Topic: [OFFICIAL]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 126. (Read 723903 times)

Yes, that is what I don't understand, why don't more people just write a bot? It is very simple to do, and it can ensure that your funds are always being used. There are many people who would simply take whatever the best rate requested, because anything > nothing. I'm thinking of writing a bot just to see how well it would work, and what sort of return I could get compared to using the FRR. I personally agree with you though, and I have always been fine with just using the FRR, and I feel like this discussion has been railroaded by people who want to fundamentally change the products we offer. There has even been suggestions to shut down the entire swap market, let bitfinex pick a rate, and then all funds receive the weighted average of the returns or something. I appreciate the effort some put in, but that is in no way going to happen. So, I appreciate your perspective, and the fact that you have seen the evolution of the FRR over time, and understand its purpose. Hopefully, the latest tweak will make it more useful.

I currently can see an offer, and a bid. The FRR is not remotely close to the bid. It is in no way standing in front of the 61 offers that are currently in front of it, AND not being taken.

"The general conclusion was to best way to fix it was to remove it."

You are the only one who has concluded this. I, personally, think that statement makes no sense. You could say "The way to improve THE SWAP MARKET is to get rid of the FRR.", but you cannot say "The way to improve the FRR is to remove it." That is not an improvement to the FRR, the FRR no longer exists, therefore it cannot be improved.

Again, you are arguing that to improve the swap market, we should follow your suggestion. While appreciated, we never asked that question. We asked how to improve the FRR, and forgive me if I look for answers to that question.

OK, I have a sick patient, I should kill him so he is no longer sick? Or should I treat his disease? That is the analogy here. We said "The calculation of the FRR is not optimal, how can we improve it". People have suggested getting rid of it. That is not improving the FRR, that is "killing the patient".

"1) swap duration is one sided, a trader can close it at will and is not required to carry it for it's full term and 2) a trader can jump from swap to swap without closing their position and with no penalty."

This is why they are paying you...they want the right to use your funds to enable a position, and they want the right to close that position early. In exchange, you get the rate that you select, or you can get a variable rate based on a metric that we provide. So, swap provider receives his agreed upon rate, trader gets the option to enter a position, but not the obligation to do so. If the possibility of early closure is very annoying, the rate should be higher to reflect this.

Basically, there is typically X demand for swaps, and Y supply. a situation where X is greater than Y is not usual. So, given the entire pool of funds in Y, if you want YOUR swap to be taken with a higher probability, you should price it lower. This "undercutting" thing is basic price discovery.
Currently there is around 1.2 million in requested swaps at rates lower than currently offered. The current "spread" is 0.0752% by 0.0806%, the FRR is 0.0844%, pretty far from the highest rate someone has offered to pay. I also notice that the shorter the term, the higher the rate demanded and the lower the rate offered, which is interesting.

I still feel like people aren't understanding the purpose of this market, to enable margin trading. It doesn't exist in a vacuum to enable passive investors to generate good returns, though I think that is a by product. So, it seems that many people want a "savings account", and while it is possible to try and use the deposit account this way, via the FRR and autolend, you will not do as well as someone who is actively managing their positions. You will have funds sitting unused, as is currently the case with the over 3 million USD offered at the FRR. So basically, the more you put in the more you can get out, but only in the context of what the market is willing to bear.

I'll try to put DRK and LTC and see what happens then, thanks!

I don't understand, it is a waste of resources to NOT include balances that you do not currently have? By adding a new query, this uses less resources? If you do have LTC, DRK, or TH1, you will receive those balances when you use the "balances" API call. If you do not have those balances, you can simply fill them in yourself with "0.0".

Here are the volumes for the last 30 days:

782339.31 BTC
1061895.98 LTC
104072.32 DRK
1121.72 TH1

If you do the multiplication so that you see, in USD, how much each market is trading, it is easy to see what most people are trading. That is why BTC/USD are automatically returned, and other balances are only returned if necessary.

Swap demand does not go up simply because the Bitcoin price goes down.  It goes up in anticipation that the price will go up, which is (presumably) more likely when the price is down. Traders are only borrowing the funds and with that the bitcoins that they 'buy'.  The only way to make money with swaps not to hold the bitcoins, but to sell them for more at a later date. The 'TO DA MOON!' people are using their own funds.

The swap rate goes down when the price is stagnate due to lenders undercutting the FRR trying to get their money into the hands of the few traders willing to take it or replacing currently existing swaps for cheaper ones.

When the price plummets, the swap rate doesn't drop, it evaporates.  Traders close their positions and return the money to the swap pool. In effect, the rate goes negative.  Traders are choosing to lose money now so they don't lose much more money later.  The swap can be 'sold' by the trader simply by closing it, they do not need to find a 'buyer'.

The 2, 5, 10 day swap rate would be interesting to look at.  I reasons don't think it would work is that 1) swap duration is one sided, a trader can close it at will and is not required to carry it for it's full term and 2) a trader can jump from swap to swap without closing their position and with no penalty.

The price Delta might not work, but without the will of Bitfinex to explore it we will never know.

Seriously ? No I do not agree.
As a doctor would you rather have a sick patient with a disease that you are able to control rather than a healthy patient ? I guess maybe it makes sense because you can get more money from the patient, is that maybe what you meant ?

This isn't going to end well, but I'll play for a while.

Let's see how 'basic' we can get this; adequately resolve the following and I will agree to your statement.

You have a hole in your tire.  What is the best way to improve it?

On further reflection, the key problem with the FRR is that taking a swap at FRR doesn't increase the rate. With so much of the market being FRR swaps that means ignoring the effect of a lot of demand for funding because it gets absorbed into the unresponsive FRR monolith and then isn't included in the rate calculations. I'm thinking it needs a rate-setting mechanism that would continue to function well (and respond to changes in supply/demand) even if everyone were using FRR exclusively, because to a first order approximation that's what the orderbook of offers actually looks like. Relying on the rates of fixed-rate swaps to set the variable rate with that imbalance present is just producing stupid results.

But of course, devising that independent rate-setting mechanism is prone to exactly the kind of difficulty that a market solution is supposed to avoid; it means effectively "picking" an arbitrary rate rather than letting supply/demand sort it out for you, and is liable to end up with magic numbers scattered through the calculation and a methodology that tries but fails to estimate/approximate the market answer... as we've seen with several of the suggestions.

That's why "Fuck it, just rip it out" is so appealing; it completely eliminates the question of how to pick a rate by removing the need to do so. But if there must be an auto-rate for the passive lenders (and that's fair enough from Bitfinex' perspective I guess; there's lots of them and they provide a lot of the funding) it needs to have it's own mechanism to adapt the rate to market conditions without relying on a hokey half-baked measure like averaging the other active swaps.

USD swap demand goes up if the price goes down ("BTC are getting cheaper, let's buy more, TO DA MOON!") and it goes up if the price goes up ("It's_happening.gif"), it only seems to go down if the price doesn't change a lot over several days. Basing a rate on the price delta of the last 15 minutes is not going to model demand easily I'm afraid.

I'm still more in favour of keeping FRR as is and rather changing defaults or introducing more strict rules (e.g. FRR can only be set for 3 day durations max. so fixed rate swaps have more space to discover prices?). Also it might be interesting to know how FRR would look like if 30 day FRR is based on 30 day fixed rate swaps, 10 day FRR on 10 day fixed rate etc.

Thank you for your prompt response,

I do not have any balance yet: 0 BTC, 0 USD, 0 DRK ecc.. so that is not the issue and, if I may, it is wrong and resource-wasteful to not send balance if "there is no balance".

This is the answer I am getting right now:
[{"type":"deposit","currency":"btc","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"},
 {"type":"deposit","currency":"usd","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"},
 {"type":"trading","currency":"btc","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"},
 {"type":"trading","currency":"usd","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"},
 {"type":"exchange","currency":"btc","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"},
 {"type":"exchange","currency":"usd","amount":"0.0","available":"0.0"}]

IMHO you only need to add the appropriate queries to your database for DRK, LBC, TH1 and add the results to the JSON accordingly.

Seems there are many emails "slip through the cracks".



I encourage people who didn't get soon response from Bitfinex support send your email again and again in case your email "slip through the cracks".

Ok, why I thought support services of a company like Bitfinex become so important for all of us as their customers?

That is because it is the only way we can contact them in case of any issues/emergency, especially when we put lots of our money into Bitfinex.

p.s. To be fair, anyway, mjr (josh?) is the best PR so far even as I can recollect he is the second one....

That really depends what your criteria for improvement are. If your goal is to enable efficient price discovery, and if FRR swaps are an active hindrance to efficient price discovery (compared to fixed-rate only), then removing the ability to offer FRR swaps would be an improvement to the situation. Whether that counts as an "improvement to the FRR" or not isn't really relevant.

I'm waiting for a response from support about my request for a refund due to TH1 market manipulation.  Original email was sent on Oct 15 (Subject: "Money lost due to TH1 contract design").

okay, since there isn't
okay, I provided a pretty good summary above and since there doesn't sound like a backlog.
My email was titled "lost Google authenticator key". I'll be glad to provide any details in regards to my account and trading activity.
Thanks for your time,
Brian

I asked specifically if you guys could provide some more info? I don't even have the email address to search for your email. That being said, support has said they do not have any backlog.

I'll address the rest of what you said in a later post. Can we please agree though, because this is basic, that you cannot "improve" something, by making it not exist anymore?

Any update about this?

It'll send you an email when the swap is paid pack (completely or partially). Useful if your email client or phone has an alert attached, so it can prompt you to check on your swaps and make a new offer.