Bitcoin Forum

I trade almost exclusively with CampBx, for a variety of reasons. Up until recently, the CampBX price was always roughly the same as Mt Gox's. For the last week or so, CampBX has been hanging a solid 5 USD lower per BTC than the Gox price, and doesn't seem to have any intention of catching up. It seems like ever since Mt Gox lost Dwolla, it's prices have been inflated compared to other exchanges. Does anyone have any insight into why this is?

More people use/trust Gox, so Gox has a higher demand. Higher demand = higher price.

Yeah, but it hasn't always been that way. Also, with Gox's loss of Dwolla, I figured a lot of people would want to switch to other trading platforms.

I don't think Dwolla is used as much as people think it is.

Maybe since Dwolla is not available as withdrawal method anymore people are converting their funds into Bitcoin and withdrawing it that way.

US traders wants to move their fiat out of Gox via BTC so less BTC for sale and higher demand is increasing price.

Actually i had usd in mtgox, so i sold them and transferred bitcoin out of mtgox as fast as possible, so the opposite

if things were more liquid, one could buy on CampBX and sell on Gox for a profit. then prices between the two would normalize.

I've thought about doing that, but since it's no longer so easy to quickly send USD in and out of Mt Gox, it's not really all that worth it, imo. Sure I could buy some BTC on CampBX, transfer them to Gox, and sell them, but then I'd have to wait like 3 or 4 days before I could re-use that USD again in another location.

I suspect this answers your initial question. In the past, if the exchange rates got too far apart, individuals would take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity.  Now that it is more difficult to transfer balances between the exchanges, their needs to be a larger difference between the exchange rates before someone has an incentive to try to profit from it.

Or rather that, with the nature of the decentralization of Bitcoin, everyone is used to being registered at and using different services. So Dwolla going down just forced people to shift to another site they're already registered with.

because gox trust

And even if other prices are lower than gox, they still stay behind them 5-10 points, no matter which direction stuff goes.

liquidity