Topic: ICBIT - New Exchange (Read 6621 times)

admin! I'm in shock! why I closed the 50 futures on 140?? (At that time, as Bitcoin was worth 85)
I am engaged in arbitration, AND SO THE FUTURES FOR ALL I HAVE BOUGHT Bitcoins

a month ago also closed several hundred at the rate of twice the rate at Gokcen. I swallowed a pill that, although the loss was enormous
I'm arbitration, and under all the futures I bought bitcoins.
I see the clearing in 8utra occurred at the rate of 130.49. HOW my futures then could close at a higher rate?
the more that ever were willing to buy, so I understand it, you are required to change more quickly before my partner, closing futures to someone who did not have enough collateral
Why is the second time I have to myself to bear huge losses (in percentage terms), while the administration admitted mistakes (not relevant market situation margin requirement GO untimely margin call)
Please answer, because if such losses occur without sharp collapse (in contrast to the situation in the past month), then the arbitration between Gokcen and this exchange does not really.
before that, when on April 12, I closed the 200fyuchersov to 143 when Bitcoin was 80, I swallowed it, though, and lost a lot of nested, the more that a month before, I was on these futures suffered loss (here), and constantly added here Bitcoins
But many of those futures, I was selling more on 55, 70, 90. And forcibly bought at 143! (
but I understand that at that time there was a sharp decline, and many have suffered from the fact that at the time were not increased margin requirements
but on the basis of what is now closed my contracts, the relatively quiet market, always with a willing to buy contracts at a reasonable price, and the more that the price is above the clearing price!
I want my money! This is an obvious miscalculation ADMINISTRATION AND I SHOULD NOT BECAUSE THEY SUFFER IN WHICH THE TIMES

Not really, if you think of it.
1. Really sticking to AML law is required if an exchange deals directly with fiat money, by selling or buying certain goods (bitcoins in this case).
2. Fighting money laundering by requesting everyone using a bitcoin exchange who is doing a "big enough" financial operation to submit scanned(!) copies of identification documents makes me laugh. It has a few complications involved, mainly that those scanned copies can be forged. So in reality, an exchange does not fight money laundering, it just tries to collect as much evidence as possible if legal problems arise.

So my solution is to kill the root of the problem, and this is what my "naive statement" means.
As of now, my exchange deals only with Bitcoins and VouchX by AurumXchange. So directly, I don't touch fiat money, hence don't have to put up ridiculuos requests for clients to send in copies of their drivers licenses, passports, phone bills confirming their residency address, etc. Legally, the problem will be elsewhere, and I'm sure AurumXchange has good lawyers who covered their side of responsibility.

Indeed it makes me quite worried if a bitcoin exchange becomes a central war place for money laundering practices. Officials should catch offenders at other places before they reach exchanges. Like, when they actually steal money, not when they try to launder...

"Also, ICBIT is not a place for money laundering, so we are not going to enforce any AML measures like ID verification requirement."

Hehe...

First part of a major update was deployed yesterday.
From user-visible changes:
 * you can now use "max Buy" and "max Sell" buttons which would put maximum amount of bitcoins you can buy at the given price (don't forget to specify price you want), and respectively maximum amount of bitcoins you can sell.
 * more meaningful error messages are returned during order placement.

Internal changes include further trading engine improvements and modifications aimed to support the new features (to be launched soon).

I added a tutorial with some essential information regarding the trading. https://icbit.se/node/9 - please have a look, comments are welcome of course.

First milestone is providing a good currency exchange and building up users base.
Second milestone would be enabling futures trading.

It's done this way because of two reasons:
1. There is a lack of good bitcoin exchanges.
2. Futures market requires more liquidity, so it's not a good idea to start it from scratch. Unlike futures market, currency exchange market perfectly starts from scratch.

So the faster ICBIT currency market grows, the faster futures market will be open I really hope this is a question of a few weeks.

When are the derivatives coming? (or did I just not find them?)

Thanks for those who tested the new interface yesterday, we've got a number of bugreports about usability issues, user interface imperfections. Fortunately, there are no issues related to bitcoin deposit/withdrawal except for one person whose small transaction was divided into two even smaller parts by our payment engine. Nothing to worry about, usually this won't happen.

All reported issues are fixed, so please feel free to test out the new interface, try to put up a few orders and actually trade. If something goes wrong, or you suspect something was not correct - send an email to the address shown on the front page of the website and we will deal with your problem as soon as possible.

Those who like to experience new user interface of ICBIT could already log in to the trading floor ( https://icbit.se/WebTrade ) and see the work done by our team.
It has some minor issues which are being resolved (would take a day, or better - a night to work out), so consider this as a sneak peak preview for now

P.S. Beware of the browser cache and don't forget to hit CTRL+F5 once to totally update files contents.

Good luck to you!

There were about 50 deals for the recent testing period, with 400+ orders submitted from various testers.
We are wiping these test deals from the production system now, and tomorrow we are going to deploy final functional update to the server.

Further updates will be posted here and on the front page of the website.

To those who wonders why is it taking so long for us to start real-money trading, there is a very simple answer:
we don't want things like those happened to Bitcoinica (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hacked-linode-coins-stolen-to-1nry8gbx56mymbhdym-66916 ) to happen to us, so the security of the payment gateway is given so much attention.

Also it's important to balance it finely, so that too much security measures don't affect system usability.

Thanks, I will try to do it that way.

NOTE: I'm working on deploying real deposit/withdrawal functions, and I will zero all account values shortly.

I like the way that btc-e.com does it.

1) click balance in either buy or sell and it fills the respective amount field with the max so it zeroes the account at the price specified in the price per btc field.

2) click calculate.

3) click buy/sell btc. 

if you don't like, type in a new price per btc, hit Calculate and you either have sufficient or insufficient funds. Either way you can then hit the balance again, and it will recalculate the amount to again zero the amount.

I cannot stand having to have excel open just to try and work out what a full amount is. That is the job of the computer, that is the job of the exchange, I should not have to trust that my sheet has the inferred formula correct, or have the fee correct, because it changed half an hour ago when tradehill went under, etc, etc.

I have numerous bit of 0.000001 aud, -0.00003btc, +0.00000016 btc, etc. in exchanges because of binary chopping to try and get to a figure that will get most of my funds transferred. How the hell I managed to get a negative in an exchange beats me, and somewhat worries me as to the calculation in the exchange matching/trading software.

marked

I need more feedback on one specific issue, which I'm being often told about. I take an example from Cryptoxchange thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cryptoxchanges-system-sucks-or-just-me-62953 :

What would you like to see in ICBIT? Right now, it functions as a real-world stock exchange, which only allows orders backed by money in an account.

My suggestion would be to do a "MAX" button which would automatically fill in the maximum possible value in the text box for buying/selling.

DNS propogation in progress, the whole system is offline for now and will be offline for the next 6-12 hours while all DNS information gets updated.

You will notice how fast the system is going to work on the production hosting

We are finishing the move to production hosting this week, along with some changes and UI improvements. So sometimes the website may be non available.
One tester could find one rare bug in the trading engine, my personal thanks to him. I will post the changelist when those changes go live.

I did say "reputable".. 

As I remember, mtGox's user database was stolen during "3rd party audit" :)

Did you see? Mtgox implemented my proposals to you almost word for word. Time to up your game if you want to stay competitive!

I'm working on attaching payment gateways now and implementing one "tasty" feature (which I left space for in the beginning of the thread). I'll keep updates on the progress here. Testing goes quite good so far.

Nope.
I fully agree with your other points which would make our exchange the most transparent among existing exchanges, and actually benefit the end-user, with some exceptions, like amount of existing fiat/bitcoin currency is not good as Tycho already suggested, because users are not encouraged to keep money in the exchange, so orderbook will show you approximate value of money "in the market".
However, as for profit/losses reports, it matters only in one specific case: if you're shareholder of the company and you want to ensure your cut of the profit is calculated properly. In any other case, a user of the exchange does not need this information being a user of services provided by the exchange.

Furthermore, from my experience in other big projects, these kind of profits/losses report will only hurt the adoption of the exchange.

I'm sorry, but that's a part of the cost of running an honest business.

But consider this. You'd have the very first exchange with this type of almost complete transparency. I'm highly confident you'd get a pretty big share of the market very fast and could cover these costs in no time.

Who would pay for this, you?

You need to rethink your positions on these two points because out of all the points I listed these two speak the most to your credibility. If you show you actually made a sizable commitment of your own capital people will have more reasons to trust you and support you. And you can verify your books by getting a reputable 3rd party auditor to audit your figures and verify them for us to see. Same goes for your profits. If we, the users, can see that your business is doing good, that your digging yourself out of the investment hole and have all the incentives to keep your business running (why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, right?) we will have even more confidence in your business and your credibility.

My point is if you do your best to be as transparent as your security allows it, it can only benefit your reputation and your client base and ultimately your success.

I don't think that it's a good idea because it looks like a security risk.

Why do you think that a business should provide such info ?

That's great idea, and in fact I already wanted to do such page, called "statistics". It's a must have information really, and there is nothing to hide. Especially I dislike when small projects start pretending to be huge.

I will comment my thoughts on your table for now, so that people here have the information right away.

-how many users are signed up: About 100, we're just testing the system.
-how many of them active in the last 1/7/30 days: Our system doesn't gather this kind of information.
-how much fiat is deposited: 0 because testing is done with "virtual" money.
-how much btc is deposited: 0 because testing is done with "virtual" money.
-show volume of new deposits for 1/7/30 days periods: Good info to show, I like the idea.
-show volume of new withdrawals for 1/7/30 days periods: Good info to show, I like the idea.
-show all orders, all of them, none of the dark bs: This is already done! Orderbook shows only really existing orders backed up by money in users accounts. Let other players implement dark pools, we don't want to cheat.
-show us your entire profit history: Not good idea, because right now I could show you off tens of thousands of US dollars already spent on the project, and noone would be able to check if that's real or not except me and my partners on this project.
-show us the entire costs of running your business: Not a very good idea, because costs vary a lot. E.g. as for hosting costs, they are available everywhere, and right now ICBIT occupies a few dedicated and some VPS servers. When the load increases, we are going to upgrade servers which experience high load, and also scale horizontally (as the architecture allows this). As for other costs, no reason to tell because noone would be able to check if they are real or not.
-show us everything, be as transparent as you can without it becoming a security risk: I'm all for this, however I'm not going to make hacker's life easier and reveal all of our infrastructure. Maybe with time, I could do this, in some interview or something.

Hey Fireball, I want to give you the same suggestion as I gave to cryptoxchange:

Gmail put your reg. email in spam folder.

Doing some maintenance on one of the servers now, so the trading engine is sometimes offline.
For the time being, the frontpage of https://icbit.se got updated with some key ideas behind this trading platform. I hope you like it.

More updates to the engine to come today... (I will post here when they are deployed).

Update: Now Filled and Canceled/Rejected orders will be kept in the Your Orders table for up to 5 minutes. They won't really disappear by themselves, you would need to reload the webpage to make them go away (this is done intentionally, so that while you're trading, you can see your most recent history).

Is this ok by your opinion? Want to propose a different time interval? Filled orders are just moved to a slower/long-term storage, so if needed we could provide an interface to view user's trading history by date for example.

Testing goes quite good so far, thanks a lot for those who took the time to go, test and report the bugs!

I'm working on the remaining things, and one very important and useful feature I will announce when it's ready.

In the meanwhile, the Trading API is being documented as we speak. The specification is available here - http://icbit.se/api . It really resembles MtGox's streaming API a lot, however there are some specific changes (only authenticated users are allowed to connect, it's possible to send out actual commands to put/cancel the order without the need to use slow HTTP POST/GET based API). It would be cool to listen to any comments about this (especially from trading bot authors as they are really concerned with speed and reliability).

Watching

Desktop trading client?  Me likes.

Fixes:
1. Now it's impossible to add an "intersecting" order (e.g. if you have a buy order @ 5 USD, you can't add a limit order sell @ 6, the order will be marked as rejected).
2. Problem with cancelling New or Partially Filled orders is resolved now.

I'll be giving this a try.

For fun, I just bought 100 of your BTCs for 6.3, and then sold them back to you for 6.2. You made some profit! :-)

I will notify when the intersecting orders update will be live.

Ah thanks, it's same issue we had before. It comes due to intersecting orders from yourself (e.g. you sell 300 for 6.3, and simulteneously you buy 100 for 6.3) - I will deploy an update with the check enabled in about half an hour and reply back here.

Still have some problems:

Hello,
let me introduce the new trading platform, called https://icbit.se. There is already a long thread about its Derivatives market section ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.605807 ). However, by reading numerous messages about problems on Mt.Gox and TradeHill, slowness of orders execution, be it web interface or special API (which should be in fact designed to ease server's work), I suspect there is a need in a better, competing exchange.

I constructed the new exchange using my multiple years of experience in the stock and derivatives trading (including HFT, quantative trading), but I tried to make it comfortable for existing traders' practices used by Bitcoin community. My wish for ICBIT is to be considered as the next step of Bitcoin exchanges evolution, something like "Exchange 2.0".

Some of the new architectural features which make ICBIT different from already existing exchanges:

• Advanced, very high-performance trading engine.
• Redis-based data storage for active data and traditional SQL database storage for historic data.
• Real time web trading client. No polling, no slowness, what you see in the web trading client is updated at real time.
• (One very important feature which will make active trading WAY more convinient coming soon... )
• Websocket API.
• Partnership with leading money transfer services for fast and convinient money deposit/withdrawal and key projects in the Bitcoin community (announcements coming soon...).

As I already told in my other topics, ICBIT is a community-driven project, so it evolves according to the demand of the Bitcoin community.

Right now, only Currency Trading section is enabled, Derivatives markets will be the next step after Currency Trading goes live.

HOW TO TRADE.
DISCLAIMER: The trading platform is in beta testing stage, so it obviously may have problems, misbehave or just don't work at a given moment of time. The purpose of this testing is to eliminate as much of problems as possible before going live. Email address for any questions is given at the website's front page.

1. Register at the website (if you haven't already) to obtain global ICBIT authentication credentials.
2. Go to the web trading client (https://icbit.se/WebTrade/).
3. Log in there with your global ICBIT login and password (it's not mandatory to be logged in at the main website).
4. Go to "Funds" tab. Follow on-screen instructions to deposit (or later withdraw) some money.
5. Go to "Currency Trading" tab. Now you can create buy/sell orders, watch the market depth (order book), keep an eye on your waller and a list of orders.

If you encounter any problem, have some useful suggestion - reply to this thread, and I would fix it.