Quote from: 01BTC10 on January 26, 2015, 04:50:01 PM

Quote from: thresher on January 26, 2015, 03:43:35 PM

The owner was already busted.
Today, every time there has been downward movement on stamp, bitfinex locks up and takes longer than usual to load, preventing a position from being taken or exited quickly.
My imagination or the owner is filling his orders first.......

I noticed the website locking up but the API did not. I guess the slowdown was caused by web traffic spike.

They use so called "circuit-breaker" which prevents malicious dumping and stop-loss hunting (remember spikes to 100 back in 2003). When trader wants to crash price, lets say by dumping 5000 btc at once, their trading engine prevents crash by locking all current orders (you cannot cancel your order in the meantime) and slowly execute all buy and sell order by matching them without jumping the line.

Without this market sell order of 5000 coins would crash price by 30% in a second. Because they use this breaker the result is now that it first dumps 1000k coins and now buy orders at this price gets activated and matched with dumpers order. Then it proceeds with selling to the next order and so on until all coins gets sold and then trading gets back to normal.