Topic: [OFFICIAL]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 251. (Read 723903 times)

You need to email your customers about this. Tweet it and also report it to safebrowsing.

Use https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/contact to contact them. Your stop buy orders should have not triggered. I've been using their service for almost a year now, this has never happened (if the price did not actually move).

I M P O R T A N T   A N N O U N C E M E N T

Dear Customers

This is very serious: someone is trying to phish our users with a fake website www at bitfinex dot net

We also posted an announcement on the website.


Please beware of any email addressing you to anything that is not www.bitfinex.com

Thank you

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

hi all,

Im new to BFX and after yesterdays debacle i lost a very good position and was not too amused but now im getting buy stops closes themselves on short positions !! ? WHY

BTCUSD    Stop    0.2    0.2    $722.0000    $702.2999       about 1 hour ago    Executed @ 702.2999(0.2)
BTCUSD    Stop    0.2    0.2    $675.0000    $662.1000       10 Feb 19:09    Executed @ 662.1(0.2)

The top one i checked on all the external charting sites and at no time did the price get to $722.00 ?? (bottom one also shows same problem )

Is it something im doing wrong ? im just trying to figure out how things work on BFX and everything seems to NOT work so far.

Iv only been testing for a few days really and iv mostly lost but mainly due to BFX's platform, in fact right at this moment it looks like i should be doing ok (going down) if the darn position had not already closed itself.

It could just be me so i apologize if it is

Also why do i need a invitation code to ask question on the BFX forum ?? how do i get one ?

Thx all.

Not to mention USE TWITTER. Goddam it! LOL!

Thanks Indirectly,

You just answered my question,   

Can you adjust the margin trading "fix" for the infinite orders? Now I can only put buys for as much coins I have in my short, but I can't do a buy for 100 btc @ 50$ for example. Can only put enough buys to close my short, but not to open a long.

Question,

When margin trading,

Are we able to use stops of an equal amount of btc to close positions ?
or do we have to manually click the "Close" button,
A few days ago thought I read a post to the effect of saying there was a change.

The real danger anyways seem to be cascading effects (sells for margin calls triggering more margin calls). Maybe it would be possible to calculate the price point where this happens in advance and display it too, so bears can place their buy orders slightly above that value. That way there is more depth anyways ("I wanted to buy back in at 350" is a nice statement AFTER the fact, if there was no buy order at the time and just someone hovering over the buy button with the mouse pointer...) which would drive that price point down over time and also would ensure bears don't get screwed in such events, as they know the market will only be emergency-stopped AFTER they bought back in and their short is realized.

I gave this whole "breaker" thing another thought.
As was written already, I believe this would work well:

- monitor average exchange rates from other exchanges
- when BitFinex rate goes x% (10 to 20%?) from the average, do:
  - all margin calls on hold, pegged to maximum x% difference
  - manually closing and trading still possible, with a huge red warning
  - infobox on all pages for everyone to see
  - optional mailalert to traders who want this, so they can add liquidity and profit
  - mandatory wake-up-call for Raphy and Giancarlo :-P

The x% maximum spread rule would stop a complete meltdown, but shouldn't risk lenders money, as the "real" exchangerate is even better than the current run-away rate on BitFinex.

The most important thing is to stop the run-away condition. Second priority would be to quickly fill the orderbook, by alarming users maybe.

Also I like the idea to make BitStamp trades more expensive and BitFinex trades less expensive, fee-wise. This should strengthen the internal orderbook to reduce the overall risk.

Finally, I'd suggest to have a maximum leverage of 1:2 at all times. Maybe as an average between all users. There will be users who have less than 1:2 leverage, so others are allowed to have a slightly larger one.


All in all, you guys did a good job! Other ventures would already be long gone, after the things happening in Bitcoin world.
I don't like what happened. But I feel the platform and the people behind it went out stronger from this. I, certainly, went out slightly smarter from this.

Ente

Well, go ultra-long then, buy up the order book up to a few 1000 USD and see what happens when shorts get eliminated and called!

I would disagree with that: it should not, under any preventable circumstance (from shutting down the trading engine to shutting down the platform completely) be allowable to have the lenders lose money. I'm not sure how many of the people here commenting about losing money have actually been faced with the prospect of losing tens or hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars. I'm not talking about BTCs that you bought 3 years ago at a fraction of the cost and you sold recently for huge profit, i'm talking about money that you earned through months and years of hard and value-creating work.

Then again, i'm sure very few people posting these comments have actually tried to convince other people to put up their money in their platform for unknown and unverified traders to play around with on margin....


Anyways, it seems we keep beating this horse after it's long dead. BFX has made it clear what their strategy is, and i'm sure most if not all the lenders (of USD as well as BTC and LTC), as well as the majority of the traders, support it.

I am sure a spike from $700 to $4900 and back to $700 would have been dealt with in the same way.

And if lenders are protected better with a clear system, lending capital will increase and borrowing rates will go down.

The problem is that the total insurance funds are only ~55.000 USD. I think many lenders would gladly insure their loans, but simply can't because those 55.000 USD are always taken. If every lender would only offer swaps if they are insured, all traders would have to fight over only 55.000 USD liquidity offers with probably astronomically high rates! So i think it's a bit short-sighted that a few traders (not you!) think that every uninsured lender should lose all his money because of a technical/organisational issue (e.g. price crashes to 1$ because BFX doesn't have enough coins/USD on bitstamp or whatever) so that some traders can make profit, because "it's the lender's fault if they don't take insurance".

But as someone who lends some of his money, I don't think that it should never be possible for lenders to lose money! As you said, if the market swings 10-15% (or more) on a natural market movement and i lose money, then i can hardly complain.

From this crap, you taught all the lenders a thing. Never pay the protection fee since they are protected from default anyway with your arbitrary halt, this is why those lenders get 200% per year, risk/return factor.
And you told the SHORTers here that there will never be cheap shit to be bought since you will protect the LONG guys and the lenders anyway.

Just had a quick skim through the nights posts, so apologies if this has been already said

On the 'circuit breaker' idea - to implement it based on hard limits, eg '10% drop in an hour' / '20% from high'  sounds fraught to me.   Whatabout 'when we run out of liquidity on Stamp' - that after all, is the crux of the matter surely? 

Also, big red banners on the top of the screen are good.   Keeping the announcements page up to date would be a small but easy thing, no? C'mon, I know you were busy yesterday but a little announcement update wouldnt have taken 5 minutes (and if it did, then invest a days dev time in a little bit of CMS) 

just my 2p

Thanks,

A Chrome / FireFox solution.
That answer helped immensely, moving forward with trading,
some of us can't afford to be getting caught-up in shorts that can't be closed.

These type of questions really should be answered by BitFinex,
instead they just leave us hanging out there in no-man's land like try it, take a
chance and see if it works or not, which equates to gambling on if the platform is
working correctly or not.

In the end I really hope BitFinex gets a grip on how to handle the system,
maybe some type of "Circuit Breaker" is the answer,

One thing for sure is that as it stands if nothing else it really screws up the BitCoinWisdom
charts zooming  scale every time one of those big red candles and the big green bouncing candle
from the drop to 100, screws up placing Fib Lines, zooming in and out after those
ridiculous candles are on the chart (sigh).

I think more transparency would also help both lenders and traders. I like that BFX is managing leverage ratios - eg they disabled leverage altogether for a few days during the China bubble insanity.

But there are actually some half-decent market solutions to achieve a similar effect, if you provide extra information to traders to let them make decisions.

One of those would be to make the current leverage ratio of the whole BFX book public, as well as what proportion of margin collateral is BTC vs USD. The other would be to make BFX's current balance on Bitstamp in USD and BTC public.

I realise these may be seen as sensitive information, and there may be good reasons for not disclosing them (can anyone think of any - I'm interested primarily in security reasons?). However if these were public, a) traders would have a much more realistic view of the available liquidity - rather than there being a step function drop in liquidity when Stamp balance hits zero unexpectedly and b) lenders would have a better idea of the risk of lending, as they can see what sort of leverage is being used, and the mix of assets used as collateral.

Actually, I support coming up with a better formula for allowed leverage that accounts for the high volatility of BTC when borrowing USD - you should not be able to borrow 2x current USD of trading account BTC. A simple, but extreme, version is not to allow borrowing USD against BTC, another option is to only allow 1:1 leverage for the BTC component.

I just had a stop loss order that apparently executed 10$ above the stop loss for now reason... Please help me reset this. What do you need from me to look into my case?

guys dont be stupid u just lost few k... if bitfinex dont halt it.. 15mil are taken at stake.. which u think is more important to them? your few thousands vs 15mil lenders money ? and of course margin traders risk is higher then lenders risk..so u deserve what u earn or loss.. use your freaking pea brain to trade next time.. do not invest all your life savings on a stupid crash.. be CONSISTENCE EARN LESS AND IN THE LONG RUN U STILL EARN INSTEAD OF WHINING LIKE A PIG ! think about it PERIOD!