Topic: Wacky order book for cavirtex.com exchange... Can you help explain this? (Read 744 times)

Hi graaxx,

I have not seen your email.

If you have specific questions, please submit a ticket and the appropriate person could give you answers:

http://support.cavirtex.com/

Thanks.

So I've been pulling these for a few days and the bids/asks still make no sense. It really looks like cavirtex.com is just generating random bids/asks to make their exchange look better on bitcoincharts.

I've emailed support a couple of times with no response. Surprise, surprise. 

set up a cron job to yank them and append a timestamp?

Smelly,  yes. Not calling it malice yet. The technical skills over there seem a little suspect.

Recommend people save a few copies of orderbook.json in case the api gets pulled, with date and time.

definitely something fishy

I have an account there too, I'll look

I am testing selling at "silly" rates now. This should be interesting.

Yep. They don't get filled. Even a few dollars under current price means orders sit for days, unless there's real downward movement.

On Sunday night the price hung at $100 or so for a while, and I had a small bid in at around $85/BTC to test this. The price dipped under $85 several times, the order was not filled until the price hit around $70 the next day.

interesting, have you an account there and tried to put in a few low bids to see if they get filled?

Hi,

I've been working on some charting and analysis software and using the order information from CAVIRTEX.COM to feed it.

Raw data (bids/asks) I'm pulling are at https://www.cavirtex.com/api/CAD/orderbook.json and follow the bitcoincharts recommended formatting. As I understand it, the order book shows a list of currently open bids and asks.

I have found that a lot of the asks seem to be almost nonsensical.

The bids to asks ratio hovers at just about 1:1 (400 to 400 or so). Most of the numbers seem pretty static.

Here are some sample asks from a few seconds ago:

ASK: Order [amount=207.65000000BTC, price=$5.00/BTC, total=$1038.25]
ASK: Order [amount=250.00000000BTC, price=$11.00/BTC, total=$2750.00]
ASK: Order [amount=102.00000000BTC, price=$4.00/BTC, total=$408.00]
ASK: Order [amount=130.00000000BTC, price=$5.00/BTC, total=$650.00]
ASK: Order [amount=122.37900000BTC, price=$5.00/BTC, total=$611.89]
ASK: Order [amount=105.60000000BTC, price=$4.85/BTC, total=$512.16]
ASK: Order [amount=250.00000000BTC, price=$10.94/BTC, total=$2735.00]
ASK: Order [amount=295.89000000BTC, price=$4.09/BTC, total=$1210.19]
ASK: Order [amount=94.47998000BTC, price=$14.00/BTC, total=$1322.71]
ASK: Order [amount=244.99000000BTC, price=$1.00/BTC, total=$244.99]
ASK: Order [amount=120.00000000BTC, price=$5.00/BTC, total=$600.00]
ASK: Order [amount=298.00000000BTC, price=$0.40/BTC, total=$119.20]
ASK: Order [amount=135.00000000BTC, price=$29.78/BTC, total=$4020.30]
ASK: Order [amount=95.00000000BTC, price=$1.00/BTC, total=$95.00]
ASK: Order [amount=109.88000000BTC, price=$33.11/BTC, total=$3638.12]
ASK: Order [amount=135.00000000BTC, price=$0.45/BTC, total=$60.75]
ASK: Order [amount=98.88800000BTC, price=$1.00/BTC, total=$98.88]
ASK: Order [amount=280.00000000BTC, price=$1.00/BTC, total=$280.00]
ASK: Order [amount=250.00000000BTC, price=$4.00/BTC, total=$1000.00]
ASK: Order [amount=125.00000000BTC, price=$1.00/BTC, total=$125.00]

The price of BTC is around $80 at time of posting. At current prices, every single one of those asks should have been filled. Who is selling 135BTC at $29.78? Some poor sap on CAVIRTEX, apparently - and oddly, no one is buying at those insanely low prices.

Using the feed data, I calculated the following on one pull from orderbook.json:

ASKS: High: 269.00, Low: 0.00, Average: 6.80, Outstanding: 392
BIDS: High: 3500.00, Low: 0.00, Average: 32.17, Outstanding: 420

Yes, there are apparently free bitcoins on offer at cavirtex.com... Except that they're just sitting on the books, not being filled.

When trades come through I do see the order book gain and lose an entry, but this pile of garbage data stays put.

Cavirtex also seems to publish a "live" human-readable but abbreviated order book on their site at https://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook, but I don't see the trades listed there in the json file.

Maybe cavirtex is not filling orders outside of a bracket around the current generally-accepted price of BTC, or they're just trying to make their market seem deeper than it is by padding the order book.

Maybe someone else could put some eyeballs on this feed and corroborate my findings. I am new to this stuff, so I'm probably making a mistake. I would be equally happy to hear what my mistake might be, or that I've found something weird after all.