Hm, what's actually the best way to lend coins?
Since VIR seems to be preferred atm. I guess VIR it is for the rate - but how long should the period be?
Positions can be opened for 1, 7, 14, 30 and 60 days. I guess it would make sense to rather offer 60 (or more) days as lending period if you want to lend for some time (especially with VIR). On the other hand I'm not sure if the system matches a 1 day position with a up-to-60-days lending offer or if it also selects by duration or amount (if there are several VIR offers). Could you please elaborate how the system selects from several lending offers that are at the same rate, but different amounts and durations?
Now traders can ignore VIR so it's not entirely true. Offers are taken from the lowest rate to the highest, if the period is equal or above the trader chosen period.
The longer period you choose, the faster your offer is taken. When a trader opens a position, the loan expiration date depends on the lender offer. In other words even if a trader chooses to open a position for 1 day, his loan for your offer of 60 days will expire in 60 days (unless he cuts it before). He will then have a position with several loans, which will expire at least in one day.
When a loan expires, the position is simply reduced by an order at market rate.
Another thing:
I offered 15 BTC VIR 10 days and 5 BTC VIR 2 days (both renewable I think) yesterday.
Today I have suddenly an open offer for 19.99 BTC VIR for 10 days and an "Interest Payment on wallet deposit" of 0.0009 BTC (it looks like the amounts in the UI get rounded to 2 digits, so it doesn't show up).
After playing around a bit, I found out that I can offer the same amount multiple times, which means I can inflate the order book arbitrarily. I guess my other offers become canceled/inactive once an offer is actually filled - but still you might consider a change there? I have VIR offers for 119.99 BTC open with only 20 BTC backing these... I could fake thousands of offers at really low rates probably leading to others trying to underbid that "wall" with only very few funds behind.
Yes, it was a compromise between server resources and security: offers are at the moment checked only when a trader pass an order. In your case your offers would soon have been cancelled.
Now that the server has more power I'll add the check before you propose your offers to avoid this kind of spam.
Another thing is that I'd like to have historic data on VIR:
I got stuff like "Executed at vir(5.0): was partially filled at vir (1.0), partially filled at vir (0.98422983), partially filled at vir (5.0), partially filled at vir (3.01577017)" and even "Executed at vir(19.96814999): was partially filled at vir (0.02185)"! This seems like quite a bit of jumping in that rate.
Also from the history I cannot see (other than looking at the newly posted lending offer, which interestingly stayed the same on the second one) how much of the BTC I offered I was actually lending out. As far as I understand, offers can be partially filled after all.
Well, offer status needs a bit of explanation here. The amount you see in parenthesis "VIR
(amount)" is the quantity of BTC or USD taken, not the rate.
And yes at the moment you don't have historical data of interests rates, that something to add on the list of dev to do.
Edit:
If positions are chosen by time stamp (e.g. take all offers that are open for at least x days starting from oldest to now), it might be a good strategy to create as many small offers as possible. If I lend out 20 BTC and only 0.01 BTC is taken from that, a new offer of 19.99 BTC gets reposted as far as I understand and I loose the old time stamp. In the extreme case I should lend out atomic positions (single Satoshis) to make sure all my funds are optimally used if renewed in such a scenario. Maybe it works differently, but so far (from logs) it seems like somebody took a loan of 0.01 BTC from one of my offers and it got renewed.
Oh, and 5 minutes ago suddenly my offers vanished ("insufficient balance, was: active"), 35 minutes after being posted.
Actually when an offer is partially taken, it is not reposter, it's the same. So the timestamps (or rather the internal offer ID) is the same and you don't lose your "place" on the offer queue.
I hope I answered to your questions. Thanks for these feedback, I really appreciate this, and we added your suggestions to the dev list.
Raphael