party could override both the minimum and maximum time. Both users (borrower and lender) values (minimum and maximum) would need to be in the correct time range for the loan to be valid.

Overall the economics would end up with longer Max time favoring the borrower and longer Min time favoring the lender.

E.g. Lender offers a $100 loan for a Max time of 60 days and Min time of 6 days at %10. If a borrower decides to accept, the borrower would immediately pay $.16 ($100 * .10 / 365 * 6).

Now you mention it...
Yes, I get the same strange behaviour here since some days (at most a week now). Actually, I didn't care much since I am still running debian (old)stable on my desktop here and Firefox 3.5 is quite dated, so I've accustomed myself to a lot of pages being slightly broken.

Once MtGox is lagged out your traders might as well be playing SatoshiDice.

How trustworthy are which numbers in the UI?

The ones in "Account overview" are currently rounded (up + down) to 2 decimals, in "History" --> "BTC" the numbers are always displayed with only 4 decimals, the only place where I've seen all 8 decimals exposed was in the "Withdraw" section. My borrowed funds + open offers however don't add up to exactly the amount there, only very close to it.

Is an interest payment that shows up in my history as e.g. 0.0167 BTC in reality somewhere in the interval [0.01665, 0.01674999] or is it really exactly 0.0167 BTC? If it is the first case, please display all decimals, as after some time numbers might not add up any more...

that would be absolutely helpful

no that much if you look past posts we did stay @ 90k usd lend most of the time whit some days above 100k


we need a history data for loans per day both in USD and BTC

That seems like a valid conclusion. I also think that a lot of people are cancelling their loans and closing their long positions resulting in that a lot of capital is freed up.
//DeaDTerra

wow, I've only been lurking on the lending page for a couple of days. Hadn't seen $13,500 on offer at VIR before. Is that outside of the norm or not?

It seems USD demand is very low currently. Probably noone wants to risk going long on leverage with a (still possible) crash or at least decrease. Am I analyzing this correctly?

Didn't look and they are gone now, but that makes sense!

what time frame are this loans ?

How come USD loans are not auto filled.  Right now someone is willing to lend at 99% and someone is willing to borrow at 199%.  Should whichever one was created second not auto-filled on the other one as it is within their borrowing or lending criteria?

Firefox 19.0.2 on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, so far I only experienced this on Bitfinex. Chrome works as expected, maybe it's an edge case for Firefox or some weird HTML/CSS/JS on the page...?

Hello Yogi,

Seems the price spiked, gave you a margin call, and by the time your position was closed got back to "normal" and you closed with a little profit.

For your information, we have again adapted the way you get margin call when market is "crazy". This should trigger a lot less false margin calls like that. We are in a tricky period where Mtgox is often unusable and we have to learn to deal with it. Which sometimes give weird/unwanted behavior.

best regards,
Raphael


Hi Sukrim,

I'll see how I can improve autolend.

About your weird behavior, I cannot reproduce it on Firefox or Chrome (Linux). What's your OS? It happens only on Bitfinex? Weird...

Raphael

Auto-Lend does not seem to play along too nicely if you from time to time also want to fill specific loan demands.

I had Auto-Lend active (at 120 days VIR), then saw a loan demand I wanted to fill, tried to do it with Auto-Lend active (didn't work, as I had already an open lending offer for my unlent balance), then deactivated Auto-Lend, filled the offer and reactivated it again (same settings as before). It took a few minutes until it posted the remaining BTC in the account as offers again...

My preferred way of Auto-Lend behaviour would be to have it reduce (or cancel + repost, but that would cause me to loose my spot in the VIR queue) open offers if I take a concious decision to fill a loan demand, so it kinda stays in "cruise control" mode but still allows me to snatch some opportunities.

Also something weird I recently experience on the page: Usually I middle-click links to open them in a new tab (using the current Firefox stable). Since a few days this does not work on Bitfinex any more (Ctrl+Left clicking also doesn't work ) and I have to resort to Right clicking + "open in new tab"...

Why has my position been forced closed?

Order #26039

I looks like this


thx for posting I totally forgot about this