Bitcoin Forum

ok trying sell my btc on intersnago for euros. been on good till cancelled forever!! same when i tried pounds and polish zlty? wot am i doing wrong?!

Intersango is a market exchange.  They match buy (bid) orders with sell (ask) orders.

If you are selling at a price higher than any bids, then the order simply will sit forever.

Other market exchanges offer trading under the concept of a "market" order, where your coins are sold to whatever bids exist, from the highest bid on down.

Intersango only has "limit" orders.  

The workaround to get the equivalent of a market order with Interango is to enter a sell price well below market.  Thus that quantity of coins will sell at whatever prices Intersango's trading system can match you up against.

From the Order book, you can see the market depth.  At this moment, if you wanted to sell 500 BTC, you'ld need to enter a price around 9.10 EUR, even though the current "market"'s best bid is about 9.65.   No you will get paid higher than 9.10 for some of the coins, because some of the bids were higher, but to sell every last one of the 500 BTC, you need to enter a price low enough so that at that price there is a bid for every coin you are selling.  So selling large amounts of coins in one fell swoop causes you to earn less, and the term for that is "slippage".  

So sellers with patience trying to get the best price will enter smaller limit orders at varying prices and hope the bidders come to them.  Often this means canceling orders and placing them at new price points as market conditions change.