ICBIT
ICBIT is a trading website which has a few sections. Both the currency and futures sections are live.
This site is said[source?] to be founded by Fireball and DeepBit by combining best practices in high-performance trading and Bitcoin experience.
Technically ICBIT is not an exchange since it does not act as a central counterparty. According to their website users are totally exposed to counterparty risk from other traders whose identities are concealed from them; the exchange does not pledge its own assets to back the other side of a customer's position. Traders are not allowed to conduct background or reputation checks of any kind on these anonymous counterparties. ICBIT recently modified the linked page and it now contains self-contradictory information, stating that "your profit may be limited by ability to pay of traders who hold opposite positions to your contract" which means that the exchange is not the counterparty.
Features
For its currency exchange section ICBIT makes an accent on the following:
- State-of-the-art technologies usage. Instead of using old, slow, polling-based algorithms ICBIT builds atop of the most up to date technologies. Its web trading client is in pure HTML and JavaScript (even compatible with most mobile devices), however it's fully realtime thanks to websockets and AJAX.
- Speed of trading. Bitcoin forum is full of anger against slowness of existing exchanges. ICBIT implements special high performance trading engine and uses high-performance "no SQL" database to eliminate the problem.
- No limits. Most of the existing exchanges put rather restrictive limitations and require users to prove their identity. ICBIT finds this totally unacceptable and does not put any limits at all.
Exchange
Traded on the exchange are:
- BTC/USD
- BTC/RUB (Russian Ruble)
- DB.RCLMR bond (bonds that can be exchanged for purchase of DeepBit Reclaimer ASIC hardware)
Futures
Futures traded include:
- BUH3 (Futures contract, expires March 15, 2012, settled in BTC)
- CLG3 (Crude Oil Futures contract, expires February 14, 2013, settled and quoted in BTC)
- GDG3 (Gold Futures contract, expires February 14, 2013, settled and quoted in BTC)
Settled futures:
- BUZ2 (Futures contract, expired December 15, 2012, settled in BTC)
Adding Funds
BTC
There is no fee for Bitcoin deposits to the account's BTC EWallet. Funds are added to the account's wallet after six (6) confirmations. Transactions made by DeepBit mining pool are added instantly.
USD
There are no methods to add USD funds.
RUB
QIWI vouchers can be used to add funds to an account's Russian ruble EWallet.
Widthraw Funds
BTC
There is no fee for Bitcoin withdrawals from the account's BTC EWallet.
USD
There are no USD withdrawal methods.
RUB
Funds can be withdrawn from the account's Russian ruble EWallet as QIWI vouchers.
Security
Accounts can be protected where both login and any money withdrawal operation requires the one-time password (OTP) feature known as two-step authentication. A mobile smartphone with Google Authenticator is the most commonly used OTP device.
History
First mentions of ICBIT appeared in June and July 2011 in the Bitcoin Stock Exchange Security Standards thread at bitcointalk.org[1] and Bitcoin futures market discussion [2]. By that time a very first version of the trading engine was developed.
A more detailed thread specific to ICBIT futures market was started [3] in November, 2011. The first closed test of futures market was performed, and work on the new version of web trading client was started.
Finally in January, 2012 the currency exchange section went live [4]
See Also
External Links
- ICBIT website.
- Trading client Direct link to the web trading client logon.
- At one point in the past, somebody who goes by the identifier "Fireball" voluntarily took the took one "bad customers" debt.