Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone! Seems like a great community here and this is my first post. I've been in CC for about a year.

Has anyone else noticed that the only coin trade-able with fiat currency (JPY only) in the Bitflyer exchange is Bitcoin? Bitflyer allows BCH and ETH trading but only through BTC. When it comes to Litecoin and Monacoin, they don't even offer trading through BTC or any direct mechanism for marketplace participation. Instead, I am prompted with a buy price and a sell price that are several % apart, and if I enter a quantity to purchase or sell, the median difference is automatically populated between these buy and sell prices.  There is no option to enter my own price. I am required to take this apparent middle ground, therefore I can't place a lower bid and let it sit for a few days if I wish. It's take it or leave it pricing that sort of looks like a market pricing.

Am I understanding this incorrectly? Am I missing something in the BitFlyer Lightning trading platform, or is my account somehow restricted and I can't see the other exchanges? I assume what they're doing is participating in a sort of artificial arbitrage, where they try to represent the market in their own website and then exchange directly on another underlying exchange elsewhere. The spread must allow them surety that they'll never lose money performing the exchange for their customers. Or maybe by fixing the price like this, they're enabling rapid facilitated exchange where they use an algorithm to move the price slowly based on the frequency of bids to asks.  But why not just open a marketplace where users can directly bid/ask in BTC units as they have already done for BCH and ETH? I'm sorry if these questions are naive, I just have never seen such selective opening of services before.

It just doesn't make sense to me... like are they matching orders between buyers and sellers only or are they dictating the price or are they exchanging on another bigger or underlying exchange that's merely not visible?