Bitcoin Forum

Why is it that BTC-e is always $5-$10/USD lower than other exchanges?   Thanks in advance.


promo
 

Bitcoin doesn't have a fixed price because different exchanges have different traders.

That results in a different price. It have been like that for a long time, only nowadays the price gap is tighter.

People on another chat were talking about how they may not have all the coins to cover it and that is why the price is lower.  But i do see your point.

Arbitragers, profiting from price differences among exchanges, minimize those differences up to the point of profitability but no further. This mean that all costs should be taken into account, including the cost of money flow. So, looking at the exchanges, you can guess how much it cost arbitragers to move money around. The reason BTC-E price is lower than most of the other exchanges most of the time is probably due to the cost of moving money in BTC-E being higher than the other exchanges. Cost here include not only money, but time and risk too.

ding ding ding! Why else would they manipulate the price lower?! They are spending other people's coins! The poor people who deposit with them :(

every exchange have different price,it's tactic marketing

BTC-E is basically the Switzerland of bitcoin exchanges. No one really knows who owns it and users are not required to post KYC details. Ie it attracts drug dealers and hackers. Because of this, sellers are willing to take a worse price for this privacy which the buyers are aware of, thus the price is always lower than other, more legitimate offerings.

I suspected (maybe from a post somewhere on these forums) that BTC-e was Russian hosted.

Is anyone able to confirm this? Should we be worried about using BTC-e since Russia has a bit of a currency crisis going on at the moment?

I'm thinking along the lines of the site suddenly being unavailable etc.

Or is it thriving so much that it should be OK to use?

I trust btc-e more than places like cryptsy..never had a problem with them  :)

The owners/operators are from Bulgaria i think, the exchange itself is on the meta-realms.

only one - the high withdrawal fiat fee

the reason is the difficulty with the banks since they are russian. that means its more difficult to wire money there, so lower $usd price (more demand for $$usd compared to eg. finex)

I honestly have not had a problem either!   I did move my coins however to Bitfinex over the past couple days.

i don't he was talking about arbitrage, but why the btc-e arbitrage is lower

try to ask them

If the price is systematically lower, that indicates that there is some advantage to withdrawing dollars there as opposed to the other exchanges, making it a seller's market. The exact opposite of second-half 2013 Gox, where the price eventually decoupled due to the impossibility of dollar withdrawals.

Right now it is closer to $1.5 lower then stamp. I have noticed that it is generally somewhat lower, but I wouldn't say it is 1-2% lower.

I would tend to agree with the above argument that since btc-e does not complete any KYC verifications it is going to attract people who value their privacy. Since it is the sale of bitcoin that is going to trigger potential taxes, people are going to want to use them to sell bitcoin more often then they are going to want to use them to buy bitcoin (when taxes are not applicable)