Topic: [OFFICIAL]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 256. (Read 723903 times)

Not that there are reasonable arguments,
it's just that "Any Blind Man Can See The Obvious Choice",

But I will say this from a Trader's Point of View
being a member of http://TradingView.com


A "Coiner" / BitCoin Trader biggest goal in life for the most part
regarding Trading BitCoin is to seize the moment / "Carpe Diem" / To Pick-up "Cheap Coins"

It's the Mantra / Saying of all Coiners, and anyone fooling themselves into thinking differently
is only being disillusional, to deny Coiners / Traders that opportunity will also spread like wildfire
within Communities and I think it was you saying earlier that "BitFinex can always find more Traders",

I would not necessarily agree with that, for instance, I'm fully aware that Btc-e use to have their
Official BitCoinTalk Thread on their front page of their website trading platform, they have since
removed / deleted the thread because they had too many complaints in that thread regarding
lost wire-transfers, transfers in the amounts of over $10,000 USD each to the point of eventually
being labeled as "Selective Scamming", there was a reason that I chose BitFinex who to this day
has handled my wires efficiently and effectively,  and still to this day I will not touch Btc-e with
a 10-Foot Pole,

I refer to them as the "Bad Russians" and Stamp as the "Good Russians" and yes
I know that Btc-e has a Cyprus Address and Stamp is Bulgarian, but what I'm referring to here is
"Reputation" and having been a full-time "Internet Marketer" for the last 5-Years I can tell you that
unlike in the realworld where one can hide, one's internet reputation is everything, all that is needed
is one un-happy customer to go rabid and start posting crap all over the internet rather it's true or
not and it can utterly destroy a on-line business, I've seen it happen on more than one occasion.

Take https://intersango.com/  / Intersango.com  one of the first BitCoin Exchanges, that now reads:


Notice: Bitcoin Transactions Halted

The system running the hotwallet has halted due to scheduled downtime of power facilities.
All bitcoin transactions will be halted until such time as the system can be manually restarted.


Everyone knows that they have been dead for quite sometime now,
but my question to you is that even if they came back up again,
would you do business with them ?

Point and Case is, "Reputation Is Everything",
Trust, once it's gone, it can't be earned back

In order for those guys to open again,
they would have to open under a New Name.

that's exactly what happened i made more than 13k in profits that were rolled back. on top of that i was unable to do any trades cause they took more than and hour to open again

And now as a result of Bitfinex protecting lenders, the interest rates have dropped benefiting the margin traders and meaning less interest for the lenders. How ironic.

It is specific to their bitcoind, a lot of database backends I've seen so far however think that if they send a transaction, all they need to store is the TXID at the time of sending and they'll be able to retreive that same transaction later down the road from the block chain.

Welcome to the club
It's nice to see there are people on this forum willing to change their mind when given reasonable arguments.

My lends were not insured, is an option you can select when lending money.

You cannot blame the trading platform for your loss. This crash was largely anticipated and will problably happen again in the near future since BTC must test the 100$ value before rising again.

Nick.

P.S. I don't know "This Giancarlo" but I think they are making a good job.

Appears to be run by more of a "Banking / Banker's Mindset"
Me, I'm a conformist, "If you can't beat them, Join'em"
Simply become a "Lender" also and get in the "Front-Seat"
of the car, the view always looks better to the "Lead Sleg-Dog"

Or in my case do both, Lend and Trade,
with the majority on the "Lending" Side,
and of course a small portion on the Trading Side
simply for the action,
at least that's my plans for the future.

+1

If lenders were wiped out then, the vast majority of them would no longer want to lend at Bitfinex again. No liquidity providers means no margin trading. Any high risk lenders left would be demanding daily interest rates consistently exceeding 1% per day, perhaps even up to 5% per day. This would make it so expensive and not worthwhile for margin traders that it would effectively kill Bitfinex's margin lending facility. This would not only be bad for Bitfinex, but for Bitcoin in general and the news of lenders being wiped out would no doubt spread to the mainstream and average Joe's would be given another reason to not to get involved with Bitcoin.

Grazie Giancarlo!

Today I had more than 50% of my lends closed in a couple of minutes while the market was panicking, without any loss.
This is by far the best possible proof of the solidity of the system.

Keep up the good work!
Nick.

Will most definitely be putting my funds on the
"Lender's Side"
In the future.

Safer that way.

Thanks

We need to know once it has been fixed...

Just to be sure that people understand what the problem is:
Make sure that TXID is NOT a key in your database - TXID can be (and now for sure will be, just to mess with you) changed after you broadcast the transaction. The set of (Amount, destination address, timestamp) however will not be changed by this, so make sure you either hash this data (to have something of constant size) or use it in plaintext as key to look up if transactions actually took place.
This can (and maybe does!) affect Bitfinex too, bitcoind/bitcoin-qt and probably armory also don't really expect TXIDs to change after broadcast. Please don't just dismiss this as a screwup of gox or something specific to them, this can very well affect a good part of existing services, despite it being known for some time that transactions are malleable.

Gox claims that their problems is giving back BTC are related to their proprietary system to store coins.
We don't use their system and we have no problem with it.
We also don't comment on our competitors.

I hope this is a clear enough

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team

Thank you for that - hopefully it will end the pointless debate going on here.


An unrelated question:  MtGox has an issue with people double withdrawing coins because they use the txid as a primary key in their internal accounting system.  Can you tell us if Bitfinex is protected from this specific issue?

What I observed from above posts.

Lenders: My capital must be protected as I am more vulnerable than traders. Furthermore, traders usually profit more than me.

Traders: We need to follow the rules of the game at all times. That means no halting of trading engine to protect lenders.

I say: Establish clear rules to demarcate the boundaries. With the rules, let us decide our trading decisions.

Earlier on, there was a post asking whether Gox's problem affects BFX as well. This is important. We need to know.

Guys

before you start any post please think about the following:

1) Bitfinex is not an exchange. It is a complex trading platform and this is why it made it to place itself among the top 4 BTC/USD platforms in the world for volume in 15 months.

2) Bitfinex also allows trading on Bitstamp via metatrading.
This lowers volatility during market crashes, but it is subject to keeping ALWAYS an amount of BTC and of cash on their platform.
There must be a balance between efficiency and third party related risk ( Gox is teaching us that trading platforms can actually have problems).
Therefore we cannot keep too much money or too many coins on Bitstamp.
When I say too many I mean more than a certain number of million dollars equivalent (either cash or BTC x price).

3) Forced liquidations can trigger cascading prices and also a rapid consumptions of coins on Bitstamp.
It takes time to replenish coins, this is not our fault, it is related to how Bitcoins are transferred.
Today for example more than 10k BTC were sold in a matter of minutes.

4) When we don't have coins on BSTP anymore (that is what happened today, we run out of coins on Bitstamp, we had a lot of them but they were all sold within seconds) we just rely on our orderbook and people tend to panic when the price crashes, therefore thinning even more the bid side of the book.

5) Whenever we see any market abnormalities we halt trading.
We don't make money when we halt trading, we just try to cover the funds given by liquidity providers.
(Today we resumed trading as soon as other coins landed on our Bitstamp account)

6) Any trader with more than 3 neurons should understand why we try to protect liquidity providers.
They are the reason why traders can take leverage.
No liquidity providers, no swap, no margin trading.
Every trader should think about this before he starts considering the liquidity provider as a blood sucker.
The liquidity provider is the one that makes it possible, and therefore he should be protected for the sake of the leverage, not because we think they are more beautiful than the traders.

We are not perfect.
We will keep having problems, this is part of the game called "being in business".
But please try to understand each of our moves is made for the sake of our community.
Letting a bunch of traders walk with their opportunistic strategy ( placing a buying order at 100 can possibly be defined differently?) and by doing this hurt the real funders of our platform will never be an option for us.

I hope that this helps

Have a good day and sorry if I lost it for a couple of posts, I apologize about it.

Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team    

Nice one, 

Try 2 weeks...
You apparently weren't on Bitfinex in April 2013

And THAT is exactly the reason you need to protect the Lenders before you protect the Traders: the Lending game is a losing one by it's nature: competing to get the least amount of money you can; very ironic if you think about it. So whoever decides to risk his hard-earned cash should come before whoever decides to speculate with other people's funds.

On a side note, this used to be the attitude on Wall Street as well before the 90's, and we all know what happened when things changed.

At 4000% APR,
what was that for like 2-hours ?

Well, I already successfully lent out money at over 4000% APR on bitfinex on multiple occassions. These times will come back, if you continue to act like lenders might agree to receive worthless sh*t (I certainly would NOT want to get any LTC for example and I have no control over how USD I lend out are used - they could be buying BTC or LTC) or that traders are in any way supposed to get some 100 USD Bitcoins just because someone didn't deposit enough BTC over at Bitstamp.