The Bitcoin Show - 056 - Roman Shtylman of Bitfloor.com

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the Bitcoin show as you know I'm Bruce Wagner and uh we are so glad you joined us today we're going to talk about we have a major announcement from a a new exchange site not that new but um maybe little heard of called bitf floor.com and they have a major announcement of new technology they're rolling out today so stay tuned today's episode of the Bitcoin show is brought to you by Bitcoin me.com it's basically the Bitcoin for dummies site it explains what is a Bitcoin how to use it why to use it so tell all your friends when you tell them about Bitcoin tell them to check out Bitcoin me.com there's also a Buy Tab that teaches you how people buy Bitcoin and there's an accept tab to teach you how to accept Bitcoin as a merchant and shopping tab to show you all the places you can shop with [Music] Bitcoin hey everybody we're back so uh joining me today is Roman styan did I say your name right stman stman oh I practiced it and everything stman it's s h t y l m a n it's not easy to say all right it's a tongue twister bit floor is easier to say much easier okay so tell us uh Roman now know you're my neighbor like we live like nearby right here in Midtown Manhattan so um uh I've known about bit floor kind of since the beginning because we met actually did was the first time we met at the Bitcoin conference last August yes in New York yep okay right here right and I remember meeting you and and I remember you saying that uh we're GNA my friend and I are going to start a Bitcoin exchange and I was like that's exactly okay I mean that was like one of the first things I heard you say I was like okay who who are these kids I mean because I thought you you know you looked like a lot younger than you are by the way which is a good thing actually you'll appreciate that later but um I thought oh my gosh okay that's cool good for you you know the more the better but since then you've launched it and uh I've been hearing fantastic things about Bitcoin when did you actually I mean bitf floor when did you actually launch bit floor uh I believe it was November when we actually pushed out to production um and allowed people to start depositing real funds and real you know Bitcoin real US dollar uh before that we had the test net running which just lets you you know use fake currencies and you know figure out what you need to do um but it was November around that time frame November so when you started working on it was it in August AUST or September yeah it was in August when we started working on it uh we started you know with the basics looking at what some of the other exchanges had and then you know seeing where we wanted to improve upon that and getting you know the fundamentals in place uh we first started with things like the matching engine and the order gateways that would gear towards API trading that's what you know interested uh Us in the beginning and then we rolled out things like the website on top of that and once we had enough of the components in place that we felt comfortable we launched okay so um in 3 months that's like a major achievement and you you started this with a partner right but correct what's his name viim okay cool and so but now you're pretty much running it kind of on your own okay yes all right cool and so um bit floor is uh it still has low volume it's not it's not the most well-known exchange out there but one of the things that brought me back to you besides having already you know met you and known you is uh I was reading about uh about it and that you had open- Source the matching engine and uh coders were saying that it's like the best one out there that it's you know it's really professional because you have what's your background uh before I started working on bit floor I had worked in automated trading um it was a proprietary trading shop that did high frequency automated trading you mean Forex uh we did uh also sorts of yeah all sorts of things oh okay yeah so it wasn't just Forex and you know equities commodities anything that you know you could connect to electronically could be traded yeah so trading shop is U the is a a software development shop is that you mean or um It's a combination of different things there are software developers that work on the libraries and the fundamental you know kind of system that connects to the exchanges to consume Market data to enter the orders all those nuances of understanding the specifications uh and then it's also comprised of the Traders and the quants you know that will come up with the algorithms that will work with developers uh which can sometimes be the Traders and quants themselves to actually Implement their ideas and then trade on the markets hopefully with the goal to make money do you mind if I ask how old you are I'm 25 I guess I guess you don't mind because it's too late I already ask yeah 25 okay so you just talk completely over my head I have no idea I'm like more than twice your age but like you young guys are blow my mind with all with your experience and how do you get so much experience in that field when you're only 25 um I wouldn't say that I have that much experience but it's one of those things where you know it can seem like a w Garden if you're looking at it from the outside but once you kind of work in it a little bit and you kind of understand like where the strings are you know being pulled and what some of the Technologies are being used you know obviously as with anything you become kind of more familiarized with the space that you're working in and so then it you know will seem like you know a lot but there's still always a lot to learn helps if you're very bright to begin with and imerse yourself in it yeah I suppose right so all right so coming from this uh trading shop background then you you had this coding experience were you actually coding there or uh working on other people's code or uh it's always a combination of both in development yeah I was a software developer so you know I would have the job of working on uh the systems that would connect to the exchanges to consume either Market data or to be able to place orders up up dat the libraries that you know Traders would then use to write their algorithms on top of and I also worked with traders to implement some of their algorithms so you know a little bit of everything cool and you know one of the things that I love most about bitf floor is its Simplicity that lesses more you know like some of these sites that are so glitzy they look like uh I don't know you know like moving ads and visuals and stuff it's just crazy too many features too many scrolling mares and nonsense garbage and what I like is is google.com from the old days you know just search you know and like real real simple like that preve website pv.com I love Simplicity That's Where It's At You Know less is more and bit floor I love that it's it's really it's just very straightforward it's got you know your overview and it's got your transactions and then it's got your Market data right and add funds withdraw funds that's it speaking of add adding and withdrawing funds um the uh so it right now uses duala duala only so what's your um what what do you tell people when they ask you you know for other options other ways to get funds in and out um people have asked about paxum in the past I told them that we would look into it obviously that's no longer an option given that paum doesn't work with Bitcoin companies anymore um some other options that we've you know considered bti instant um other things like Liberty reserve um AC directly you know taking those U but mostly a lot of that has been put aside just to keep it simple and to you know help kind of manage our risk uh with dealing with US Dollars obviously you have the risk of chargebacks and you know just the whole anti-money laundering you know regulations you have to follow and so the less we can expose ourselves to you know potential attack vectors and you know kind of simplify our dealings with US Dollars the better so we've been hesitant to you know kind of add new things without properly exploring them right so paxum for those of you who who don't know paxum recently has announced right that they're they F they closing uh their dealings with any business that does business with Bitcoin so um that's kind of closing that venue um hopefully that doesn't happen with dalla because Bitcoin I think is a huge P percentage of dua's uh overall transactions um and then um the other bid instant in uh oh a like direct a I can see that being a huge problem because that's obviously that's just chargebacks you may as well just take checks you know or even worse credit cards or PayPal that can be reversed 6 months later they just charge it back months after the fact 180 days yeah H yeah that's you know well actually they can even I I've heard of cases where like uh credit cards and PayPal can even up to 6 months later it depends on the ter specific terms stuff but anyway so um uh bid in is good but then that kind of uh it works real well but it also opens you up to another venue of having to deal with US Dollars directly and that makes sense so dwala works for now I mean they have there is that uh dwala instant service they have I think it's a maximum of $300 or something like that but you can apply for that where so that they can at least put money in instantly and then you know then they settled back on the end you know how that works no basically extends you a line of credit you apply for it and they're basically giving you line of credit for 300 bucks and so I say instantly send it and they instantly send it and then the six calendar days that it takes to get it out of my account they're this just they're extending a loan to me until the money is pulled in so there's like I think it's $3 a month or something like that they charge for that service so you know as long as you only need $300 at a time it seems like a good idea I don't know I don't know anybody who's actually I I know a couple people have applied for it but I guess it takes some time to get approved but anyway you know so whatever if it's they say two to three business days withdraw but sometimes I've seen it be like five or six calendar days so it has to do with you know if you make a new duala account it'll take some time for those initial first deposits so you verify that account then it'll take some time for the a to transfer and it's just you know kind of part of the us a you know banking system but you know that's kind of how it is but once you get past some of those initial hurdles with dwala I found that you know it's pretty reasonable to move funds in and out yeah I mean the last time I did it it was six calendar days and I already had an established account this is like after that so so those of you who were setting up a dwell account initially you know count on it's like I call it calendar days not banking business days I'd give it five days to set it up and another six days to do the transaction each time you do a transaction but you know it's cool one good thing is that when you put money like if I take money out of an exchange into dwala I can send it right back out from dwala to bitflow without having to wait because it's pretty much instantaneous as it comes in and goes right back out yeah that's what I would recommend for people if you know you're going to be you know using funds between several exchanges or you know it's not a one time I just need to convert some BTC to US dollars or anything like that just keep some in dalla you know um an amount you're comfortable with and then just have that so that you don't have to incur the like you said six C day weight time just to trade $10 if that's what you want to do exactly yeah well and then the bid in I mean what do you call it uh the duala instant service would come in handy if it's only $10 anything less than 300 so that's pretty cool um let's see so the uh about the matching engine is that the part I've talked to developers because I'm not really I'm not a developer anymore way back way back in the day a little bit but um I've talked to developers who say what's needed for Bitcoin is a high frequency exchange so would you consider bitf floor a high frequency exchange um compared to the other exchanges I would consider a high frequency exchange and I'll kind of outline why um why I think we can do more a higher frequency than the others compared to real stock exchanges obviously we're nowhere close um but one of the things that kind of makes us different than what I've seen implemented um and from what I know looking at the other exchanges is that our matching engine is run entirely in process um in memory orders everything uh it doesn't have to hit uh a database to look up orders so a common thing I've seen with some of the other exchanges I can't speak for all of them just a few is that when you send an order to their you know let's say their order Gateway that receives your order um they will put that order into a database of orders which makes sense um and what will happen then is they have another process maybe it's the same process that will look at that database periodically or be told that hey there's a new order and then it'll see what orders it can match it'll pull orders from that database see what else it can match for us we don't do that we accept your order at our order gateways we you know make sure you have the proper accounts on you know in your the funds in your account we put them on hold if necessary and then we will send that to the matching engine uh which has all the other orders in memory and it'll be able to very quickly perform the match or you know your order or anything like that and it will send that information out to the rest of our system which can then relay it to you or write it to a database on its own time so all of that happens kind of with these independent components uh that can allow us to scale and in different ways um that's what makes our matching engine a little different than some of the others potentially so because it's componentized would you say like modular so the matching engine is its own function uh it's separate and then so that in other words in other implementations like all of it has to happen in one process and and by separating it um the writing to the database and sending it to you and all that can happen later so the the the real high speed part of it happens uh separately you could summarize it like that it doesn't for other implementations it doesn't have to happen in one process because they are writing to a database and then pulling from the database they could have separate process they could have a matching engine that kind of also acts partially in memory reading from a database but since we already have checked your order on income on the incoming gateways we can you know send it to the matching engine and the matching engine doesn't hit databases you know it doesn't do any complex logic it assumes the orders it's getting have already been vetted and are okay to be executed against so they'll be tagged with your user identification they'll be tagged with the amounts and everything um and then if they can be executed they will if not they'll go on the order book uh that type of system also allows us to scale out the front end gateways a little better so instead of having just one entry point for users to enter in orders we can have different ones that can all talk to the same matching engine um because they all have a common way to communicate so as the theand grows you can you can scale that out and corre larger and larger yes can the matching engine be scaled that way or is it a single point that uh the matching engine as we currently have it is a single a single process for each type of product since bit floor only deals with btcusd there is one matching engine if there were multiple currencies or different products there could be a matching engine for each one so as not to slow down the other matching engines so again we would not be using a shared database for all the matching engines we could you know have one matching engine you know either potentially fail and not affect the others or just work completely completely independently with the database setup you could also scale it out differently you could have different databases for different products but it's you know it's manageable just not quite the same mhm is there is there a standard way to measure the speed of uh processing ability of the of transactions with um exchange software orders per second that you're able to process um would be the biggest thing just how many orders clients can kind of input and how many the matching engine can crunch things like that uh something we do at floor um that I don't believe I've seen at any of the other exchanges is that we send you back timing information uh so when you get your order status or order confirmations they have the time stamps from when the exchange specifically the matching engine saw your order so you can begin to get information about your latencies you know maybe generally you have very low latencies you're able to get orders in and get the responses quickly but then you know every once in a while it spikes or something bad happens and to again highfrequency trading and to automated trading this is very important to understand when these things can happen and kind of be able to manage that um because order you know the execution speed matters right um to you know just a day trader or someone that just wants to exchange their Bitcoins cuz they heard about the cool new thing it doesn't matter but to someone running a bot it definitely matters so we provide that type of timing information so okay so have is there have you done any benchmarks is that something that's done like to Benchmark the the maximum like try to is absolutely something that's done uh I have not benchmarked against some of the other exchanges we have a rough idea of how many um requests per second like our matching engine could handle and like bulk um we don't know exactly how many it could handle like a peak or in one Spike things like that um but we have a ballpark of around 2500 to 3,000 probably requests per second on the back end match engine could maybe do more with a little optimization but that hasn't been a problem yet so okay and so now uh what happens if it exceeds that what if you got 10 times as many at the same uh it depends there are different things in the pipeline that could fail um as with any exchange um obviously what's nice about our setup again different from some of the others is our website our matching engine our order gateways are all very independent processes so if our website goes down this does mean that trading operation stops the order gateways um can still continue to operate as we look into maybe a website issue likewise if an order Gateway goes down we can have backup order gateways and the website doesn't go down so all of these things um help kind of mitigate that so to answer the question about what happens if you get flooded it really depends um how seriously you're flooded and you know to some degree you'll start to drop orders maybe you'll start to reject orders um um to another degree you can have a queue a backlog of orders um we haven't been flooded but one thing to consider if you do get flooded um is that I believe uh ORD should be tagged with time to execute so that if let's say you know you sent an order and for some reason the exchange is backlogged and it's been so many seconds or something like that you should be able to not have that order execute um I don't think other exchanges do this we currently don't provide that feature either M but with our system it would be easy to implement and that would allow you to kind ofate the risk of a backlog so that if the exchange is experiencing problems you don't have to be executing orders um in a delay and the reason that's a problem is because if you're executing orders delayed you may not know where the market is trading and so you may not be getting the right executions you want the right deal things like that so it's important to always know where the market is when you're training can they could and is that the the the matching engine that would actually I mean like can it keep um a cue of and say once I'm I'm like at 90% of capacity just automatically start rejecting orders um the matching engine could definitely do this uh various things could could do it but the matching engine would be kind of the last step of the puzzle like I said if the matching engine accepts your order M that means the order has been put into the matching engine stored into its state and we will honor that order until you cancel it so if the matching engine has confirmed that it has received your order that it means it has written it you know to dis recorded that it got the order so that we can recover in case of disaster and you know your order will be honored and we have all of this logged so that you know if there are discrepancies we can look at it yeah wow okay have you ever had to do that we have not no the systems you know knock on wood have been really good for being just you know made by two people and run on their own um again we haven't experienced high volume so part of that is not having experienced really high volume that like Mount gox does um but I still feel confident that it would hold up to good volume have to put it to the test yeah for sure okay so now tell us the the big announcement that is happening today MH now that we' got all all that basic out of um so going back to what lets us scale and something that makes uh the way our system design interesting is I can drop different types of gateways in front of the matching engine so historically we have had a uh HTTP rest Gateway which is similar to other exchanges they provide a you know kind of a single you um endpoint where you just send the order and you know you can query for order details you can query for your account information but really you just kind of send the order and then you can figure out if you have fills later and this is all right for the you know getting the exchanges going to write a simple trading bot you can do this it's very simple but something that has been lacking has been a Gateway that allows you to connect and get your fills streaming in real time um so this is you send an order and let's say you know it's able to execute immediately you want to know that you got the fills and you got the execution right away or when they happened right um and that has been lacking at the exchanges so what I have done at bit floor is developed a fix Gateway uh fix stands for financial information exchange and it is a standard used very widely in the financial industry for connecting to trading platforms exchanges and placing orders and getting fills back and getting that information in a realtime manner so you know starting today bit floor will have a fixed Gateway that Traders can use to connect send their orders and do their trading so they will use uh a fix compatible software that will be their front end to interface with bit floor is that how is that how that would work yes so fix allows uh the great thing about choosing fix is because it is a standard there are many many off-the-shelf solutions that a Trader can use many trading shops like proprietary trading like where I worked any banks things like that will have you know in-house knowledge of how to connect to fix endpoints several exchanges provide fixed gateways um there are free libr liaries there are paid libraries um lots of different tools that you can use gooey tools non- goey tools um that Traders can use to connect to a fixed Gateway um however they see fit so providing it um you kind of piggyback on all of that existing knowledge and that industry standard that you know many people already know how to use so someone coming into you know bit floor or sorry Bitcoin trading from a existing trading operation m uh might be familiar with fix they won't necessarily be familiar with your custom you know rest API but with fix they will be familiar and they'll know how to connect to it they'll know how to How it Should operate how to you know speak the fixed protocol essentially and they already have the tools in place to do it exactly so we got to do a press release and send it out to the whole trading community and say guess what you can do it with Bitcoin now and only at bit Flor yes as far as I know there's no other exchange uh that is providing a fixed Gateway right now that is cool now one thing just to clarify um you know for like a lot of people in our audience are obviously they're not experts in this and um including me so um when you talk about real time like you're putting put place the user puts it in an order and then getting real time fills the data coming back I mean an average user might say well I can get that on the other exchanges because within moments they see the order being filled and they they get that information but that's what you're saying is that's after the fact that what you mean is like instantaneously with within microsc correct right yes I do literally mean it could be micros seconds um that's probably what you'll see on bit floor on real exchanges it's even faster um but the difference is that when they enter an order and there is fills what they have to do is they have to query for order details again to see if there are fills which means they have to perform another request has to go through you know any validation the order gate have to do things that their order gateways have to do as well as ours um and then they get that information back and that those for gearing towards high frequency trading again uh those you know delays those you know seconds even or half a second could matter between you know placing the next order or not um so with a fixed Gateway it's connection based uh with rest every new order um every new request is kind of its own connection it stands Al independent of all the others with fix you connect to the Gateway and you maintain your connection for the lifetime of the session and you can you know send orders you can get the fills immediately and act upon those fills let's say you got a fill for an order you know that was only partially you can cancel it you can place new orders you can do these things much quicker now than you could with the rest Gateway another interesting thing the uh fix Gateway allows you to do is send in orders kind of like in a streaming fashion let's say you want to send several orders really quickly back to back you can do that you can also send the cancels quicker than you can with the normal you know rest end point because you're connect because you have a connection that sounds like is it resource intensive on this on the bit floor side of it it's not really more resource intensive than the existing order Gateway that we have for the rest um it is a little more resource intensive in that we have to maintain State for the connections and you know we have to keep track we have to make sure you're connect um another interesting thing we have at our fix Gateway this is pretty common to see at others is cancel on disconnect so if for some reason so let's say you've connected you've placed 10 orders and for some reason your connection is broken you lost internet or something this can be potentially you know a dangerous situation because you're trading trying to you know essentially trade on the market so what will happen is our fixed Gateway will automatically cancel those orders for you everything as soon as you lose connection it cancel everything corre it will cancel only the orders you've placed through the fix Gateway if you continue to place through the rest Gateway those orders it doesn't know about obviously but everything you've placed through the fixed Gateway as soon as you disconnect it will cancel for you um if it can obviously if an order has already executed cuz someone else beat you to it you cannot but if it can it will cancel which kind of you know mitigates the risk of losing your connection and yes exactly and this is important because people who are so let me let me make make sure I understand too that so these um this fix protocol is something that all kinds of super sophisticated trading software is designed for right am I right and they can so they have these fancy interfaces and and data analysis of what's being filled in real time and it's are there bots that are built on that too yes yes um I mean where I used to work we would connect to many fixed gateways there are many you know other proprietary trading shops um like I said fix is uh standard well recognized and used by several exchanges so there are many like people that write B write libraries that can speak fixed um and you know we'll handle a lot of the session issues for you so then you can just deal with I want to build this this order or I want to know when I get a fill uh bit floor itself um uh to write our fix Gateway we write on top of an open source fixed library that we are you know heavily contributing to and expanding um and that's available on our GitHub page um at github.com bitf and you know others are welcome to use that to write trading Bots to you know connect to a fixed session and to not have to worry about some of the intricacies of the fixed protocol and just you know do what they want to do which is the trading yeah yeah it sounds like uh one of the results of this am I right that one of the results of this is going to be a lot more Arbitrage if it it doesn't take that many Bots that many Traders uh to keep the you know to do Arbitrage between the other exchanges so it sounds like the um the the price on bitow floor is going to much more closely uh reflect the price everywhere else because of this is would that be um it could be I think one of the biggest challenges to doing Bitcoin Arbitrage currently has been moving the uh Fiat currencies like US dollars or pounds between the exchanges and that's why you don't really that's why you can see what looks like really good ARB opportunities but not everyone is taking advantage of them because it just it's kind of painful to move the other currency between them but D works for that doesn't it like you but it does it still take a day or do um I don't know dalla I think if you move into dalla and then back the other exchange it's minutes but again you know sometimes the ARB can close up I've been pretty happy with the spread on bit floor um it's been sometimes it's been as close as 1 cent which is our minimum allowed spread we have a minimum tick increment of 1 cent um and sometimes you know it opens up to 10 cents depending on where the market is at but even for low volume I've been pretty happy MH with what the people trading on bit floor have been doing yeah that's good and I i' like uh the one if I'm interpreting it properly you tell me because uh when I look at the market data and I you can you can see the um you know the spread right and when I hover the mouse over the ask price I can drag it up that line and it tells me the total liquidity or something it looks to me it looks like if I'm going to spend $200 this is the price I'm going to get is that right like I would have to spend $200 to get this price are you talking about the charts or on the homepage the charts yeah the charts I believe um the chart will show you uh summed amount so it will take into account how the um you know the size at that level and then the price of that level and then if you wanted to essentially consume that level you could pay that amount yeah that's so important to me it's so basic like when I you know a friend and and they're like well you know it's different if you're buying $1 or $200 or $1,000 you're going to pay a much different price and so just to be able to hover the mouse up until I get to $500 and say okay at $500 this is going to be would that be your average price or would that be the high price I guess on the chart um if you're looking at the chart I don't remember the nuances the chart but it would depend on how much is before you yeah um it would probably be the high price to that price at that dollar amount yeah see what I want what I want is really simple we'll talk about it later play but what I want is I I mean super super simple to say I want to buy $1,000 worth a Bitcoin and then have it tell me the average price you would pay based on the order book now I see so simple little calculator um I tried to get Bitcoin charts to do it and they kind of did the reverse they're like well if you bought this many Bitcoins it would cost this many dollars but that's not how people do it they they don't say I want this many Bitcoin usually it's the other way they say I have $500 what would be the price right now um so if I type in 500 kind of like pre like it should adjust in real time as I type you know like aaction so that like I type in $500 and it will say that's going to be$ 3.98 per Bitcoin if I type in $1,000 it's going to say you know 407 so I can kind of play with the numbers maybe you know maybe even a chart or somehow but so that you can see like okay I should buy this many that I should maybe not a th I should buy 860 because at 860 I'll get a much better price than a th000 does that make sense it does make sense and one thing I'll say you know without kind of going into too many details of how trading how you could do basic trading or anything like that is it really depends on your end goals what you're trying to accomplish if you just have you know $100 and you need Bitcoins right now no matter what you don't really care and you just want to do that you just can put in an order for a very high you know price and just do it for $100 and get the Bitcoins but if you're really looking to kind of slowly acquire them and want the best you know price yeah you sometimes it's not in your interest to kind do one order sometimes it's in your interest to look at what the inside of the book is which is the best bit and ask that you can get kind of take that order and then wait to see if someone else will come in and kind of you know step into that position right um see like the sand is coming down the side of a hill and you just grab some and then more will fill in grab some and then more will fill in um so this is obviously um this will if you are patient can net you a better o average price in the long run if the market doesn't move while you're doing it obviously the danger with all of these things is that as you eat away nothing fills in so the spread widens and the market is moving EV essentially but obviously on average you'll do better that way than if you just you know dumped $1,000 one big order you're going to essentially and this has happened on some of the other exchanges you're just going to wipe out the book yeah um and this you know it's a very real thing it can happen so you won't get the best price again if you don't care doesn't if you want it you need it whatever exactly that's kind of where I guess that's kind of basically the chart as it is kind of fills that purpose because you you see this Valley in the middle and then on the right hand side is the asks and if I just hover I can see the price and as the price goes up I can see okay well this is about the price I want to pay yep so then that's 167 so I can just put in $17 $167 and I know that I should get about that price so it kind of helps for planning if you want to play that little game but yeah that does that all the time if he if you were doing it for sure several yeah several users um have asked about kind of an AutoFill in for the price uh or sort of kind of simulate a market order if you will where they don't really want to take the time to compute they just the price that they should um trade at they just need n number of Bitcoins and they just want to do that immediately um and that's something we're looking into doing here's another feature that's maybe stupid there's actually three features I can think of I want one is tell me if this is a good idea like literally a big green button and a big red button and a green button that just says buy all my dollars into Bitcoins that's it I want my dollars to be zero just buy and buy all you know buy entire at whatever just like do it and then a red button that says sell sell all my Bitcoins for dollars just like boom and it just automatically does it I know that you can obvious you can obviously you can put in an order for well see you can't though like I can't put in an order to buy a million Bitcoins at $20 a Bitcoin because it's going to say insufficient funds so now I got to get out my calculator and do the math backwards it's like no I just want to hit a green button and say buy all my money into Bitcoin so that I want that feature I think that could be a reasonable feature um given if you just had an okay step or something right yeah as long as it pops up and says are you sure exactly are you sure you want to to spend all your dollars into Co at the current book you know yes I'm sure something that's kind of the differentiating factor here um so another interesting thing so while we're talking about kind of web interfaces and we the trading interfaces at um so I haven't seen this at the other exchanges maybe they've added it since then but with bit floor we have like uh in the trading interface online we have a grid view like a table that will list all of your active open orders and you can expand them to see the fills and the fees you've incurred kind of a very intuitive interface to get a complete overview of your trading history if you will mhm um a lot of this was designed with the idea of kind of a novice to you know kind of capable online Trader maybe that's why we don't have you know a giant big green button or giant red button but certainly that is an important thing we want to also begin to cater to is kind of a novice user coming into it that does want a lot of the math and a lot of this the Simplicity and so we may like you know either simp a giant green button sure exactly yeah so it's really just deciding on who we're targeting with what type of interface um and what type of tools to give them even a capable Trader sometimes just wants to buy $100 wor a Bitcoin and just buy it without having to get out their calculator yeah exactly of course that's uh that's one good see like on other exchanges they'll allow you to exceed your funds which is weird and then it just keeps the remainder in in an open somehow in in an open order but uh so I can actually put in buy a million Bitcoins at $1,000 dollar of Bitcoin and it'll do the same thing as my little green button idea right but then the remainder shows up in the order but then I still have to go down there and click cancel because if I don't then it's like a permanent green button that will always be so that's not perfect either but really I just want a one time only click are you sure you want to spend all your dollars into Bitcoin at the current market you know order book yes I'm sure and uh and then this opposite obviously the other thing I would like is is basically like an um a checkbox so that I could have it automatically do that M so that for and I'll tell you the use case for this this would be really useful for a merchant if a merchant has um a fear of currency risk because they want to receive Bitcoins but they want it converted into dollars right away cuz they're charging $12 for a cheeseburger and and shake and they need the $12 they can't take any chance that they're getting them at $5 today and then tomorrow it's back to $3 so um they need a button that say a check mark that says Auto Sell um always Auto Sell every Bitcoin that hits this account I would love that because you know it has to be real visible it should be actually be like like the auto reply on Gmail where it's like a visible Banner that says you have this set to Auto Sell cancel now you know so that it's like there but it's a setting so that they could just leave it and go and never have to mess with it again they they only have to go in to withdraw the dollars if they're like for example all they're using it for like they can actually take their Bitcoin address for uploads to bitf floor and make that their Merchant's Bitcoin address then every Bitcoin that hits that address is auto sold and they don't have to worry about it it's one less step for them to do for every transaction that's the other thing I'm going to that is interesting and we can I like that um again it's completely possible because of uh essentially the website and the trading features of the website act as just another Gateway so now you know we at bitor we essentially have three order gateways three different types we have the rest API we have the fix order Gateway and the website and you know the website can be this place where it gears more towards an noice or towards a merchant type of setup where it can provide some of these features um and as long as you know you're being notified of what's happening with your account I think it would be reasonable um because the last thing we want to happen is you know for things to accidentally be flipped or to you know what you didn't intend to happen yeah it has to be very the language has to be very clear and are you and all that but they but these could be you they don't have to be obtrusive and they don't have to interfere with those capable Traders that's the thing they're completely you know they're very independent systems and it's easy to kind of add on to the website a feature that would do that and as long as it's been okay you know it'll just it'll make the records that the orders happened and things like that you know let a rest IP what what is rest um rest is just a um I wish I could remember what acon yes API API I what an API is but what's rest rest is a certain type of API yes I forget what the acronym stands for but it essentially is over HTTP and it means that there is no um like state in the connection essentially you can do a request and get the response back from the server and that's it you like unlike the fix conne single transaction connection okay okay it's like at rest in between sure you could think of it like that yes yeah and this is what's very common with all the other Bitcoin exchanges okay y so like if somebody developed an Android app for bit floor B floor mobile right then um would it it would it use the fixed Gateway or would it use the rest it probably use the rest API um a mobile app would probably use the rest API because with mobile obviously you have the problems of losing the connection all the time uh it would and again with mobile you're not looking to do the type of high frequency and the immediate you know feedback necessarily you're really just looking to place an order and have it be out there or kind of look at your over account overview and all of those things you would do with a rest API not a fix API yeah cool cool or a mobile website would be equivalent you know it should be easy enough to create a mobile app you know they should they should actually create like a universal mobile app that would work with multiple exchanges um it's possible a lot of the exchanges do have very similar API kind of layout outs um there are some libraries out there that can you know I believe there's some PHP some python libraries that can talk to different exchanges so the same thing would be done you know on the mobile space rest is very simple because essentially when your browser is when you've loaded a website and your browser is talking you know showing you the content and everything it's also speaking rest to the server um or over HTTP um so that it's all very it's all kind of the same thing very cool very cool so have you talked to uh any of your uh contacts in the uh trading space about uh and and told them about this or has this been high now um the fixed Gateway we just launched today um it's available on the testet now um for just wide testing and we be on the production um Network within the next few coming days once I feel kind of happy with where testnet is and get some users actually interested in it um and then I guess I can you know the goal is to spread the word and let some people in the industry maybe know that this is a possibility um and that there is an exchange out there with fixed connectivity you're letting them know right now they're watching so they'll be checking it out by the time they're watching this by the time they're watching this it'll probably be it's definitely running on testet and this is where you know regardless of what type of trading you're doing rest API or fixed or anything I recommend you always start testing your things on our test net it's like fake money dollars the same site but you can you can what change play dollars for fake Bitcoins is that what the test exactly I didn't see that on the site um it's maybe I should make it a little more known it's not even a setting if you go to the uh API documentation at the bottom of the page it talks about how to test your Bots um this would be really for testing Bots this is through the API not through the web interface uh through the web interface as well yes there's a so the test Network is just like the Bitcoin test Network it's a completely separate box completely separate set and it's an entire clone of the production Network so everything you can do on production you can do on testnet the testnet API is just test net. bitf flor.com okay um we'll get you to the testnet web you know web interfaces and to see how many fake dollars you have um but otherwise I recommend all users start there just to make sure they can connect properly that their systems and our systems are doing what they expect before moving to real money on the real production Network right maybe I did see it I just didn't I knew what it was and I it's only it's only mentioned in the API section because as a normal just web frontend user you wouldn't care that this kind of exists but if you're working on apis you will want to know how do I test it without incurring losses right and the test net is for that right cool cool cool exciting all right wow well we're getting the word out about the fixed Gateway yeah definely FL all right so I'm very excited about it I think it's uh my goal and belief is uh that it provides a little more kind of legitimacy to what bit floor is trying to accomplish which is provide good apis that people would be familiar with and that you know would provide the things the API resources they need um so not just kind of throwing together any old API but actually thinking about how other real exchange you know when I say real I mean like nice NASDAQ bats how they do apis what terms do they use and you know what are the characteristics of their systems and then trying to bring some of that over to bit floor and its apis um we document everything on our website we you know I try and be very thorough with the documentation and what each API call does um I we provide example libraries example Bots uh we don't want people coming to our exchange and then just having to hunt around everywhere else to find the documentation we want it to be very clear on our own website what the exchange supports and what our capabilities are right right and if people send you an email you actually get it right away and read it and reply yeah I'm kind of an email junkie I yes I get the emails to the phone as a lot of people do and I I try and reply um at least with confirmation that I've gotten their email uh most emails like I said cuz we've been low volume have been really simple either a request or a recommendation and you know I thank them for that or address it and things like that you ever get an email that's just like like uh what what is bitcoin and why should I use it yes I do get those every once in a while for those to bitcoin me.com that's yeah and definitely bitf floor is not necessarily the place to you know start as a complete novice we try and redirect people to other sites um like Bitcoin me.com to learn about it like I said you know our goal is more from the trading aspect someone that is looking to trade make a market or just exchange some Bitcoins and a little bit familiar with what it is cool so now after after uh this after the fixed Gateway what's your next uh major thing under thing you're going to undertake um I think the next thing to pursue on the exchange will be to reexamine some of the web interfaces you talked about and some other people have alluded to ways we could clean it up things here and there um not much has changed on our web interface and I do want to kind of revamp that make it a little more structured and build upon some of the good things there um so that would be the next big thing but just you know Simplicity though don't make it GL yes exactly we do want to keep it very simple um uh the whole experience should be very straightforward um another thing that I'll you know is as volume begins to grow I'll probably add things like uh daily or weekly report trading reports for people that want them uh this is you know more important maybe for people running automated Traders just to double check that things are kind of where they expect or to download their order history in kind of a reasonable manner which you can already do we have a download your history link but kind of make some of that more well known so that as people begin to do some trading they can get these Aggregates you know how many how much in fees have they you know done that's another interesting thing that we did first out of all the other Bitcoin exchanges is we U differentiate between a liquidity provider and a liquidity taker oh yeah we provide a rebate for the liquidity provider so you didn't mention that so let me see if I got it right so the the liquidity provider is the one who puts in an order that is is not filled right now they're they're putting in a standing order as I would call it correct and they are going okay and then the that's the liquidity provider the one who takes that order and matches it is the liquidity Taker and the taker pays 0.3 is right I believe it's 0.3 or 0.4 I think it's 0.4 0.4 I remember the three because it's the difference so 0.4 they pay 0.4 and then the other one actually doesn't get charged they get paid 0.1 correct so their net the net revenue I guess is.3 but you're charging one side 4 yes and you're paying the other side 0.1 which is great so you can actually do do all your trading just by simply putting in standing orders and you don't pay any trading fees you get paid to trade again that's you know it's geared towards it you know there's different reasons for doing it one of them is obviously if you don't care about what exact price you're executing or you don't need the Bitcoins now you know we encourage you to just fill out the order book a little and part of that is an incentive the rebate acts as an incentive to kind of show your hand if you will because now you're saying I'm willing to pay this price for the this amount of coins or whatnot and you know that's giving other people more information to act with accordingly so for that you get an incentive if your order is executed and a fuller order book just gives you a much clearer picture of what's what's available what's there yeah otherwise if the order book's empty it's gonna it doesn't uh facilitate trading yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense a lot of sense cool well thanks we've got to do this again for sure when you know next major update yeah exactly the next major thing maybe the web iner face right yeah for sure I'll help you I I can uh I can be the dummy it's for dummies yeah the dummy the usability US user testing so cool thanks so much Roman join thank you all right and thanks you guys for joining us and we'll see you next time on the Bitcoin show take care [Music]