Bitcoin Forum

There are significant differences in pricing on various exchanges. What is to stop someone from buying at a low rate on one exchange, sending it across into another exchange and dumping it for a profit?

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

Can someone please explain the catch?

There is no catch, people do this all the time. Its how the price gets equalized between exchanges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage

If you find an unbalanced exchange (regarding the others), that just means the money flows are not working properly.
Or else someone (or some bot for that matter) is picking up that free money.

tx fees, exchange fees and the time it takes to transmit the funds. These can make arbitrage risky.

I think the most difficult part is to open an account in, for example, a Korean exchange... where BTC is trading high while you're based in the US, for example, where BTC is trading low...

Here's the biggest one: GDAX had a 24-hour range of more than $6,000 today. That's more than a third of its price! The arbitrage cycle: Buy BTC on Exchange A, Sell on Exchange B, Withdraw USD to bank, Deposit USD at Exchange A, repeat.

Bank wires take days to process (and some exchanges can't even reliably process them). So while you're locked in USD trying to pick up a few %, you just missed out on a 37% move in 24 hours! That's huge opportunity missed when you could have just held BTC.

So, the biggest problem is the opportunity cost during the time you're waiting on bank transfers. Also, lots of such bank wires will attract unwanted attention from the bank, who might in turn be filing SARs on you to the government.

Plus all the risks that you are taking if you want to do arbitrage, a lot of exchanges, like BitHumb is pretty unsafe for making arbitrage because they can freeze your funds, the same applies to bittrex.

People will never understand that the price is always different on the exchanges that doesnt have enough volume, because nobody is buying in there.

But you can still do arbitrage if you are doing it between two good exchanges, not the crappy ones.

Sounds easy huh? Arbitrage is not that easy as you think espevially in bitcoin price movement.

Then why not try it for yourself and see if that will give you profit. You will soon know what Im trying to say after you did some testing. :)

isthere any good and trust site fore make this profit  between different exchanges?

all site corean sud not safe  ::)

coinone.co.kr i creat account wen i login he say false password .

It is not as simple as you may think, the prices tend to have a difference when it comes to local exchanges, for example every time I see a Korean exchange have way higher prices, but most of the time you need to have a local bank account in that country, also if there is a big price difference that may be the sign of problems in the liquidity of the exchange so arbitrage trading has more risks than what you may think.

buy low and sell high on different exchanges aka arbitrage is not an easy thing,
it's not about the people that do not know about it but instead it's because a few factors that prevent people to do that.
like this :
on coinmarketcap.com you can see a lot of exchanges that listing 'A' coin,
let say 5 exchanges : 1,2,3,4 and 5.
you can see the difference between one and another in term of price,
but people can not do that because whenever you're doing a trade on '1' you need to verify your account with document,
many people does not want to do it because they do not trust them,on '2' there're no buy order,on '3' no buy orders,on '4' they're doing a shady activity and lastly '5' is the place that you're currently doing the trade and it's the lowest one.

other than orders and account,
some of them hesitated to do it due to network.
just imagine it if you're buying coin 'S' and when you sent it to '1(exchange for example)' and it require 100 confirmation to credit your account,
does that mean you need to wait for a day or even more than that do the trade ?
if you keep doing that,the price may be goes down under your buy order because of it.
and many others that can not be explained in detail.

in conclusion arbitrage is not an easy thing because it require a lot of thing that we need to do,
plus at the same time it has risk when we're doing it

there is actually a lot of things stopping you from performing a successful arbitrage with bitcoin:
1. this https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions which is currently at 220,000 unconfirmed transactions! and you will be withdrawing from an exchange and who knows what fee are they going to pay and how long would that even take!

2. sometimes there is a good reason for the price difference. for example, the exchange may have a high fee (trading or deposit or withdrawal or all) so the price lags behind. or for example it is higher because of the deposit methods that it has such as $1000-$2000 higher prices on yobit which has weird deposit methods!
not to mention the matter of trust. some exchanges can not be trusted at all. and some of them are in other countries which you can not even deposit any money there. for example it is at $20k in India but good luck getting any money in there!

Sending and withdrawing to another exchange costs fees and bitcoins confirmations aren't all that fast.. so by the time your funds arrive the price might have already got corrected on that exchange. What you could do is split your funds between the exchange and do it simultaneously  ;)

In most cases, the difference is not high enough to cover the transaction fees and the hassle of doing the arbitrage transaction. If it is very high, then capital controls will usually be in place. You can sell your Bitcoins for a very high price in Zimbabwe, but there is no way you are getting the money out from there.

His sound is very easy, but just imagine if that happens maybe I think it's not easy what like you think now about bitcoin. If you find an unbalanced Exchange it just means money flow doesn't work well. or so much as the person is taking advantage of the free

i agree . profit by buy and sell in different exchanges Not an easy job
If the transaction not  confirmed for a long time and  bitcoin dump hard The investor will lose a lot

sell in yobit.io 2000 usd difference !!!!

Different native exchanges have particularly different prices . It depends upon the demand of bitcoin in that country . Not all the exhanges works hand in hand . There are always some differences in the value . For example  Indian exchange has a big difference in the value then that of USA , because the demand is particularly high in India.

This is the normal standard of trading: buy low, sell high. However, you need to watch the market carefully to do a better trade.

I'd say this is quite common, especially when the price of digital currencies has been moving so far lately. The difficulties would be how long it takes to convert into bitcoin and the fees associated with moving bitcoin around - they have grown quite high lately. If you're buying in big enough amounts, then it should be fairly easy to make a profit.

If there is a significant price difference it's because it's hard to move fiat back and forth.

For example the Korean exchanges won't let westerners sign up, so it's impossible to send fiat there. Bitfinex has no dollar bank accounts at all (people have been waiting months to withdraw dollars from them).

You can do arbitrage on the western exchanges, but you need to have planned ahead and become verified on all of them in advance. That takes time because they all have lengthy backlogs.

None will try to sell their bitcoin in the shit exchange site like yobit, There are so many scam accusation to the yobit and it doesn't get any response from the owner of yobit. So many people can't withdraw their token from there. Suggest you the shit exchange to others looks very bad idea.

this kind of selling / buying make fee high and this big number of unconfirmed transition.


last three days only those holder who play in price using big difference between one site to another "3000$"

What is wrong about doing it? It is called arbitrage, there are some tools all over the internet only to do it in a proper way. Just be careful about in what exchanges are you going to buy and sell, be careful about the verifications and the KYC & AML.

You can easily buy on Poloniex and then sell on Korean exchanges.

This has been working for a while, but you need to pay attention and sell those bitcoins on an exchange that does not ask you for KYC

korian and Asia exchange sites have massive demand and high price in exchange sites but euro and other have lower than it so all buy in euro exchange and sell in korea

I think there's nothing wrong with such an idea, but the truth is that the price is mostly the same (or almost the same) on major exchanges and you'll probably spend more on transferring your funds than win. Take a look at ethereum, for example. The price is VERY different if you look at different trading pairs. eth/krw is $900, whereas eth/usd and eth/btc is a bit more than $700. I think money transfering will make the profit insignificant. And eth is among the most significant one's, whereas usually the price differs less than 10%.

Ever tried getting money into and out of exchanges?

You cannot sign up with BitFinex due to DDos etc.
You need to transport between exchanges. Doing this in $$$ this will require validation and bank transactions.
Also you will have withdrawl and transaction fees.

Creating a loop is possible if coins allow for it
Example: Exchange A - buy BTC convert to LTC. Move LTC to B and convert to BTC. Move BTC to A and covert to LTC... etc.

If it was that easy, people would have done it already. Also, by the time you are setting up just one arbitrage trade, the price could have gone up or down a lot already, and depending on how things play out, you'll miss out.

Korean exchanges aren't easily accessible to western traders, and you'll more than likely be forced to verify yourself, and if you're not from Korea, you won't be able to get anything done.

These are the times you as arbitrage trader faces more risk than ever due to the regulations exchanges are subject to. Nowadays the main complaints towards exchanges are the massive amounts of blocked accounts.

It's just not worth the risk and hassle.

For all of those who are saying that they could re-sell on korea exchanges, let me tell you that it is not that easy, most of those exchanges are pretty risky, i would never put a single dollar in there, no matter what

It is called business. Nobody do opposite of this thing. Everybody wants profit on hi investment. All the people who bought bitcoin for low price will want the price to grow more and when reach to that level which they want they will sell their bitcoin. Sometimes the situation goes different but mostly the investors make profit against their investment. Time will tell us how much an investor will earn if he buys today.