Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin works great because it is decentralised.

80% of bitcoin trade happens at Mtgox which is centralised.

WE NEED A DECENTRALISED EXCHANGE SYSTEM NOW!!!!!

This is my solution:  www.poundcoin.org (http://www.poundcoin.org)

I think ripple will go a long way towards decentralising bitcoin exchange.

Blog post doesn't clarify how these colored coins could get successfully pegged to the pound.

• Issuer would have to be trusted (so much for "decentralized exchange")
• Market would have to trust someone will always be there to buy and sell these colored coins at 1GBP
• No entity, central or aggregate would be able to hold the price pegged without constantly burning wealth in the process (buying and selling at loss to manipulate price free market forces would otherwise randomize)

Great. So go implement it.

Amen to that.  Got some cash to through at this problem?

New Slogan:

Bitcoin - In Gox we Trust !

I think this is a bit early maybe, great idea though.

+1

Sorry but you need a centralized exchange that way you can use others to gauge what's worth what...

Right, so that the pump-and-dumpers can gauge what's worth what for you, and eventually .gov regulators can come in and start manipulating that gauge even more, the way they do on traditional exchanges.  :D

Maybe YOU need that. I don't want Bitcoin to just be more of the same old system.

LOL ;D  And he let us down!

At the moment Ripple seems fairly dependent on centralised exchanges as well. But I guess in time this may change.

Question:

Why is gox doing 80 percent of the business?

Of all the people I'd expect to be willing to support new exchanges, I'd think bitcoiners would least likely to all flock to the same exchange.

Is there something wrong with the other exchanges?

I have already started one. It is superior to Ripple in that the users can make money in two different ways.

See:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0


BTW, I am not making something that will be under my control. It is truly decentralized.

You want to decentralise where bitcoin is traded?  It's dead simple.

Create your own exchange that has buy/sell fees of less than 0.25%.  Mt gox starts at 0.6% and slowly goes down with bigger trading volume (for the average 50 BTC day trader it goes down to about 0.4%)

If day traders were aware of an exchange that charges less than MT GOX, many would flock!

How about NO fees? I had no idea that Mt Gox charged .6 percent. Even Paypal charges less, if I remember right.

Edit: I was wrong:

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees

Paypal charges 2.9 percent and a .30 cent transaction fee.

But, its time to start flocking...

Here is the plan:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0

It does not start out with math, but faith.

Until one can live a comfortable life using only BTC, I don't know how far we'll ever get with decentralized trading.  Ripple sounds great, but there's still a huge amount of trust to be had.  And traders still gotta make some money to make it worth their time.  Capitalism is a bitch ain't it :P  If you can make money, there's no reason not to.

Dude... c'mon... 6% != 0.6% and MtGox charges 0.6% ::)

poundcoin concept sounds neat but i dont see how you could ever create a digital cryptocurrency equivalent to a fiat currency. Even then whats the point, to have a pseudoanonymous digital fiat? Cause its still gonna get inflated by the central banks, and im sure they would take offense to someone, even with a full reserve system, making a digital banknote on their behalf.

Not really.  Day traders are going to trade on the exchange with the consistently lowest spread.  Because MtGox is the most used exchange, it'll have the lowest spread.  And because it has the lowest spread, it is the most used exchange.

Exchanges already exist with fees below MtGox, but they aren't as successful, because they all have various problems.  Bitfloor was hacked and not smart with security.  Coinbase has issues with downtime.  Most other exchanges aren't available for one particular main currency or another - MtGox has the most world-wide currencies supported AFAIK.

MtGox isn't nearly as good as it could be, but nothing better has yet presented itself.

I can just see it now Pound MY ASS! COIN!!  you know like buttcoin right ?

+1 I agree with General Spike for once.  :D

Speculators go where the volume is. It's the easiest and most lucrative place to separate amateur "investors" from their money. It's like trying to catch salmon during their run up the river, rather than trying to catch them in the ocean.

Plus, for the big pump-and-dump artists, they can control the reference exchange rate for the entire Bitcoin world there.

This is the "good" MtG now. For those who remember, it was a real POS with dark pools (to make things easier for the pump-and-dump brigade) in 2010-11, before the 611 crash and the Karpeles era.  :D

How do you get 80%?  Is there a well-defined set of bitcoin addresses that belong to MtGox so that we can compute the ratio of the value of transactions involving them to the value of all transactions?

I think you mean 80% of the bitcoin trade in currencies, perhaps even just the pound.  The ability to convert between bitcoin and your local fiat currency is becoming less and less important.  Sell silver, gold, copper, services, food, whatever you want for bitcoin. And sell bitcoin for all those other things.  I doubt very much that MtGox has 80% of that trade.  Closer to 0, I imagine.

We, as the bitcoin community, have the opportunity to utterly destroy the idea of fiat currency.  Fiat currency isn't something you can do without large amounts of coercion and deceit.  The way we destroy it is by trusting math instead of authority.  We are brainwashed into measuring value with fiat currencies, but value is subjective and underpins our cooperative human nature:  You have something that is more valuable to me than something I have, and I have something more valuable to you than something you have.  They are the same two things (whether time, stuff, trust, reputation, notoriety, or whatever), so we're both better off trading them.  We need to unlock our lips from around the nipple of fiat currency and embrace the underlying fact that we all have different values and those differences make us valuable to each other if we can trade.  Bitcoin makes this possible through the Internet because it's public and timestamped.

1. fully decentralization is a myth, "a brain is always needed to control a body"
2. digital coins are the best internet product so far after worldwide communication

What if:

A free plugin could be downloaded to any site and shown across the world for a sale or trade of bitcoin? What if the system  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0)could actually make money for the users, similar to direct marketing?

I actually read that post a while ago and I love the idea especially because both sources of income are so reliable.  How soon will it be launched and ready to go?  I'm on board   ;D

Thanks...

I have to make the plugin myself or find a PHP programmer who enjoys working for passive income. It runs itself after that. It wont take long.

So how is the short term future looking for the "GDI Bitcoin Project"? Long term future?

SgtSpike nailed it. All the other exchanges face 2 pretty huge problems IMHO :
* volume. Or to be precise, lack of. One can always find buyers or sellers on MtGox.
* trust. It's still the wild, wild west out there. Mtgox won't just disappear overnight, others no one is sure.

Over the years I tried all those :
Tradehill : was pretty good, but it closed down.
Bitcoin7 : got hacked. Poor volume. Lost 5 BTC.
World Bitcoin Exchance : was very nice to use but owner ran away. Was lucky to withdraw on time.
CryptoXChange : turned out to be a scam. Lost a fair bit.

...I'll stay with mtgox for now :(

You can work out roughly what percentage of bitcoin trading is happening through Mt.Gox by looking at the volumes of the different exchanges listed at www.bitcoincharts.com/markets (http://www.bitcoincharts.com/markets). In the last 30 days, roughly 2.1 M bitcoins have been traded through Mt.Gox, and roughly 2.8 M have been traded through all of the exchanges combined.  So Mt.Gox has about 75% of the market.

I think you were aiming that question at me. :)



The short term is a bit on hold at the moment while I am making money in other places,
but it was important to show bitcoin users that better things:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0;all

are on the way.


The "long term" as you put it is inevitable. I believe bitcoin markets need to match their
product, especially to avoid what happens with regular centralized markets, where they
get stolen from by thieves. A decentralized market(s) does away with that problem.
There will be no big piles of money in the decentralized markets and therefore very little
incentive to hack it.

Thanks... the OP does not seem to have come back yet. :)


He said 80% (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149963.msg1593634#msg1593634) and your's is just five points away, so.... two people's testimony is a bad sign. Something should
change.

Thanks.  So that is in currency trade and excludes exchanges not listed.  How do we get a handle on how much btc-fiat exchange is going on outside of those listed exchanges?  About half of my own bitcoin came from personal exchanges, though it's not much.

Check out CampBX if your sick of Mt.Gox, They have a simple easy to use site that unlike Mt.Gox doesn't mysteriously lock up when the price of BTC starts to tank.

Sign up here using this referral link - https://campbx.com/register.php?r=x855P0x3G72 so i can get some coin for promoting them.

LocalBitcoins.com

Gox is Goxed again.

The blockchain got forked because of a db issue between 0.7 and 0.8 clients.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0

That's a good point. I don't think there's any good way to measure these kinds of off-exchange transactions. Perhaps some of the larger person-to-person traders could shed some light on the size of these markets? If you were to take the off-exchange transactions into account, Mt.Gox would probably have a much smaller percentage of bitcoin trade.