Topic: [OFFICIAL]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 88. (Read 723903 times)

Can someone explain to me how do I use a swap that I"ve purchased when I enter a long position? Do I have to buy the swap first then it uses it automatically?

Also, if I take a long position for 1000$ do I need to buy 1000 units of swap if I want to get a lower interest rate to cover that 1k long position?

Before that rule, autolending would put the interest you earn on the books. every. single. day. - Lots of "spam" offers, not lots of added benefit.

Btw. as we are talking about fairness improvements... A swap user can 'partially pay back' the BTC he took, even if it's just 0.01 BTC. But I cannot offer these as the minimun amount I'm allowed to offer is 50 US$ (in BTC).

Talking about Satoshis of interest here, but what's the point of this rule? It's not fair.

I know the trust would be a major factor in a service such as this, and to be honest, I put the project on hold as I wasn't sure the interest would be there for such a service, but it was just an idea I had.  Obviously, I have built a lot of trust around here and that says something, but it is one thing to trade a few hundred dollar item and another to send thousands in bitcoins to with the idea of investing.  I figured I would take a percent of the daily interest as payment for such a service, which would lower interest probably further.

Like I said, it was just an idea and I thought it would allow people to have liquidity on their deposits, but being a third party service from Bitfinex obviously would have its draw backs.  Perhaps when I have more time I will follow through with this service more and see if it would go anywhere, as I still think it would be a great idea and get a lot of interest.  In my eyes, it would be just like investing with Bitfinex, but you can withdraw whenever you want and still earn roughly the same amount of interest.

I don't think I'd ever want to 'pool funds' in the sense of transferring cash to some other user (not with the trust issues involved) but if 'finex had a way to officially delegate control of your funds to another user, limited to offering swaps without the ability to withdraw or trade with your money... that would be interesting. Genuinely not sure whether I'd want to be delegating to someone else or offering myself up as a candidate to be delegated to, but it'd be interesting either way.

Could be implemented via API key perhaps (would just be one use of a more general "API keys with limited privileges" feature, which could be several flavours of useful); would then just need some software to streamline the day-to-day of offering swaps while handling funds from multiple accounts, which could potentially be put together by a third party.

Correct. I'd not give lenders the chance to close it early, that would wreak havok.


True in theory, usually not in reality though. But you're right, that argument is compelling enough not to change anything. It the lenders' fault that they dont ask higher premiums for longer durations.

Edit:
@DebitMe
Well, main focus of bitfinex is to make trading for traders affordable and convenient. Creating a lending-syndicate isnt in their best interest. Plus implementing THAT is potentially a lot more complex than the easy calculation I suggested. Even if they did want to do this, they'd need to assign some manpower to this without much benefit for finex.

I actually had an idea that would fix this and even got quotes to get the website made, but let me know what you guys think.  My idea is to provide liquidity for the lender by pooling funds into one account, and lending out roughly 90% of the pooled funds, while sharing interest over all deposits.  This should allow enough liquidity for people to withdraw their funds whenever they want, but still earn interest.  Obviously, that number can be tweaked to get the right amount that would need to be withheld, but I believe that with a bot to handle the lending to make it optimal for the pool, you could make up the interest lost on the 10% of funds not lent out, so that users really wouldn't notice a loss of any income and could withdraw whenever they felt like.

Thoughts?

The asymmetry is inherent to the nature of the arrangement - you promise a trader control of some funds until they choose to release them. Granting lenders any more power to recall their funds would open the potential for traders to be forced onto more expensive swaps than they'd agreed to. Unless... I guess a feature could be imagined whereby a lender asks for their swap to be closed and replaced with a new one of the same duration, with the lender agreeing to pay the difference between the rates if the new swap is more expensive.

In general though the problem you're trying to solve (that traders will take out a swap for long periods then return it sooner) isn't really a problem - traders already pay a premium for 30 day swaps because there are fewer of them available and they normally start at higher rates than 2 day swaps. They're not necessarily going to know how long their position will be open for at the outset, but they're paying for the guarantee that the rate they pay stays stable, regardless of how long they end up needing the swap for.

It sounds like in your ideal scenario, traders would always take a swap pre-agreed for exactly the length of time they need it for, but that's not information that exists when the swap is taken, and besides... if traders changed their behaviour to only take a 30 day swap when they "mean it", you'd just see far fewer 30 day swaps being taken at all.

I know liquidation price is only "indicative".  So what is the best way to pinpoint at what price your position will be liquidated?

I think it is because one of the administrators was located in France at the time of the creation of that page.

Small idea for some fairness improvement?


Currently, there's a pretty big "asymmetry of power" between a lender and a swap user: once the swap has been taken, there's nothing a lender can do. But the taker can return it anytime of his choosing. Tough to plan for re-lending funds as a lender. The intention fo lending funds for 30 days (to not have much managing to do) does not work in reality because of that. No FRR can fix that, most FRR swaps never get lent out, unless there's big swap demand increasement, like in the last days.

Also at the moment, even if returned immediately, at least the first hour of interest of a swap has to be paid.

How about charging the first 1/48th of the time period at the time of the swap taking instead of just the first hour? That would make exactly no difference for 2 day swaps. But it encourages not to use 30 days as default for swap users who dont plan to use it anywhere near that time frame anyways.

This might increase convenience.

BTC rates only spike in a very drastic downturn. Even then the rates are only high for a few days until people stock up their accounts and provide BTC swaps.

I read that they don't do social media at all. That is why you won't find any links from them on the website.

Does anyone know why the Bitfinex facebook page is so inactive?
https://www.facebook.com/bitfinex

Last post was in June 2014. Is it not an official page?

Location is set to Lyon, France which is quite odd, considering Bitfinex is in Hong Kong.

USD swaps have been fun, shame BTC swaps are so low though.

Was a fun 48 hours in swap-land, but now the FRR appears to have re-asserted itself and rebuilt the wall.

Still hopeful that there might be another spike, but I feel like the default assumption now (going by past form) is that the rate is going to rapidly decay back towards the prior lows. Or at least some low-point to asymptotically trend towards.

Wow, I just checked the SWAP rates and they spiked really nicely. This might indicate some burst out. Looking forward to it!

@mjr: while you're here, a minor gripe - I turn on all of the notifications I can find for my swaps (offer taken, swap reduced/repaid, anything moves I always want to know about it). But with autorenew it's possible for a swap to be offered, taken, and then closed all without a single notification being generated, because when you're setting up auto-renew it doesn't pay attention to the "Notify when offer is taken" checkbox.

What's worse, is that it's also possible for a swap with the "offer taken" notification enabled to be taken, but not have that automatically enable the "swap repaid" notification as would normally happen when a swap is taken - if it becomes an 'unused' swap then that notification isn't automatically set, and even if you manually enable it, when it becomes a 'used' swap the notification is turned off again.

I had some money I thought was earning a return (because I checked my email and saw "offer taken" and no "credit closed", but actually it had been taken as unused and closed 2 minutes later. Nothing major, but an annoyance; I have no interest in whether a swap is used or not, to be honest I'm not sure why that's even known to me, so it'd be best if oddities from that distinction didn't mess with my flow. Would be nice to have some more global notifications settings in the account settings, like exists for deposits arriving and withdrawals completing.

Yes, we don't support a websockets API currently, although we use websockets on parts of the website. We will, however, offer a fully supported (which would include documentation) websockets (and FIX) API once the alphapoint integration is done.

This upgrade is really the key to a ton of new products and features, as well as the benefit of better performance.

Hey guys, brief update, we have made a bunch of progress on integrating Alphapoint, and are on the last legs of testing. We are still getting a couple errors, which are being fixed, but it is very close!

In general, we are able to correctly handle all but a couple hundred (in total, not by type) of the total user actions in a given day, so this is probably around .1% of the total actions that users would do, but it is those edge cases which typically take the longest to identify and fix. Should have more news for you soon, and once this is done, we can start to really roll out new features, as well as be able to handle much more volume, much more quickly.

There is really not a lot of other news to report, things have been quiet but I am personally excited that it seems the prices are starting to go up. I wanted to thank all of you guys who help out those who have questions about how parts of Bitfinex work, we are working on an updated FAQ/knowledge base which would serve as a one stop shop for answers. Right now, a lot of the questions are answered on our site, but I understand it might not be easy to find. So that is something else that is in the works.

Other than that, I hope everyone has been well. I am going to get back to working on Alphapoint stuff, but I try to check in once a day and see if there is anything major going on.