 Hey everybody, welcome back to the Bitcoin Show. As you know, I'm Bruce Wagner and we're so glad you joined us. Today we're going to talk about, we have a major announcement from a new exchange site, not that new, but maybe a little heard of called BitFlor.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 bitcoinme.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 bitcoinme.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 Bitcoin. Hey everybody, we're back. So joining me today is Roman Styleman. Did I say your name right? Styleman. Oh, I practiced it and everything. Styleman. It's S-H-T-Y-L-M-A-N. Yes. It's not easy to say. It's a tongue-twister. BitFlor is easier to say. Much easier. Okay. So tell us, Roman, you're my neighbor. We live nearby right here in Midtown Manhattan. So I've known about BitFlor kind of since the beginning because we met actually, was the first time we met at the Bitcoin conference last August? Yes. Okay. In New York. I remember meeting you and I remember you saying that my friend and I are going to start a Bitcoin exchange. That's exactly me. Okay. That was like one of the first things I heard you say. I was like, okay, who are these kids? I mean, because I thought you looked like a lot younger than you are, by the way, which is a good thing. Actually, you'll appreciate that later. But I thought, oh my gosh, okay, that's cool, good for you, the more the better. But since then you've launched it and I've been hearing fantastic things about Bitcoin. When did you actually, I mean BitFlor, when did you actually launch BitFlor? I believe it was November when we actually pushed out to production and allowed people to start depositing real funds and real Bitcoin, real US dollar. Before that, we had the test net running, which just lets you use fake currencies and figure out what you need to do. But it was November around that time frame. November. So when you started working on it, was it in August or September? Yeah, it was in August when we started working on it. We started with the basics, looking at what some of the other exchanges had and then seeing where we wanted to improve upon that and getting the fundamentals in place. We first started with things like the matching engine and the order gateways that would gear towards API trading. That's what interested us in the beginning. And then we rolled out things like the website on top of that. Once we had enough of the components in place that we felt comfortable, we launched. So in three months, that's like a major achievement. And you started this with a partner, right? Correct. And what's his name? Vadim. Okay, cool. And so, but now you're pretty much running it kind of on your own? Yes. Okay. All right, cool. And so BitFlor is, it still has low volume. It's not the most well-known exchange out there, but one of the things that brought me back to you besides having already met you and know you is I was reading about it and that you had open sourced the matching engine and coders were saying that it's like the best one out there, that it's really professional because you have, what's your background? Before I started working on BitFlor, I had worked in automated trading. It was a proprietary trading shop that did high-frequency automated trading. You mean forex? We did all sorts of things. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it wasn't just forex and equities, commodities, anything that you could connect to electronically could be traded. So trading shop is a software development shop? It's a combination of different things. There are software developers that work on the libraries and the fundamental kind of system that connects to the exchanges to consume market data to enter the orders, all those nuances of understanding the specifications, and then it's also comprised of the traders and the quants that will come up with the algorithms that will work with developers, 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 you don't mind because it's too late, I already asked. Yeah. 25, okay. So you just talk completely over my head. I have no idea, more than twice your age, but you young guys are blowing my mind with your experience, and how do you get so much experience in that field when you're only 25? I wouldn't say that I have that much experience, but it's one of those things where it can seem like a walled garden if you're looking at it from the outside, but once you kind of work in it a little bit, you kind of understand where the strings are being pulled and what some of the technologies are being used, obviously as with anything, you become kind of more familiarized with the space that you're working in, and so then it will seem like you know a lot, but there's still always a lot to learn. It helps if you're very bright to begin with. I suppose that helps. And then just immerse yourself in it, yeah, I suppose, right? So all right, so coming from this trading shop background, then you have this coding experience. Were you actually coding there or working on other people's code? It's always a combination of both in development. Yeah, I was a software developer, so I would have the job of working on the systems that would connect to the exchanges to consume either market data or to be able to place orders, update the libraries that traders would then use to write their algorithms on top of, and I also worked with traders to implement some of their algorithms. So a little bit of everything. One of the things that I love most about BitFlor is its simplicity, it lessens more. Some of these sites that are so glitzy, they look like, I don't know, like moving ads and visuals and stuff, it's just crazy. Too many features, too many scrolling marquees and nonsense garbage, and what I like is google.com from the old days, just search, and real, real simple, like that preave website, preev.com. I love simplicity, that's where it's at, less is more. And BitFlor, I love that, it's just very straightforward. It's got 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 adding and withdrawing funds, so it right now uses Duala, Duala only. So what's your, what do you tell people when they ask you for other options, other ways to get funds in and out? People have asked about Paxom in the past, I told them that we would look into it, obviously that's no longer an option given that Paxom doesn't work with Bitcoin companies anymore. Some other options that we've considered, BitInstance, other things like Liberty Reserve, ACH directly, taking those, but mostly a lot of that has been put aside just to keep it simple and to help kind of manage our risk. With dealing with US dollars, obviously you have the risk of charge backs and just the whole anti-money laundering regulations you have to follow. And so the less we can expose ourselves to potential attack vectors and kind of simplify our dealings with US dollars, the better. So we've been hesitant to kind of add new things without properly exploring them. Right. So Paxom, for those of you who don't know, Paxom recently has announced that they're, they're closing their dealings with any business that does business with Bitcoin. So that's kind of closing that venue. Hopefully that doesn't happen with Duala because Bitcoin I think is a huge percentage of Duala's overall transactions. And then the other, on BitInstance, ACH, like direct ACH, I can see that being a huge problem because that's obviously, that's just charge backs. You may as well just take checks, or even worse, credit cards or PayPal that can be reversed six months later and just charge it back months after the fact. 180 days, yeah. Yeah, well actually they can even, I've heard of cases where like credit cards and PayPal can even up to six months later. It depends on the specific terms and stuff. But anyway, so BitInstance is good, but then that kind of, 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 Duala works for now. I mean, they have, there is that Duala 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 they settle back on the end. Do you know how that works? Yeah, no. Duala basically extends you a line of credit. You apply for it and they're basically giving you a 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 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 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 know a couple people have applied for it, but I guess it takes some time to get approved. But anyway, so whatever, if it's, they say two to three business days with Duala, but sometimes I've seen it be like five or six calendar days. So it has to do with, 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 ACH to transfer and it's just kind of part of the US ACH banking system. But that's kind of how it is. But once you get past some of those initial hurdles with Duala, I found that 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. So this is like after that. So those of you who are setting up a Duala account initially, a count on is, I would 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 it's cool. One good thing is that when you put money, like if I take money out of an exchange into Duala, I can send it right back out from Duala to Bitfloor 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 using funds between several exchanges or it's not a one time I just need to convert some BTC to US dollars or anything like that. Just keep some in Duala, an amount you're comfortable with. And then just have that so that you don't have to incur that, like you said, six calendar day wait time just to trade $10 if that's what you want to do. Exactly, yeah. Well, I'm in the bid instant. I mean, what do you call it? The Duala instant service would come in handy if it's only $10. Anything less than 300. So that's pretty cool. Let's see. So about the matching engine, is that the part? I've talked to developers because I'm not a developer anymore, way back in the day a little bit. But I've talked to developers who say what's needed for Bitcoin is a high frequency exchange. So would you consider Bitfloor a high frequency exchange? Compared to the other exchanges, I would consider it a high frequency exchange. And I'll kind of outline why. Why I think we can do more, a higher frequency than the others compared to real stock exchanges. Obviously, we're nowhere close. But one of the things that kind of makes us different than what I've seen implemented and from what I know looking at the other exchanges is that our matching engine is run entirely in process, in memory orders, everything. It doesn't have to hit 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, let's say their order gateway that receives your order, they will put that order into a database of orders, which makes sense. 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. You'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 make sure you have the proper accounts in the funds in your account. We put them on hold if necessary. And then we will send that to the matching engine, which has all the other orders in memory, and it will be able to very quickly perform the match or reject 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 that can allow us to scale in different ways. 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, it's separate. In other words, in other implementations, all of it has to happen in one process. And by separating it, writing to the database and sending it to you and all that can happen later, so the real high-speed part of it happens 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 a 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 the incoming gateways, we can send it to the matching engine and the matching engine doesn't hit databases. 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. And then if they can be executed, they will, if not, they'll go on the order book. 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 because they all have a common way to communicate. So as the demand grows, you can scale that out in larger and larger. Can the matching engine be scaled that way? Or is it a single point that... The matching engine as we currently have it is a single process for each type of product. Since BitFlor 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 have one matching engine either potentially fail and not affect the others or just work completely independently. With the database setup, you could also scale it out differently. You could have different databases for different products, but it's manageable, just not quite the same. Is there a standard way to measure the speed of processing ability of transactions with exchange software? Orders per second that you're able to process 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. Something we do at BitFlor that I don't believe I've seen at any of the other exchanges is that we send you back timing information. 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, maybe generally you have very low latencies, you're able to get orders in and get the responses quickly, but then every once in a while it spikes or something bad happens. And to, again, high-frequency trading and to automated trading, this is very important to understand when these things can happen and kind of be able to manage that because order, the execution speed matters to just a day trader or someone that just wants to exchange their Bitcoins because 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. Okay, so have you done any benchmarks? Is that something that's done to benchmark the maximum? It is absolutely something that's done. I have not benchmarked against some of the other exchanges. We have a rough idea of how many requests per second like our matching engine could handle in bulk. We don't know exactly how many could handle like a peak or in one spike, things like that. But we have a ballpark of around 2,500 to 3,000, probably requests per second on the back end matching engine, could maybe do more with a little optimization, but that hasn't been a problem yet, so. Okay, so now what happens if it exceeds that? What if you got 10 times as many at the same? It depends. There are different things in the pipeline that could fail as with any exchange. 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 not mean that trading operation stops. The order gateways 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. Hope kind of mitigate that. So to answer the question about what happens if you get flooded, it really depends how seriously you're flooded and to some degree, you'll start to drop orders. Maybe you'll start to reject orders. To another degree, you can have a queue, a backlog of orders. We haven't been flooded, but one thing to consider if you do get flooded is that I believe orders should be tagged with time to execute so that if let's say 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. I don't think other exchanges do this. We currently don't provide that feature either. But with our system, it would be easy to implement. And that would allow you to kind of mitigate the risk of a backlog so that if the exchange is experiencing problems, you don't have to be executing orders 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 trading. Can it, and is that the matching engine that would actually, can it keep a queue of, and say once I'm at 90% of capacity, just automatically start rejecting orders? The matching engine could definitely do this. Various things 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, 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 to disk, recorded that it got the order so that we can recover in case of disaster, and your order will be honored. And we have all of this logged so that 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, and the knock on wood have been really good for being just, you know, made by two people and run on their own. Again, we haven't experienced high volume, so part of that is not having experienced the really high volume that like Mt. Gox does, but I still feel confident that it would hold up to good volume. I'll have to put it to the test. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so now tell us the big announcement that is happening today. Mm-hmm. And now that we've got all of that basic knowledge out of there. Sure, so going back to what lets us scale and something that makes our, the way our systems design interesting is I can drop different types of gateways in front of the matching engine. So historically, we have had a HTTP REST gateway, which is similar to other exchanges. They provide a, you know, kind of a single end point 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. 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. And that has been lacking at the exchanges. So what I've done at BitFloor is developed a fixed gateway. 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 real time manner. So, you know, starting today, BitFloor will have a fixed gateway that traders can use to connect, send their orders and do their trading. So they will use a fixed compatible software that will be their front end to interface with BitFloor. Is that how it works? Yes, so fix allows, 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. There are free libraries. There are paid libraries. Lots of different tools that you can use, GUI tools, non-GUI tools, that traders can use to connect to a fixed gateway. However, they see fit. So providing it, 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, BitFloor, or sorry, Bitcoin trading from a existing trading operation 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 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 BitFloor. Yes, as far as I know, there's no other exchange that is providing a fixed gateway right now. That is cool. Now, one thing just to clarify, you know, for like a lot of people in our audience are obviously they're not experts in this, and including me. So when you talk about real time, like the user puts 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 get that information. But that's what you're saying is that's after the fact that what you mean is like, instantaneously within microseconds. Correct. Yes, I do literally mean it could be microseconds. That's probably what you'll see on BitFloor on real exchanges, it's even faster. But the difference is that when they enter an order and there's 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 any validation, the order gateways have to do, their order gateways have to do as well as ours. And then they get that information back. And those for gearing towards high frequency trading again, those delays, those seconds even or half a second could matter between placing the next order or not. So with a fixed gateway, it's connection-based. With REST, every new order, every new request is kind of its own connection. It stands alone, 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 send orders, you can get the fills immediately and act upon those fills. Let's say you got a fill for an order 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 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 REST endpoint. Because you have a connection. That sounds like, is it resource intensive on the bit floors side of it? It's not really more resource intensive than the existing order gateway that we have for the REST. It is a little more resource intensive in that we have to maintain state for the connections and we have to keep track, we have to make sure you're connected. Another interesting thing we have at RFIX 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 a dangerous situation because you're trading, trying to 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 cancels everything. Correct, it will cancel only the orders you've placed through the fixed 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. If it can, obviously if an order has already executed because someone else beat you to it, you cannot, but if it can it will cancel which kind of, you know. Minigates the risk of losing your connection. Yes, exactly. And this is important because people who are, so let me make sure I understand too that so these, this fixed 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 data analysis of what's being filled in real time and it's, are there bots that are built on that too? Yes, yes. I mean, where I used to work, we would connect to many fixed gateways. There are many, you know, other proprietary trading shops. Like I said, fixed is a standard, well-recognized and used by several exchanges. So there are many like people that write bots, write libraries that can speak fixed and you know, we'll handle a lot of the session issues for you so then you can just deal with I wanna build this, this order or I wanna know when I get it filled. Bitfloor itself, to write our fixed gateway, we write on top of an open source fixed library that we are, you know, heavily contributing to and expanding and that's available on our GitHub page at github.com slash bitfloor 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 wanna do which is the trading. It sounds like one of the results of this, am I right? One of the results of this is going to be a lot more arbitrage, it doesn't take that many bots, that many traders to keep the, you know, to do arbitrage between the other exchanges. So it sounds like the price on Bitfloor is gonna much more closely reflect the price everywhere else because of this. Is it, would that be? It could be. I think one of the biggest challenges to doing Bitcoin arbitrage currently has been moving the 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 is kind of painful to move the other currency between them. But Duwala works for that, doesn't it? Like you get, but does it still take a day or? I don't know. Duwala I think if you move into Duwala and then back the other change it's minutes but again, you know, sometimes the ARB can close up. I've been pretty happy with the spread on Bitfloor. It's been, sometimes it's been as close as one cent which is our minimum allowed spread. We have a minimum tick increment of one cent and sometimes, you know, it opens up to 10 cents depending on where the market is at but even for low ball you might have been pretty happy with what the people trading on Bitfloor have been doing. Yeah, that's good. And I like the one, if I'm interpreting it properly, you tell me because when I look at the market data and you can see the, 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 gonna spend $200, this is the price I'm gonna 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, the chart will show you a summed amount. So it will take into account how 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, you know, a friend and they're like, well, you know, it's different if you're buying $1 or $200 or $1,000, you're gonna 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 gonna be, would that be your average price or would that be the high price, I guess, on the chart? If you're looking at the chart, I don't remember the nuances of the chart but it would depend on how much is before you. Yeah. It would probably be the high price. Yeah, I believe it would. You'd have to go up to that price at that dollar amount. Yeah. See, what I want is really simple. We'll talk about it later and maybe we'll play. But what I want is, I mean, super, super simple is to say I want to buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin and then have it tell me the average price you would pay based on the order book now. I see. Just so simple, a little calculator. 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 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? Okay. So if I type in 500, kind of like, it should have just in real time as I type, like age action. So I type in $500 and it will say that's going to be $398 per Bitcoin. If I type in $1,000, it's going to say, 407, so I can kind of play with the numbers maybe even a chart or somehow. But so that you can see, like, okay, I should buy this many. Maybe not 1,000, I should buy 860 because at 860 I'll get a much better price than 1,000. Does that make sense? It does make sense. One thing I'll say, you know, without kind of going into too many details of how trading, how you can 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 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 price, you sometimes it's not in your interest to kind of 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 step into that position, right? So you see like the sand is coming down the side of a hill and you just grab some and then more will fill in. You grab some and then more will fill in. So this is obviously, this will, if you're patient, this can net you a better 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 event, essentially. But obviously on average, you'll do better that way than if you just, you know, to dump $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. And this, you know, it's a very real thing, it can happen. So you won't get the best price, but again, if you don't care, it doesn't matter. If you want it, you need it, whatever. Yeah, 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 see this valley, you're in the middle. And then on the right hand side is they ask, 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. So then that's $167. So I can just put in $167 dollars 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 you were doing it for sure. Several users have asked about kind of an auto fill-in for the price, or sort of kind of simulate a market order if you will, where they don't really want to take the time to compute the price that they should trade at. They just need n number of bitcoins and they just want to do that immediately. And that's something we're looking into doing. You know what I would love? Here's another feature that's maybe stupid. There's actually three features I can think of if 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 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 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 of bitcoin because it's gonna say insufficient funds. So now I gotta get out my calculator and do the math backwards. It's like, no, I just wanna hit a green button and say buy all my money into bitcoin. So I want that feature. I think that could be a reasonable feature if you just had an okay step or something. Yeah, as long as it pops up and says, are you sure? Yeah, exactly. Are you sure you want to spend all your dollars into bitcoin at the current book? Yes, I'm sure. Something that's kind of the differentiating factor here. So another interesting thing, so while we're talking about kind of web interfaces and the trading interfaces, I haven't seen this at the other exchanges. Maybe they've added it since then, but with BitFloor, we have like, 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. A lot of this was designed with the idea of kind of a novice to kind of capable online trader, maybe. That's why we don't have a giant big green button or giant red button. But certainly that is an important thing we wanna 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 the simplicity. And so we may either simplify it. There's gonna have to be a giant green button. Just a little green button. Exactly, yeah. So it's really just deciding on who we're targeting with what type of interface and what type of tools to give them. Even a capable trader sometimes just wants to buy $100 for the Bitcoin and just buy it without having to get out their calculator. Yeah, exactly. Of course. 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 an open, somehow in an open order. So I can actually put in buy a million Bitcoins at $1,000 in Bitcoin and it'll do the same thing as my little green button idea. 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 wanna spend all your dollars into Bitcoin at the current market order book? Yes, I'm sure, but and then the opposite obviously. The other thing I would like is basically like and a checkbox so that I could have it automatically do that so that for, and I'll tell you the use case for this. So this would be really useful for a merchant. If a merchant has a fear of currency risk because they wanna receive Bitcoins but they wanna convert it into dollars right away because they're charging $12 for a cheeseburger 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 they need a button that's a check mark that says auto sell, always auto sell every Bitcoin that hits this account. I would love that because it has to be real visible. It should be actually like the auto reply on Gmail where it's like a visible banner that says you have this set to auto sell. Cancel now 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 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 Bitfloor and make that their merchant's Bitcoin address and 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 a transaction. That's the other thing. That is interesting and we can... I like that. Again, it's completely possible because of essentially the website and the trading features of the website act as just another gateway. So now, you know, at Bitfloor we essentially have three order gateways, three different types. We have the REST API, we have the fix order gateway and the website and the website can be this place where it gears more towards novice or towards a merchant type of setup where it can provide some of these features and as long as you're being notified of what's happening with your account I think it would be reasonable because the last thing we want to happen is for things to accidentally be flipped or to what you didn't intend to happen. Yeah, the language has to be very clear and are you sure and all that. But these could be... They don't have to be obtrusive and they don't interfere with those capable traders. Right, that's the thing. They're completely... 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 make the records that the orders happened and things like that. How about a REST IP? What is REST? REST is just a... I wish I could remember what the acronym. Yes, API. I know 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 like state in the connection. Essentially, you can do a request and get the response back from the server and that's it. Unlike the fix where it's connection, yes, exactly, yes. 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. So like if somebody developed an Android app for mid-floor, mid-floor mobile, then would it use the fix gateway or would it probably use the REST API? A mobile app would probably use the REST API because with mobile, obviously, you have the profits of losing the connection all the time and again with mobile, you're not looking to do the type of high frequency and the immediate feedback necessarily. You're really just looking to place an order and have it be out there or kind of look at your account overview and all of those things you would do with REST API, not a fix API, yeah. Or a mobile website would be equivalent, yeah. It should be easy enough to create a mobile app. You know, they should actually create like a universal mobile app that would work with multiple exchanges. It's possible. A lot of the exchanges do have very similar API kind of layouts. 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 or over HTTP. So it's all very, it's all kind of the same thing. Very cool, very cool. So have you talked to any of your contacts in the trading space about and told them about this or has this been high-fived on that? The Fix Gateway we just launched today. Yeah, it doesn't mean. It's available on the Testnet now for just wide testing and will be on the production 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. 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 and that there is an exchange out there with Fix 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, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely running on Testnet and this is where, you know, regardless of what type of trading you're doing, REST API or Fix or anything, I recommend you always start testing your things on our Testnet. It's like fake money, fake US dollars. The same site, but you can, what, change play dollars for fake bitcoins? Is that what the Testnet is? Yeah, exactly. I didn't see that on the site. It's, may I should make it a little more known? It's not even a setting. If you go to the API documentation at the bottom of the page, it talks about how to test your bots. This would be really for testing bots. This is through the API, not through the web interface. Through the web interface as well, yes. So the test network is just like the Bitcoin test network, it's a completely separate box, completely separate setup 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 testnet.bitfloor.com. We'll get you to the Testnet web, you know, web interfaces to see how many fake dollars you have. 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. All right, maybe I did see it, I just didn't, I knew what it was. It's only mentioned in the API section because as a normal just web front end 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. And the Testnet is for that. Right, cool, cool, cool, exciting. All right, wow. Well, we're getting the word out about the fixed gateway. Yeah, definitely. All right, so. I'm very excited about it. I think it's, my goal and belief is that it provides a little more kind of legitimacy to what bitfloor is trying to accomplish, which is provide good APIs that people would be familiar with and that would provide the things, the API resources they need. 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 NICI, 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 bitfloor and its APIs. We document everything on our website. We, you know, I try and be very thorough with the documentation and what each API called does. We provide example libraries, example bots. 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. It's a miracle. Yes, I get emails to the phone, as a lot of people do, and I try and reply at least with confirmation that I've gotten their email. Most emails, like I said, because we've been low volume, have been really simple, either a request or a recommendation and I thank them for that or address it and things like that. You ever get an email that's just like, what is Bitcoin and why should I use it? Yes, yeah. I do get those every once in a while. For those to bitcoinme.com, that's... Yeah, and definitely bitfloor is not necessarily the place to start as a complete novice. We try and redirect people to other sites like bitcoinme.com to learn about it. Like I said, our goal is more from the trading aspect, someone that is looking to trade, make a market or just exchange some bitcoins and just a little bit familiar with what it is. Cool. So now after this, after the fixed gateway, what's your next major thing you're gonna undertake? I think the next thing to pursue on the exchange will be to reexamine some of the webinar faces you talked about and some other people have alluded to ways we could clean it up, things here and there. Not much has changed on our webinar face and I do want to kind of revamp that, make it a little more structured and build upon some of the good things there. So that would be the next big thing, but just promoting it. I like its simplicity though, don't make it glitzy. Yes, exactly. We do wanna keep it very simple. The whole experience should be very straightforward. Another thing that I'll, as volume begins to grow, I'll probably add things like daily or weekly report trading reports for people that want them. This is 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, how much in fees have they done? That's another interesting thing that we did first out of all the other Bitcoin exchanges is we differentiate between a liquidity provider and a liquidity taker. Oh yeah, that's right. And we provide a rebate for the liquidity provider, so. You didn't mention that. So let me see if I get it right. So the liquidity provider is the one who puts in an order that is not filled right now. They're putting in a standing order, as I would call it. Correct. And they are going, okay, and then 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 that right? I believe it's 0.4. 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 the net revenue I guess is 0.3. But you're charging one side 0.4, and you're paying the other side 0.1, which is great. You can actually 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, it's geared towards, 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, 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 this amount of coins or whatnot. And that's giving other people more information to act with accordingly. So for that, you get an incentive if your order is executed. In a fuller order book, just gives you a much clearer picture of what's available, what's there. Otherwise, if the order book's empty, it doesn't facilitate trading. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Exactly. Cool. Well, thanks. We've got to do this again for sure. Next major update. Yeah, exactly. The next major thing. Maybe the webinar face, right? Yeah, for sure. I'll help you. I can be the dummy for this. The tester. Yeah, the user testing. Cool. Thanks so much, Roman, for joining me. Thank you. All right. And thanks you guys for joining us. And we'll see you next time on The Bitcoin Show. Take care.