"LindeX" - Linden Currency Exchange Begins Public Testing

Funny how already the price is dropping too. People HOPE to get 250l/USD, but when the market really takes over I bet you will see a bigger decline in L$ then where GOM left off.

Yeah no doubt. And this is with only a few testers in the arena. Soon as the flood gates open it will be a nice frantic period of adjustment.

Time to kick back with a stockpile of cash and $L and wait it out when that happens.

Or if you feel luck, try to play the market and make a bunch of money. I would do that, but I always pick the worst times to buy and sell.

Well, the tier on GOM actually screwed sellers because people could sell at a lower price than you and you had to match in order to compete with their offers.

Eg:

If there was no tier on GOM, I could have priced my L$ at 12 cents higher per block, and if someone wanted to sell lower than me - no problem, but they'd have to pay the same 12 cents so they'd only price lower if the market moved.

By having a tier, volume sellers would price at less than my 12 cents because they could afford to. In order to compete, I'd have to price at their point and I lose out on the 10 cents difference.

So, in a way, the lack of tier helps sellers on Lindex because it means nobody can outprice me based on tier, but only based on market demand.

The problem with lindex is that you can't queue up buy offers, so in order to sell people have to reprice, you can't just take from the queue and widen the spread and inviting market makers to come in and do their thing.

It's completely a buyers market right now because the buyers aren't competing with each other, or at least they are not visibly competing with each other.

Right, and I think that will cause too much downward pressure on the L$. That has been my biggest fear all along. I have however hear a rumor that the buy side will be coming, just not at launch. Can anyone varify this?

Well, that's what they promised in the original release that got yanked in this thread, but I helpfully quoted it all.

..

I knew I read it somewhere, thanks Blaze. What is the topic again?

Has anyone asked / wondered why you can buy Lindens "on the same form of payment you used to open you Second Life account" [SIC] but when you sell them you have to get the cash via check or PayPal? Does that seem right? Why shouldn't it accrue to my credit card in both directions?

In real-world economics mechanisms like this are known as repatriation controls, things that limit your ability to take money out of one country and bring it into another. It's generally seen as inherently unfair and in most cases bad for the health of an economy because it's a disincentive for people in one country (or in this case, the physical world) to do business in another country (in this case, SL), because it's not as easy to get their profits out. I would be surprised if it doesn't work the same way in this case.

and blaze, can you email me the URL and/or information from the Lindex page itself? I will keep your identity secret when I testify before Congress and I will go to jail to protect my sources if need be. Well, virtual jail, anyway, since I'm a virtual journalist.

thanks,
Walker

walkering AT gmail DOT com

https://secondlife.com/currency/
E-mail [email]Peter@secondlife.com[/email] if you'd like to help test!

oh thanks, Nimrod. I saw that one, but I thought maybe there was more information on the Lindex page itself. I don't have enough Lindens to spend on testing it out!

Another problem most likely right now is that all testers have L$ and don't need to purchase any.

LOL, u noticed that one eh? lol. Seems everyone up there now is trying to make a nice 40 cent profit from any lidens transferred over from GOM LOL

No, not true, there are both buyers and sellers trading, but I assume that there are more sellers then buyers.

yeah dnate, i was engaging in hyperbole.

But am I right though, or do they load the rates into a static web page for calculating your currency buy rate?

I mean, woooah. that is going to confuse users when their actual buy rates never match what the webpage says.

there should be a forum to discuss this i guess

I should send them a tutorial on AJAX

OMG... I've been thinking this ALL DAY!!! Seriously, it's time for the LL's web department to buck up. It's time for some AJAX and webservices...

Well, I didn't sign up to be a tester, and it works just fine for me. Looks like they've opened it up now.

Yep, works for me too, and I'm not a tester either.

bah, and now its closed again, hope it opens on Sunday.

That's because we can't credit to credit cards, we can only "reverse charges" when appropriate. Apparently that's just the way most/all merchant accounts work.

PayPal has different rules, so we are able to credit people's PayPal accounts, and we hope to automate this soon.

Cheers,
Lawrence Linden

You no longer have to email me to help test... LindeX is now in open public beta. However it is running with restricted operating hours right now, and with tight restrictions on trade volume.

This weekend, barring any major problems I expect to keep the market open from about 10am to 10pm pacific time.

At this moment the trade restrictions are as follows:
- Your account must be at least 45 days old to buy or sell
- You can not buy more than US$20.00 worth of currency per 24 hours
- You can not sell/list-for-sale more than US$100.00 worth of currency per 24 hours

Stuff to note:
- LindeX uses L$/US$ to describe the trading rate, some other exchanges use US$/L$1000
- remember to convert the rates as appropriate if you're using other markets as references
- thus the "Today's Trades" graph may seem inverted...

Known issues:
- need more descriptive error messaging
- need more descriptive error messaging... it was worth saying twice
- too much text on the buy and sell pages... folks aren't reading it
- the fees description page should be more explicit about US$ vs L$
- the basic vs. expert mode toggle needs to be more obvious or accessible
- seller's fee calculations for large blocks are off a bit in the favor of the Residents (3.5% gets to be more like 3.32%)
- the "Today's Trades" graph could use a better name... it really shows the last 24 hours worth of trades
- confirmations screens and emails may format the US$ figures a bit oddly.... US$5.50 may be displayed as US$5.5
- if you double click the buy/sell button on the trade confirmation page and/or refresh those pages you many wind up clearing the buy/sell amounts thus causing the buy/sell to not go through. this is an unintended side effect of the code that is present to protect you from accidentally double-buying/double-selling. Please be patient with the buy/sell... it can take 3-15 seconds to execute depending upon system load.
- the basic limit sell auto-pricing algorithm needs improvement

Things we're strongly considering for future changes to the market...please keep in mind that business priorities sometimes change and thus these are not promises:
- adjustments to the trading limits
- 24 hour operation of the market
- breaking out the fees for display in various places
- various improvements to the graphs and user interface
- SL viewer integration of the basic buy
- buy limit and sell market orders
- downloadable market data in a spreadsheet compatible format
- market data pages that return data in an easily processed format such as XML

Please feel free to contact me with problems/questions/suggestions.

Cheers,
Peter 'Lawrence Linden'

Yeah, we have some nice AJAX based projects in the works that I think you'll like... stay tuned because we're currently on track to unveil one of the projects next week.
Also, we're definitely headed quickly in the web services direction. However, the currenncy exchange was not going to be the first place we deployed AJAX, but we're already considering how we can improve it with AJAX.

Cheers,
Lawrence

The web page is loaded with the latest data when you load/refresh the page. Within a certain frame of reference you could call this "static", from another perspective this could be called "dynamic".



Unfortunately that is to be expected for a market order, which is why we say "approximate cost". Normally the estimates should be very good if you've loaded the page recently. We're continuing to work on ways to improve the estimates; we may choose to use AJAX to keep the pricing more up-to-date for folks who sit on the page for a long time.

Cheers,
Lawrence

I still don't see how its cheaper for the TRADER(as in someone who buys and sells to make a profit on the difference). Paypal fees don't come into play for a trader until they cash in or out. I'm talking about actual trading fees. On gom that fee for a trader would've been 2, 4, or 6 cents per 1k block trade cycle(buy + sell). SL charges over 12 cents per trade cycle. It is better to have higher cash in and out fees and lower spread fees for a trader then vice versa. These cost are too high for traders and kills any sort of trading to be profitable. I would like to see SL have lower trading fees. Maybe charge a monthly fixed fee that gives ppl trader status and gives them lower trading fees. I don't see any problem in doing so.