Topic: ICBIT Derivatives Market (USD/BTC futures trading) - LIVE - page 4. (Read 97687 times)

Important message about recent changes.

Our rules are in effect starting from this night: https://icbit.se/rules
Most statements were already de facto in effect, and our main goal was to cover all possible situations, so we will add more explanations should any uncertainty arise.

Additional margin (see rule 3.3.1.2):
I expect that approximately half of our players would be very upset with new additional margin, but you should understand that this is the only one possible way to deal with current situation. Base margin for all contracts only covers any movements within the trading range, but no more, so there is no way we could settle a contract with 100% contango if just ~10% is covered by a margin. 100% contango is a severe condition and it was even rising instead of contracting, so we had to implement this additional margin to be able to manage settlement of this instrument.
Other half of those positions, who were shorting, will understand that we did it to be able to pay all shorts.
We also get messages from possible big traders telling us that it's just absolutely not serious to keep such a low margin and that they wouldn't trade here knowing that their profit may be not paid due to longs defaulting.
It's still not the end of the world, and we won't issue margin calls in this and next trading session so you can either reduce/close your position or add funds.
Yes, we also had a proposal to deploy additional margin gradually, by a few percents per day, but as our estimation shows, this would cause much more damage.
It turns out that some players with long positions were intentionally exploiting this low-margin situation, buying more contracts at the price higher than they ever expected spot to reach at the settlement.
Summary: we know that this a very unpopular change and we expect lots of scam accusations with negative feedback, but 1) we had no choice, this is the only way to be able to settle our BTC/USD instruments, either this or stopping our operations, 2) this change makes our trading much more secure and we decided that it's more important than possible negative feedback. It's not a completely sudden change, we posted the proposal in the trollbox many times during the last 3 weeks, even personally to some long position holders, but didn't received a lot of alternative solutions. And yes, we understand that trollbox is for informal communications, not official announcements.

Technical issues and withdrawals/deposits today:
We experienced some bad luck today and have to move/switch some servers due to hardware problems, this includes our Bitcoin interface too, so bitcoin operations may be delayed while this server is offline. Don't worry, your bitcoins are safe and we will continue operations soon. As I said before, no margin calls will be issued during this and next trading sessions.

New rules:
If you think that our rules do not cover some important aspect of the exchange, please comment here and we will add clarifications. It's important to cover all possible situations there.

Your safety is our priority.

Ahhhw that sucks, I was about to check it out haha.
Well I guess ill come back later.
Good luck solving these technical issues!

Sorry to bring in bad news, but we have a number of technical issues with the hardware.

Bitcoins are unaffected, please sorry for downtime. ETA on recovery will be published soon.

OK, this is not a dramatic change, and it does not look like it affects us users in any bad way - just a bit less manipulation, which is good for most of us, I guess. 

It has not yet been announced here, but this seems important.

A new rule is going into effect at icbit at 2000 today.  It is rule 3.2.3 in https://icbit.se/rules/

N.B. The rules at https://icbit.se/rules/ are presented merely for discussion.  Most are either de facto or previously published, but it has been announced by Tycho "[11/27 11:33] Tycho: Rule 3.2.3 is in effect."

This becomes meangingful at 1900.  Plan accordingly.

New contract launched: BTC/USD-1.14 (expires in January, 2014). Range ±15%. Tick size $0.1

An unforeseen technical issue, was resolved shortly.

It gives me runtime error what's going on?

Servers may be down for a few minutes for maintenance. Thanks for patience!

Good news everyone!

To celebrate our anniversary a period of ZERO FEES will start today (2nd of November) at 20:00 UTC and it will last for 2 weeks (until 16th of November 20:00 UTC clearing). After that, fees will be significantly reduced according to the spot exchange rate to make futures trading even more fun.

It is indeed quite expensive!  But then Bitcoin is extremely volatile, so if you hedge against a risk that risk is unusually large (hence the high price of hedging) or if you are speculating the potential gain is large.

But I agree that the price has become absurd.  As the price increases, the contracts become smaller and smaller (measured in BTC) while the fee stays the same.

Thanks for your replies. I find that absurdly expensive. The cost of 'hedging' is too high to use it.

Didn't you mean 0.02 BTC per day.  That is 200 times more expensive.

With some of the other futures the fee is really heavy.  If you deposit X BTC and buy BUZ3 or BUH4, you have already used 10% of the deposited BTC on fees, and will use another 10% when selling.  On top of that comes the large spread.  Normally with such a large spread it would pay to make a market-making bot that places orders inside both sides of the spread (and tries to keep the total balance close to zero).  Such bots would reduce the spread, but the fees makes it impossible to do that.

Discounts table is available here: https://icbit.se/discount

- https://icbit.se/futures

So, X2.

 .... your 100 contracts cost $0.02 per day  (100 contracts X 0.0001 BTC X 2 clearings per day).

That is specific to BUX3.  Other BTC/USD contracts for durations further out don't have that daily clearing.  Also, some larger traders have enough volume to get a discount on that fee (both clearing fee and per-contract trx fee).

Hi Fireball,

I've tried trading one contract at ICBIT (BUX3), and have a question related to fees.
The info page on icbit website (https://icbit.se/BUX3) says the following:
My question is: does ICBIT charge clearing fee every day? How often the clearing occurs?
I sold only 1 contract, so the fee I was charged is only 0.0001.
In case if I sell 100 contracts, will I be charged 0.01 every day?

Thank you.

DIFF-10.13 expired today, settlement difficulty value was 189281.
BTC/USD-10.13 expired 2013-10-14, the 24H VWAP MtGox price was $149.87


Thank you for trading!

Problem with displaying logs in Firefox browser are resolved. Thank you for testing and bug reporting!

Logs page finally received an update, and now you are able to see your full trading and money history by selecting the date range.

Hello!

1) Options - yes, but that's a medium term plan
2) No
3) You're the first trader asking for BTC/LTC futures settled in LTC. Everyone else are asking about BTC/LTC settled in BTC.