77
Many people already do this with bitcoin. In finance, this is called arbitrage trading, or simply arbitrage, sometimes even abbreviated arb.
The reason for the price differences are fees for transferring between the bitcoin exchanges (you have to transfer both, bitcoins and fiat currency for a complete cycle) and fees for trading bitcoins against fiat ...
58
If you bought a bar of gold at $1200 / ounce, then the price of the gold drops to $600 / ounce, you wouldn't actually lose any money at all unless you decided to sell your gold at that time. However, if you wait until the price of gold rises to $1800 / ounce, then sell it, you will gain money. The key is an ounce of gold is still an ounce of gold, ...
41
I've writen software to arbitrage on some US exchanges.
I couldn't arbitrage without software because:
It was hard to account for all fees to understand if an opportunity is profitable.
It took a couple of minutes to evaluate opportunities (query an exchange's order book, query another exchange's order book, do an evaluation, execute a sell, execute a buy) ...
28
Basically there are five main ways of getting bitcoins:
Mining
Buying
Offering goods and services for Bitcoin
Obtaining for free through micro payment
Asking a friend who already has them to give a tiny fraction for free
Let's start with mining:
first of all I have to warn that currently there is almost impossible to mine by your own. You need to have a ...
28
If you bought one bitcoin and the price goes down, you still have one bitcoin. If the price goes up...still one bitcoin.
This is just like everything else, including groceries, gasoline, gold, stock certificates, etc... Measurements of value in fiat (such as dollars) does not affect the amount something you own, only the price at which you will be able to ...
23
What's stopping people from doing so? What's the catch?
The catch is that few people have been able to get US dollars out of Mt. Gox since June 20, 2013, when Mt. Gox imposed a "hiatus" on US dollar withdrawals. Mt. Gox has a long list of excuses for not paying their debts, which you can find on their site. Some of their excuses strain credulity. This ...
20
Setting up and operating an exchange can be quite involved.
A few tiers to start thinking about: legal, banking, tech+security, and volume.
Legal
The first question is whether you want to operate globally (e.g. Bitfinex or BitStamp) or focus on a national market (e.g. FlowBTC, meXBT). The next step is to seek legal counsel to help decide where you want ...
18
You need three components:
A user account system that allows users to register, maintain a balance, deposit and withdraw BTC and other currencies, and place buy and sell orders. You'll need to integrate this with a payment processor to support currency deposits and withdrawals.
A matching engine that looks at the current buy and sell orders and matches ...
17
I am developing the ccxt cryptocurrency trading library, check it out on GitHub:
https://github.com/kroitor/ccxt
It is a library for cryptocurrency trading and e-commerce with support for many bitcoin/ether/altcoin exchange markets and merchant APIs.
With it you can access market data and trade bitcoin, ether and altcoins with more than 70 (!!!) ...
16
In 24 hour markets High and Low usually mean "highest/lowest price in last 24 hours".
Open generally refers to the price at 12:01 AM UTC of any given day and close generally refers to the price at 11:59 PM UTC of any given day.
14
Yes, if someone buys at a particular price, someone else must sell at that price. But they didn't place their orders at the same time. The buy/sell indicates the direction of the filled order. This is needed to make sense of the price.
Imagine an apple exchange where no trades are occurring. Then someone walks in and buys or sells an apple for $1. Do you ...
13
New offers and orders are matched respectively with the best order and offer available until they are fulfilled. If there is more than one entry at the same price, the oldest entry will be matched first. If a new entry cannot be matched completely, it will remain in the order book until the remainder is matched or it expires.
See an example below:
The ...
13
tl;dr- This is called a capital loss. You're said to realize the capital loss if you sell the Bitcoins at the lower price, such that you lost money due to having bought/sold them. However, note that this isn't legal advice and I'm unsure about what the current legal statutes are surrounding Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's a capital asset (at least conceptually; dunno ...
12
Shamelessly summarized from this extensive guide on local transactions:
You want to meet in a sufficiently public location, such as a pub or mall, preferably one that has an open wifi.
If you have agreed on terms in beforehand, print out what you agreed upon and take it with you.
If you have not agreed on terms yet, be sure to check the current price of ...
11
The answer is not unique to bitcoin. It would be the same if you're dealing with (non-crypto) foreign currency, stock, a stock derivative or commodity or commodity futures.
When you buy something like the above, you are giving up your "real money" (fiat currency) to take possession of said commodity/stock/bitcoin/etc (let's call these assets in general). ...
9
Yes, you lose a quantity of your money, at the time you gave it away in exchange for the bitcoin you received. Subsequent changes in the exchange rate only vary the hypothetical value of what you would get if you wanted to trade back.
8
One of the major reasons standing in the way of profiting from arbitrage opportunities has to do with "volume".
The volume for either exchanges is not high enough yet to support big trades. Large profits require large trades (in arbitrage). Making $1,000 may be feasible between exchanges, but that's an extreme best case scenario and using 10k in capital! ...
8
As with any traded commodity the price largely depends on the confidence of the buyers and sellers in the future evolution of the price. Basically you pay whatever you feel it is worth. Like stocks this changes over time, as the company or the bitcoin economy in our case evolves.
The wild price swings are not that really that surprising then when it is ...
7
It is possible, there various sites that provide option (or option like) trading. Each have their pros and cons. Of the ones I know of theses seemed the best. However YMMV and caveat emptor.
At time of writing here are some simple ones:
btc oracle <-- Looks like a very elegant (bitcoin) solution. Just send some bitcoins to the addresses and if (in 15min,...
7
In a limit order, you specify how much of the asset (in this case BTC) you want to buy or sell, and the price you want. If there are matching orders on the book (e.g. someone who wants to sell at the same price, or lower, as the price at which you want to buy), your order will be filled immediately. If not, your order will stay on the book until matching ...
7
Yes, absolutely. Here's just one example of how this can happen:
You invest Bitcoins worth $100 in some kind of high interest scheme.
You cash out of the scheme and get Bitcoins worth $200.
You invest those Bitcoins.
You lose them.
The high interest scheme turns out to be a Ponzi scheme. You are sued to clawback the $100 value of the Bitcoins that were ...
7
Found the data on crypto compare
const endpoint = 'https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/histoday?aggregate=1&e=CCCAGG&extraParams=CryptoCompare&fsym='+ ticker.toUpperCase() +'&limit=365&tryConversion=false&tsym=' + currency.toUpperCase();
7
I had the same problem, couldn’t seem to find a good API that supported most of the popular indicators, and at the same time covered all the exchanges. So I decided to start up a project for this. So check out https://taapi.io . We cover 200+ indicators, pattern recognitions etc… I’m a big fan of free products myself, so taapi.io is free as well.
If your ...
6
Because the demand for bitcoins is largely driven by speculation, i.e. people buy bitcoins in the hope that the conversion rate will rise so that they can make a profit.
Such speculative investors tend to exhibit herd behaviour: the more the rate falls, the more of them will sell, to realize gains or cut losses. And the more it rises, the more people want ...
6
Something I am currently looking into, and a huge issue that nobody has really mentioned earlier is blockchain time.
1) Bitcoin is traded on a number of exchanges, however the entire process of buying on one exchange, transferring to another exchange and selling on that second exchange can take on the order of magnitude of 30 minutes(~10 minutes per block ...
6
Bitcoin exchange is not a giant, what all you need is running daemons of the coins in the backend on your server, a front end PHP website which deals with the transactions taking place on the website. You also don't need a bank account, you can accept USD with so many online payment gateways which do not connect with banks.
So what actually happens is you ...
6
Their claims are, IMO, implausible. If they're not in it for an honest profit, what are they in it for? If they are in it for an honest profit, what do they need your money for?
They're essentially borrowing money from their customers and saying that they are very, very likely to pay off at an above-market interest rate. Well, why would they do that? Any ...
6
Irrespective of bullish or bearish outlook, there are two attitudes a trader can have in the market: active or passive.
Limit orders and stop orders are "passive" trades because they don't move market price. These types of orders are offers to buy or sell bitcoin at a certain price. Passive orders are placed in the exchange order book and remain waiting ...
5
LocalBitcoins.com has person-to-person PayPal trading:
http://localbitcoins.com/buy-bitcoins-online/paypal
https://localbitcoins.com/sell-bitcoins-online/paypal/
There are also discussion forums where people frequently discuss about PayPal, avoiding fraud there, etc. Here is an example:
https://localbitcoins.com/forums/#!/trading#getting-paypal-...
5
A Bitcoin Trust fund registration statement was filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If approved it would be the first Bitcoin ETF you can trade in the market.
UPDATE: The Bitcoin ETF was not approved.
As discussed further below, the Commission is disapproving this proposed rule change
because it does not find the proposal to be ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
