Re: The Bitfinex order book anomaly, ongoing downtime.
Could someone at bitfinex—or anyone—kindly explain:
How the observed, anomalous behaviour of the BFX orderbook could be caused by (or related) to connectivity or lag or network or datacenter issues?
Yesterday, the BFX orderbook started behaving first a little weirdly.
And then increasingly weirdly.
And then 90% of the liquidity on offer evaporated:
And then you were offline for 7 hours.
Interupted only by some brief seconds of uptime,
during which price crashed several tens of dollars.
Given this new extremely shallow orderbook-depth.
It appears like normal trade volumes (for Bitfinex).
Could suddenly move the market hundreds of dollars in either direction.
Which given the volatility of bitcoin, would soon leading to a total short-squeeze or (far more likely) a violent flash crash.
I fail to see how “Packet shaping” or “quality of service” or “equipment failure” or any of the many non-explanation explanations Phil was delivering:
Could play any part in explaining this.
These anomalies are consistent with Bitfinex suffering a bad problem.
Hopefully not a bad problem of the MtGox-Cryptsy variety.
So what I’ve been wondering about, to myself,
since before Bitfinex was taken offline.
Is… Were you pwned last night?
PS: At any rate, fuck you for doing this for the half-a-dozenth time.
I hope this is your last.
I used to worry a lot about Bitfinex going tits up, everyone who was there in the beginning did. But, to paraphrase Tolkien:
“History became legend. Legend became myth, and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”