Bitcoin Forum

Hey all, how many of you are using both Coinbase and Circle?   I am wondering your thoughts on if you think some thin arbitrage opportunities may arise between the two.   As of this post:

1BTC on Coinbase: $482.94
1BTC on Circle: $486.23

Obviously there are fees for both on withdrawing, and I have not yet withdrawn any funds from Circle to bank or Credit Card.   I would say that both sites are equally easy to use.   The main difference being the ability to use a credit card on Circle.com.  

Circle also has the ability to withdraw funds to a credit card (which is an option I haven't seen available) besides on BTC-E.


How many of you have switched over to Circle from Coinbase?  Does anyone know which exchange Circle is pegged to?

would you not need to be looking at the buy price vs sell price differential to see how much opp. there is?

Oh yeah, duh you are right...  I posted the wrong amounts, but they were skewed just about the same amount when I checked...

+1, you may not be able to buy a coin for that price and checking the buy and sell lists needs to be done before you start moving coins around.

use a trusted exchange and transfer to wire ... withdrawn to credit card is a hole for now (a hole of fees, real fees !)

Your price difference is only ~$4, which works out to roughly 1%. This is equal to what coinbase will generally charge via it's spread. Since both of these sites have two prices, one to buy and one to sell, they are really not designed for arbitrage like this

There is no arg opportunities with Coinbase's fees in my opinion...

It is important to remember that coinbase is not meant to be an exchange. If you have too much activity at coinbase and you do not have a merchant account then you will likely get looked into and potentially have your account suspended/looked into. If you have too high of dollar amounts flowing through your account then they may be forced to file a SAR on your account if they feel what you are doing is suspicious.

What would you consider high dollar?   I would say if you regularly have over 10k per month, then they may start taking a closer look, but any less than that I would think that you wouldn't really raise an eyebrow...

IDK what I would consider to be high dollar, but I would agree that coinbase would likely consider 10k per month to be high dollar. At 1% this would mean that you wold have made $100 on arbitrage if you earned 1% per trade.

Better arbitrage can be done between USD based exchange and EUR based exchange.

Any good and easy profit will be taken by market and disappear right away.

The appearance of "profit" usually doesn't include all the fee. So when you take all fee into consideration, it might not not have any profit left.