Topic: ICBIT Derivatives Market (USD/BTC futures trading) - LIVE - page 24. (Read 97654 times)

Minor thing: front page's news block in the left sidebar was broken (it used to show latest @icbit_se twitter feed). Now I fixed it, and reworked to be asynchronous, so now page loads much faster, without the annoying lag which happened before.

BTCUSD is a non-linear futures, all other (GOLD, OIL and upcoming S&P500) are linear futures contracts.
Non-linearity appeared from the fact that the contract's quoting price: the trading community is very familiar with prices like $28 (USD per 1 BTC price), rather than 0.03571428 (BTC per 1 USD). If it would be quoted in BTC per 1 USD, then the futures contract would be linear.

No wonder it has already become virtually untradeable..

The trade fees must be fixed in minimal price steps..

The futures are supposed to be linear securities
here we can see highly non-linear behavior instead..

Too weird for my taste

When they started they really did not give the impression that they knew what they were doing.  But following the discussion is interesting, they are clearly experimenting and trying to find a good way to run it, learning a lot in the process.  It will be interesting to see where it ends, their platform might end up being an attractive place to trade (though I have my doubts).

But until then I will stick with ICBIT.  I tend to do better on markets that I understand, and futures are not that hard to grasp. :-)

Icidentally, thats why I find the development on Bitfinex quite interesting. There, instead of displaying just an opaque CfD mechanism and "some" sperad, they have made everything completely transparent and allow users to provide the necessary loans on an integrated loaning market. The results are sometimes weird, but this is also a self regulating market.

Bitcoincharts still didn't have time to add futures support

Ok, I will add my own volume charts then (as the HighCharts engine, alas, is buggy and does not show proper volumes neither on ICBIT nor on MtGox), along with recent trades log.

Is there any way to see the 30d, 7d, 24h volume ICBIT is experiencing?

I will explain, what I mean when I'm saying it becomes harder. I see that exxe offers 1:5 max. leverage to BTC/USD currency pair (the lowest compared to other securities).

So far when a few people put in their 50 BTC, and majority goes long, it's no problem, owners probably have enough US Dollars to cover this position on Mt.Gox.

Now imagine N persons come who want to make quick bucks bitcoins, and put, say, 1000 BTC each, and go long (very probable scenario). This effect scales perfectly, and now the forex broker needs to cover these users long position by buying N*26000*5 = 130000 USD minus short positions traders opened. Amount of such people can very easily go to the moment, when forex broker needs to posess something like 1 mln US Dollars on the account in MtGox to start with, or otherwise the desk goes bankrupt when enough people start trading.
If BTC rate would be crashing, again majority goes short, and forex broker needs to have enough of bitcoins to cover the short position on MtGox with 1:5 leverage.

In futures contract market, ICBIT does not need to be (the only) market maker: this effect could be scaled down to another N traders who want to hedge, arbitrage and speculate, as there is a self-regulation of the market which we see in action already: if there are too many traders opening long position, the contango appears, and makes futures contract less appealing to buy, but more appealing to short sell. And vice versa, if the traders are pessimistic and majority goes short, backwardation appears, and it becomes appealing to open long positions.

There is of course no guarantee for a max spread on a futures trading platform either.  I do not understand the argument about why it would be harder to get out of CFDs when the volume goes up (but of course that does not mean that it is incorrects), however right now it might be pretty difficult to get out of some of the futures contracts.  Anyone being long on gold on icbit would have had a hard time getting out of those contracts these last weeks - although the events currently unfolding on mtgox might change that

As a "customer", I must say that I find that futures and CFDs supplement each other.  Diversification is good!

No, it won't become "harder and harder" and there are no plans to increase the spread.

This is not intentional and a good idea. Displaying the max/average spread and limits could be implemented. (Added to the TODO list).

I really don't want to advertise here, I just want to answer on the rumors.
As I said, futures and CFDs both have advantages and I wish you great success with icbit, Fireball. 

Though I appreciate exxe's desire to provide a CFD service, and getting in or out of a position may indeed be very easy there as long as the usage is small. With the increasing usage and demand, it would become harder and harder to "make the market" (provide users the ability to buy and sell CFDs as easy as now). This is usually regulated by increasing the spread level.
And this small detail has always kept me out of using this kind of services (when it comes to both fiat and BTC money).

For example, if you look carefully at their website, there is absolutely no promise about the spread values. It just reports "current spread". There is no such thing as max. spread value, max buy/sell volume or any other similar figures.
Imagine that when you're trading at ICBIT, you would not know what the value of Fee would be for your next trade, and that only ICBIT own orders would be displayed in the orderbook and you would have to either agree to them or wait when they change.
Open market FTW :-)

What I said above applies to all Forex-alike and Bitcoinica-alike trading services, including Forex brokers too.

Good to hear. 

It looks a bit worrying from the outside, but I really hope that you are right because:
Indeed! 

And I do wish you luck (but limit my exposure, as I do with icbit, too).

And while we are at it: I must say that it is a lot easier to get into or out of a position on 1broker compared to icbit, mainly due to the relatively low volume and corresponding high spread at icbit.  But I guess that it is also partly due to the nature of CFDs versus futures.

I PM you to debug the problem.

Using the ICBIT api, I get multiple orders entered for BUH3 after sending a single create_order command.  Sometimes I get as few as 4, and other times as many as 80, but never 1 as I would expect.

Is anyone else entering orders using the API, and if so, have you seen this kind of problem?

This is only partly true.  1Broker has a connection to the Bitcoin market. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to survive the volatile BTC/USD market. Saying that 1Broker has a "problem" is quite unfair. Both, CFDs and futures have their advantages and can coexist in Bitcoin-world as they can in "real" financial markets today.

That's a great solution.  I agree that Mt. Gox's send_simple makes me a little uncomfortable. 

Do you plan to add that feature?

No. Such API function would expose a security risk. One possible solution would be adding a function which sends to already predefined, confirmed address (via two factor authentication, at least) which can't be changed using API.

For automated market making purposes, an API-directed withdrawal facility (such as the Mt. Gox  send_simple function) would be very handy. Does such an operation exist now? If not, do you plan to add one?

1broker.com has the same problem now (apart from the bizarre numbers).  Icbit, on the other hand, is a "real" market.  You buy and sell futures to other customers on an exchange.  The flipside of the coin is that a "futures contract" is slightly more complicated than a simple leveraged buy/sell, and that the price can depart significantly from the spot market.

I have used icbit for half a year now, the site works well and the operator (Fireball) appears both honest and competent (neither is a given in the bitcoin world, unfortunately).  However, past performance is not guarantee for future performance, the site may be hacked, closed by the authorities, scammed, shut down and run, taken over by the mafia or suffer any other unfortunate fate tomorrow.  So as always when you place your bitcoins on a website, take care and don't gamble everything.  :-)

I've never been on icbit.se, but it was pretty easy to tell Bitcoinica was BS from the very start,

i remember mailing the guy that his site was essentially just a gambling site, since it had no actual connection to any bitcoin market (and bizarre ""bid"" and ""ask"" numbers that guaranteed bitcoinica making shitloads)