Bitcoin Forum

Bitfinex: 378$
Huobi: 388$


Why this big difference? Why no arbitrage between these exchanges?

It's easy to move money between Hong Kong and China but you will pay a 1% fee to move the money and 1% currency conversion fee. So if Chinese markets are leading and bullish, we would expect a 2% gap. And that it what we see. The market stabilizes with a 2% gap: 378/385.

It's not unusual for there to be a £10 difference between dollar and yuan exchanges. The table from tradeblock compares the prices of bitcoin across the largest exchanges, and all the yuan exchanges are $10 higher today. I have seen $40 to $50 differences before today, and a $10 is on the low side of the average difference.

https://tradeblock.com/markets/bfnx/xbt-usd/30m/

http://s14.postimg.org/9ktwrhhpt/prices.jpg

The largest Chinese exchanges are all higher than traditional exchanges like Bitstamp and Bitfinex. Btc-e as always is staying behind even further. I think it's purely the fact that the demand in China is higher than for example in Europe and USA.

Wealthy Chinese are interested in Bitcoin as a means of moving wealth out of the country into USD.

So the 'numbers algorithm' churning out it's huge volume sends the market into overdrive, and the USD exchanges follow. The Chinese then sell BTC on at increased prices on USD markets.

This is why the likes of Huobi always leads the charges higher, and why it is more often than not, Bitstamp where the mass selling pressure occurs. During the last great sell-off (from $500), the Chinese exchanges were were like $60 higher than the USD exchanges for extended periods, as great big BTC Kilobombs kept being dropped on Stamp.

If you drew red zones on a BTC chart, you would find that China Bedtime coincides with the most 'stable' periods of Bitcoin. These guys drive this market.

there should be still 0.5% of earning, it's 2.5% of difference versus the 2% gap, so that 0.5% can result in a nice profit with a big sum

but probably they want that to increase their volume even further, is an old trick of some exchange

That's good gap to take a some profit or other reason is because west market follow china market now

to get us to transfer to them :))))

I think low fees and the possibility of easily moving coins around make a great difference.We should not forget that many europeans/americans take advantage of this spread, because we also can use those exchanges. You take some coin on finex you move them on okcoin and if the spread is still there you got profit. That's arbitrage.

There almost certainly will be - the difference will reflect the cost of arbitrage. An arbitrageur would need accounts at Huobi (say) and a non-Chinese exchange (Bitstamp, say), and a way to get CNY exchanged for USD. It's that last part that's hard, and probably forms the largest part of the cost of this arbitrage.

Yes, even the Yuan in China and the Yuan in HK are priced differently. There are a lot of painfully boring studies such as http://www.bis.org/publ/work492.pdf that try to explain the CNY-CNH vairance. The Yuan in Hong Kong (CNH) is not 100% fungible with the actual CNY.

Note that CNH is not even an official ISO 4217 currency code but many trade settlement systems have the code programmed because they need to account fo the difference with the CNY.

I always wondered why CNH existed, but there wasn't a comparable code for Eurodollars etc. Thanks!

Is that really the situation? Hmm, now I see that arbitraging in 2 such different markets won't be that cost-effective after all.

because it is pump time

since sometimes when there is pump China has bigger prices, I don't know why though