Talk:ICBIT

Please stop deleting material from this page. For a very long time ICBIT's webpage clearly explained that it was not a central counterparty. Now it's been changed to something absurdly self-contradictory that essentially says "we call ourselves a central counterparty but we aren't one and we explicitly deny the responsibilities that define the role of a central counterparty". The whole point of having a futures exchange is that you're exposed to credit risk from only one party and you know who that party is (the exchange). ICBIT is not doing that. If they decide to do that and say so publicly, then feel free to change this page, but unless/until then please stop deleting important facts. Eldentyrell (talk) 16:04, 13 August 2013 (GMT)

First of all, finally thank you for taking this into Discussion page. The thing is that you seem to misunderstand how exchanges work. Indeed, ICBIT acts as a counterparty to all futures contracts trades happening, and all major fiat money futures exchanges out there do the same.

That means that if one trader buys 2 BTC/USD contracts, counterparty is ICBIT, and it is also counterparty to those traders who sold these 2 contracts!

Graphically:

Trader 1                    Trader 4
Trader 2  <==>  ICBIT  <==> Trader 5
Trader 3                    Trader 6

Now, the most important fact Sum of all money paid by loosing users equals to sum of all money paid to profiting users!

And when any user from loosing side goes bankrupt, central counterparty (aka exchange) has to pay its own money. We do that, but we can't do that all the time, and we can't guarantee it happens all the time, so that's why we say that we guarantee to pay as much, as loosing traders are able to pay.

Again, that's absolutely same to how fiat-money "real-world" exchanges work. They have reserve funds, and they often go bankrupt (lookup recent Hong Kong's derivatives market bankrupcy, for example).

Fireball