Cool. Thanks so much for the clarification.
Hey, I'm not like some evil broker. Whatever things I post regarding Bitcoinica's trading activity or whatsoever, must be from the past (already hedged orders and liquidated positions). It's also morally incorrect (and sometimes illegal) to read customers' orders and trade at the same time.
I have a rule for myself (and I hope other exchanges' owners can follow):
Every time after seeing customers' orders, intentionally or unintentionally, refrain from trading or discussing them publicly for 24 hours.
The temptation to do this surely must be great though. I find it worrying that the operators of dark-pool trading platforms like bitcoinica (perhaps ONLY bitcoinica) are privy to the collective trade decisions of it's users when everyone else is not. Especially when these businesses are not subject to the stringent external auditing processes as real world institutions.
I know you have stated that you promise not to trade based on this information, but it is not really good enough for me because a promise is hardly a rock solid guarantee. How can we be sure you are telling the truth, and are not going to trade against your clients? Trust is just not enough, even though you seem like a decent guy zhou.
Given the open-source spirit of bitcoin, I think it would only be right to open your order books the same way mtgox and the other exchanges do. I know you said that this would leave bitcoinica open to manipulation, but my (admittedly poor) understanding of game theory is that as long as everyone has access to the information, it would be no more problematic than it is now. What do you think about this?
It's not as if the folks at MtGox still couldn't get an advantage in trading. They know how much bitcoin and USD is sitting around off the order books.
haha, that's a good one.
