Topic: [OFFICIAL]Bitfinex.com first Bitcoin P2P lending platform for leverage trading - page 96. (Read 723903 times)

My view is similar to sangaman on this. If they wanted to inside trade on a big scale they would likely do it not on their exchange just like insiders often trade through third persons. If bitfinex was actively and automatically trading against its users by front running, stop huntingen etc. they wouldn't tell us anyway.
It's best to keep a close eye on trading/the order book just like people are doing now and mentioning any possible manipulations like the volume manipulation that is rampant on zero fee exchanges. If something like that on BFX happens be sure to notify people.
Mjr has mentioned countless of times in the past that he is prodiving swaps on BFX which initially made me wonder as well but I guess it's to be expected in an unregulated market like this.

What I'd like to see from BFX in the near future is the following:

1. An official statement on their policy regarding inside trading and a promise that their employees/founders are not actively trading against BFX regular users.

2. An official statement regarding the potential losses incurred through the Egopay incident and how they will be shouldered.

3. An explanation about "tether". It seems clear that tether has a direct affiliation with Bitfinex and I want to make sure BFX stays safe when they enter the international money transmitter business. Some former companies like liberty reserve got burned very badly for their operation. Why is tether already integrated into Bitfinex if it is not even usable at the moment?

When you have access to sensitive information you really should not be trading on your exchange at all. The fact that bitfinex allows for anon accounts makes it very easy to trade on inside information without anyone ever knowing. Even their 2fa system essentially cannot be traced back to you 

I don't really see a problem w/ Bitfinex admins or employees trading on their own platform. If there's reason to believe they're running large-scale trading operation using inside info about the system as their entire edge, then perhaps that's a different story.

The main difference between Bitfinex employees trading on Bitfinex and what's normally considered insider "trading" is that Bitfinex does not trade in its own shares, it trades in bitcoin. Whatever edge a Bitfinex admin might have - lets say they see a bunch of hidden buy orders and USD deposits coming through and believe price is heading up short term - can be used anywhere bitcoins are bought and sold. If bitfinex employees use their knowledge as employees to trade on Bitstamp, is there still a conflict of interest? I wouldn't say so, largely because if so then it could be argued that almost anyone involved in bitcoin or bitcoin businesses has insider information and should not be allowed to trade bitcoin.

Free market does not mean fair market in my opinion.  Many people are competing to get a small edge with trading bots set up to monitor many variables across multiple exchanges.  Banning employees from trading on  Bitfinex may be a solution here, but unlikely to cause traders to lose any less money than some other reason.
This issue is too minor and there is almost nothing we can do about it, so it's a non issue at the moment in my opinion. 

No I do not work for Bitfinex.

I think there is a good case for not trading on your own exchange.

If you are trading on your own exchange you could enact policies to balance the playing field. For instance, you could eliminate hidden orders (or use cryptography so that even the admin could not see them), publicly show the amount of USD and BTC going in and out of the website in real-time, and publicize the number of logged in users (or any other data that would be available to site staff that could influence the price).

Or you could place restrictions on internal trading. For instance, limit it to small amounts and long-term trades.

Hmm - even if you trade on another exchange, you still have access to inside information from Bitfinex which will affect prices on other exchanges.

Sounds good that you find the idea interesting. Information leaking shouldnt be a problem because if you mean hidden orders then one can find it out with an automated miniorder too. I mean if there is a hidden order.

The thing is only that its pretty hard to collect some profits when you hit the taker fee.

Regarding the trading on the own exchange. I dont know how people think this can be avoided. I mean you guys own the exchange and it is on trust like with every exchange. There is no regulation of some kind that checks if you trade. So even if you all claim that you dont trade... nobody would know when you do. So at the end its nonsense to me to get loud about this. So im not sure what people await. Did they trade on bitfinex and never thought about that its unregulated and without state regulation or are those only the kind of persons that try to make other businesses look bad.
At the moment i only see something i never doubted that it exists and that i awaited. I wonder where this comes from. If there would be strange happenings or so. But as it looks now there are only bad thoughts in persons that believe other persons would have the same kind of bad thinking. 

Anyway... as long as there is no sign that things are manipulated...

Let me get this straight. You acknowledge Phil's story and admit to trading on your own exchange but maintain, "there is no insider trading, because: believe me."

The way most people avoid this is to price their orders more aggressively. If the market is trading around 210-211, I would suggest putting in a buy at 208 or a sell at 213...it is a balancing act, because you do want to get filled, but you don't want to pay higher fees. This is all part of what makes trading such an inexact science or a demanding art. I do think that it is an interesting suggestion to include an order type that says "maker or cancel", or something like that. The implementation might be a little tricky, because you have to go through the whole matching process in order to know whether you should cancel the order...and it could be used to try to gain information without risk.

In traditional finance, lowering the costs associated with trading is one of the main ways that people increase their profits, but it is not very easy, usually, and comes with the same balancing act of speed of execution vs cost of execution (sending an order to ARCA vs a darkpool, most traders know they could get filled on ARCA, but use it as a last resort).

This is just ridiculous...

None of us at Bitfinex take advantage of any inside information, and each of us monitors each other to make sure that we are behaving ethically. However, how would we go about obtaining bitcoin? We work hard to build a good exchange, because we believe in bitcoin, so we should go trade on another exchange? I have known Phil a long time, and he is extremely ethical. I, for one, use bitcoin in order to withdraw my paycheck. I usually place a small market order once a month, but I have no idea what the state of hidden orders are, or whether the market is going up or down, and I don't much care about those things. I need to convert a certain amount of dollars into the equivalent amount of bitcoin, so I just buy some bitcoin.

I'm not sure how this works in the "real world", but I am pretty sure that someone who works at Nasdaq can still trade stocks that are listed on Nasdaq. They aren't getting any special information, or access to a VIP service, but they still probably have a retirement account, or something along those lines, and still have investments. I don't think that because someone works at Nasdaq, they cannot own Apple shares in their retirement account. So, I am beyond annoyed that people think that someone who is interested in bitcoin enough to work in the bitcoin space, surprise, surprise, buys bitcoin...what is the alternative, that everyone interested in bitcoin enough to work in that space cannot use their own product?

Anyway, I think most people have enough experience with Bitfinex to know that we value our reputation as a fair place to trade, and specifically keep rules in place that cost us money because we think that the benefits of a fair marketplace far outweigh the small short term gains of cheating. I've been a big fan of bitfinex since before I started working here, and I haven't closed my account just because I got a job here.

I think i get it slowly how to trade successfully. Though the problem is that profits are reached slowly while losses are reached very fast. The problem is the fee. Without the fee the risks would be the same in both directions. So in order to make a profit its good to trade with lower fees. But it seems i cant avoid it, even when watching closely to only put in orders between margin buy and sell prices, that i buy into the market as taker. And this brings a hit on my profits. I would like to avoid that but i dont see a way. Bitfinex only has this interface and the API seems to be restricted on the amount of requests doable per minute. So theres always a risk. The only solution i see is an option like "dont fill order as taker". Thats it. And i think it shouldnt be a big change in code.

Please think about this since it really hurts having to pay the taker fee. I mean one has to take a good jump in price only to get back the taker fees of a buy and sell order. As a closed trade cycle. I think this should be doable since bitfinex has an interest on market makers too. Thats why the maker-taker-fee-model exists.

Is it possible to buy a VIP status on your platform? I´d love to have some additional informations!

This is exactly what is going on. Your tradeable balance changes based on not only the amount in the wallet, but also based on the unrealized P&L. This applies to all the rest of the calculations, so it can get pretty complex. Every moment when the book changes (best bid or ask) your tradeable balance will also change, because if you have a position, your P&L changed.

Now, because the book and your balances are not refreshed in the same way (we use websockets for the book, more on that to come), you may see a new value pop into the book, and this will change some of the calculations. One of the issues here is actually pretty basic with web based programs. The client (your browser) is running javascript and updating some of the fields that it can calculate on its own, but it also relies on the server, which does its own calculations for other fields. So, depending on which field we are talking about, it could be relying on the server to give it the correct value, while another field may be updating based on a local calculation. So, ideally, doing things locally makes them faster for the user, but the server won't know about them until they are sent, while if you wait for the server for everything, it won't be as responsive on the "frontend" (which is the browser you are using to view bitfinex.com).

That is all to say that there is a lot of stuff going on all the time. Other people are changing the state of the book, and depending on whether a given value is being calculated by the server or the client, it can be difficult to keep track of how a certain number was arrived at. This is a general answer, to your very specific question, so it might not be exactly right, but in general, in my experience, it is usually caused by things like this.

Basically, you have to account for unrealized P&L in order to calculate correctly, because your wallet balance is not static (it changes for the purposes of those calculations based on your unrealized P&L).

We are going to release an official announcement about that, but as stated by others, this didn't really affect us. We had very little usage of egopay, and what was used was very small. No user should notice any problems on our system due to this, but we have disabled that option for withdrawal and deposit.

"No, bitfinex does not do instant market orders."

This impossible due to the quantum nature of the universe...time exists, and what happens "instantly" on your screen cannot possibly be known "instantly" on our server. So, just to get that out of the way, there is no way that two events can happen at the exact same time.

That being said, yes, if you send a market order, depending on when we receive it, how many orders are ahead of you in the queue, and how those other orders affect the state of the order book, you might not get filled. Unfortunately, it is not even theoretically possible for us to maintain synchronization between your computer and the state of our orders in a real time fashion, that doesn't exist. It takes time to notify you of changes, and during that time, other changes can occur. It also takes time for you to send an order, and when you click the send button, you are already operating under assumptions that may no longer be true. During the transit time of your order, there could be even further changes.

Luckily, these are just theoretical problems, in practice we handle 100's of thousands of orders and are able to fill people in the way they would expect.

You yourself pointed out that you placed this order during "peak hour", which means that your perception of the state of the book was not only out of date, but you would probably have to wait until the queue of orders before you had been handled. If you place a market order, you will be filled at the best available price AT THE TIME WHEN YOUR ORDER IS HANDLED, not when you press the "BUY" button. Now, we are currently (as in, at this moment) working on the upgrade to our backend matching engines, but there is NO matching engine with infinite capacity, and if it is over capacity, you would be in the same exact situation. Until it can handle that given order, you will remain "unfilled".

Ah, I see you don't understand how Bitfinex display works!
Let me explain: The top price has no relevance to recent movements, it may update once in a minute and sometimes it stays at old number for 10 hours.

If you thought that if you have an order to sell for 209 and the price in the ticker goes to 210, do not expect your order to be filled! Because what is in the ticker may have happened long ago; or; your order may get into queue in the far future!

Let me explain once more on a practical example!

I put a MARKET order for 1 BTC sell during peak hour. (not the crash) That MARKET order was unfilled even after I refreshed page and was unfilled for about TEN SECONDS, so the relevance of what ANY of the price displays displayed was NONE. SebastianJu imagines that whatever his computer screen displays has been truth right now and not in some faraway point i the past. He asked if he could possibly be INSTANTLY notified of his order passing trough, so he can continue with the next trading step. I have answer for him: no, Bitfinex does not support that feature. No, bitfinex is not able to meaningfully support that feature. No, bitfinex does NOT have fixed point decadic system prices. No, bitfinex does not do ranged grouping or orders to speed up order matching. No, bitfinex does not do instant market orders. No, bitfinex does not have the software skills to implement any of the above.

Bump..

nevermind...somehow my phone uncheck "automatically sync time"...all good now.

It works fine for me.

having trouble logging in with 2fa....

Incorrect one-time token. Please try again.

Anyone else? I tried numerous times on PC and phone.

I doubt a whole lot - Egopay has not been withdrawal option for a while already and amount listed there were 'trivial' compare to the total loan book