Bitcoin Forum

Has anyone in been observing this craze lately? Basically certain exchanges will have consistent price differences with other major ones. I'm not talking Bitfinex, which is probably done for, but pretty much all else known to be reliable exchanges.

I'm wondering, isn't there any pressure to close such gaps in the price? it's really a good chance for traders to profit with arbitrage but I really can't fathom how those gaps remain open for hours.

It looks easier than it in reality is. In most cases people struggle with the strict verification policies of exchanges, where they get demotivated due to all the negative aspects connected to that.

Aside from that we also have the markets that go up and down in such a quick fashion, that by the time you plan to strike, the opportunity has already vanished, where you have money stuck on whatever exchange.

Money that you could have used to benefit from whatever price swing this market is generously throwing with. That of course doesn't mean that no one is doing it, but if the mass jumped on it, the differences were gone already.

Incentive isn't really there.

There will always be arbitrage opportunities across markets. There are several things to consider, though:
- Prices can go up or down between buying and selling time
- Bitcoin transaction fees are huge (especially for small transactions)

All in all a lot of things to think about. If you think you can profit from it, go for it!

just yesterday i noticed almost a 100% difference in SIA between bittrex and hitbit.
There are always opportunities in arbitrage but as mentioned there are hidden pitfalls primarily to do with bitcoin,
ie. Fees and transaction times.

I think that altcoin markets are trading with smaller volumes so if a coin is listed in many exchanges differences in price can be a normal thing. I'm posting in this subforum though because I'm talking about bitcoin to fiat pairs. With those markets having the biggest volumes consistently, it's really interesting to see them having big differences in price.

Arb is something which looks like a lot of money can be made on the surface, but if you are to really look into it you'd see that the profits are hard to come by and insanely risky to try to chase. For one thing, if you are to buy coins from one exchange and send them to another -- you're going to get raped by tx fees,  confirmation times, and the volatility of bitcoin within the change.

You're also going to have to get confirmed with your identity docs on these exchanges -- which isn't open to most of the USA (bitfinex)

SO yeah, it looks good but it isn't.

Verification is indeed the hardest part in getting started with your arbitraging journeys. The long and arduous path on getting verified in different exchanges is already tiring, what more the waiting process? The market movement also is very unpredictable, resulting into failed attempts before even starting to execute your orders, so yep, most traders don't even dare trying to arbitrage anymore.


I beg to disagree. The huge price gaps are the ]incentives these traders are looking at, but because of your first point, not many people are daring to try.

If you already have 2 verified account on 2 different exchanges which allows you to deposit or withdraw a fiat currency, it's possible to do arbitrage trading. But, the most common problem are: Bitcoin transactions require high fees and may takes hours to be confirmed, exchanges has high fees for withdraw fiat currency or send bitcoin. Hence, you need big capital to earn profits.

Yes its true. Most of trader get struggling with verification.
But how if trader pass it? I think the most problem is when we send the altcoin to other exchange. It will take longer in busy blockchain and make the price move lower and ending with loss.

It's really complicated to do arbitrage.
It is necessary to have many funds divided on various exchanges.
Also at this moment unfortunately the fees to transfer btc are very high and limit this opportunity.

i have made my fair share of income from arbitrage yet not always i succeeded to gain profit from it

No i have not observed recently. So i do know that they have consistent price differences.
Actually i have done before around 2 weeks but the differences price not so often between exchanger so i decide to stop this strategy.

That happens to be the true picture of things as having verified accounts and some substantial amounts in a number of exchanges would have been a way out of the disagreeable situations, but the exhobitant withdrawal fees being charged by most exchanges leaves little to be desired.

One might want to guide against leaving  significant amounts of fund with exchanges because that has been turning out undoing traders and investors  than even ponzi schemes.

which I know usually the price gap occurs due to late delivery in transactions. or it could be a wallet in maintenance so the price gap between different markets for several hours.

for me arbitration is a thing that has a big risk we can lose our money if we do not think about it because we need a considerable difference between the market one and other markets in addition to arbitration also takes a lot of transaction costs.

when you are talking about arbitrage based on bitcoin price differences in different places, it will always come down to fiat deposits. I have actually checked this out and without an exception whenever there is a huge difference and you think you can make a good profit (for example $2500 difference between bitstamp and yobit these days) the reason is because of the way fiat deposit and withdrawals works. bitstamp has bank transfer but yobit has random stuff with high % fees.

same is true with bitfinex, I am not using it so I can not be sure but I believe they still have the bank problems which means you can not deposit and withdraw fiat with ease.

I agree that traders are able to make money by taking advantage of the price gap between exchanges. But there are risks involved, one of them is the transfer time, the price might changed by the time the transfer is completed.

My experience doing arbitrage when the time of transferring the coin took time to complete in the exchange. The one advantages of this arbitrage is the profit you can get when you grab this opportunity. So in this scenario it is risky and you have to accept what may the outcomes by doing arbitrage.

in my opinion only the person who has been engaged in this for quite a long time will be able to overcome the shortcomings of the process, but it is better not to arbitrate for arbitration. Or am I wrong? At least I bypass this field of activity.

I am not sure what other ways there would be to actually perform this in order to profit, but wouldn't doing arb with existing balances on exchanges work in a similar fashion than waiting for the funds to be deposited?

Sometimes I also do Arbitration between Exchangers, to cover small losses and also to get a little profit. I rarely do Artbitrage because of the distance of time of delivery that sometimes annoys me and finally loses the moment to sell my coins at the highest price.

Due to the crazy prices with all alts and even bitcoins, there has been a lot of arbitrage opportunity. This is a normal effect of the price volatility of everything in crypto. The best thing is to take the opportunity yourself. It's hard to do but it is possible to profit big time on arbitrage opportunities. Also you have to have some btc in a lot of exchanges and you have to transfer what you bought from one exchange to the other fairly quick also considering the cost of moving alts as it could eat up profits.

Has anybody tried intra-site arbitrage, i.e. finding triangles (e.g. BTC->ETH->IOTA->BTC) that give you small gains without the need to transfer funds between exchanges? I guess on Bitfinex those inefficiencies are closed immediately but I'm wondering whether there are reasonable opportunities on sites with smaller volumes.

Yes, it's been tried but there are bots that do this much more efficiently than any human would. Those gaps close withing a matter of fractions of a second due to bots having direct access to trades with APIs. It's a matter of speed and its an arms race for very small profit, while still bearing risk.

If you buy BTC->ETH->IOTA->BTC again in an exchange, that's called trading not arbitrage anymore as arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.
Yes, it's profitable even though you trade on an exchange with smaller trading volume, most people do the same thing, some makes profits while others not so lucky.

If you start from BTC and end up with BTC it is trading. If you hold BTC, ETH and IOTA and perform 3 trades at the same time it's intra-exchange arbitrage. I also think it does not make sense to try it by hand, I'd be curious how efficient the bots are, if it's actually a fraction of a second or rather a few seconds. I assumed that inter-exchange arbitrage is also dominated by bots but I might be wrong. Is anybody here doing it by hand regularly?

I did it by hand several times. But only when the conditions were so favorable that it was worth the risk.
Otherwise, this is something that is best left to bots. Market can change in seconds and then you can end up with a bunch of unwanted coins. ;)

There is price difference last time of close to 1000 usd on bittrex and gdax/coinbase.  However someone said thats because of the tether rate.  So that means this cannot be done then right/


What exchanges can you really arbitrage on?  Those that only do usdt?  Thus an exchange that does usd and one that does usdt and do not allow usd withdraws won't work?

There are bots on the internet about arbitrage, but be careful about which ones you are going to download, most of them are containing trojans, cryptominers or just shit in there that will make your computer slow.

Do the arbitrage by yourself, it is not difficult to do so.

Try to be careful about it, of course, because if you make a bad movement you can easily lose everything in just a single trade.

It's only good until the damn wallet from exchanges gets disabled  ;D ;D ;D

That's probably a sign that you should stop trading shitcoins. I remember how I have made the same mistake back in 2014. I bought coins from Mintpal to sell them on Crypto at a near 30% higher price. It were instant profits, or at least, that's what I thought. Turns out, that shitcoin had its wallet disabled at Cryptsy, where I had to sell the coins over at Mintpal to get my initial investment back. I "only" suffered a loss of nearly 10% due to the lack of actual buy support. That was my first and directly last encounter with arbitrage trading concerning altcoins. Either just stick with Bitcoin, or else the top altcoins in the market.

my arbitrage method,

I've partner that live in US and can buy LTC in their exchange, I live in asia where all coin is overprice. I buy LTC from my partner +5% fee, he sent me ltc, I sell it on my exchange +10%.
Compound it.

Arbitrage requires a lot of experience and experience. You have to compete over time and take action within seconds. A friend was making money with arbitrage and losing 7.5 Bitcoin because of the rush, because the wrong address transferred. For this reason it is a very difficult business.

Yes, bitcoin used to be a good coin for arbitraging and I used to do a lot earlier. However, I have stopped arbitraging using bitcoin because of the slow network and high transaction fees. The slower network will make you loose the opportunity and the higher fees will eat up your profits. So bitcoin is not anymore suitable for arbitraging.

Instead, I will recommend you to use ETH for the same purpose. ETH transactions are superfast and cheaper. So you can move funds from one exchange to another very easily. I am using ETH for the arbitrage trades and it's worth it. Even though ETH price doesn't have much differences in various exchanges, but if you invest a good amount of money, the return will be great.

If you do not want to risk losing the price when doing Arbitrage, better do not do it. Because I also did it and did not make a profit because of the long delivery time that made me angry. But I should be grateful, because the benefits I get more than the losses that I received.

Sometimes I make arbitrage with low value (less than 100k $) ethereum tokens; but only with small amounts. There is no gurantee that you sell them with profit. I don't like daily trading but I often see arbitrage opportunities between ether tokens. You may watch for them.

The withdrawal price of btc is another factor of arbitrage.  This discourage investors to do arbitrage. You need a huge amount of btc to feel the profit from arbitrage.

Cryptocurrencies arbitrage isn't profitable anymore, unless you know how to program  and trade with extremely low latency bots that can outperform the domestic bots working on the exchanges servers(certainly not the junk sold in the retail); and even then it requires a 24/7 monitoring of the activity and constant adjustements of strategies and updates by developers as it a highly competitive business in a perpetual race.

The manual cross arbitrage ship has already sailed months / years ago, as the market as grown increasingly competitive and aggressive

I'd like also to emphasize that it is very easy to get badly burnt trying to do this kind of operation without extensive experience. The market is totally unregulated and full of traps settup for the newbies trying to catch price differences. And i've seen many getting badly screwed and go home totally broke. Transfers getting lost, withdrawals stuck for weeks while the currency plunges, deposits not showing up for days, currencies flash crashing, dead pools traps, exchange shutting down,  exchange scams, etc etc..

I think it is unethical to lure people with irrealistic expectations when considering arbitrage and to not warn them about the extreme danger on the long run of trying this. There is no such thing as free lunch in the markets; price differences always have reasons, which mean that 99,9% are untradable because either the exchange is shutdown, nodes are under maintenance, withdrawals are suspended, exchange is a scam, or because the volatility is temporarily extreme and that it is nearly suicidal to even try it

You'd better educate yourself and try your luck with mid-long term trading strategies which have been yielding solid returns until now, rather than trying this near zero profit business only accessible to the most advanced and well funded traders
You could just have bought ETH and hold for the past months and made 30x what you have done doing crappy amateur arbitrage

I did observe that there are many arbitrage opportunities and I do believe that many have benefited from it but then people are somewhat reluctant to do it because there are times when orders would not be executed because of some problems and in case of some huge arbitrage opportunties, most likely the exchange would deactivate the wallet of that certain coin so that traders would not be able to benefit from it. There are some cases then that an arbitrage would be successful but when one arbitrage goes wrong, the one who is doing it would be reluctant to do it again especially if it involves a large amount.

Exactly. All the posts here are commenting about transferring deposits to different exchanges. That's not how to do arb, and of course you'll lose money like that. You should have balances in all pairs on all exchanges you intend to arbitrage with beforehand, and then do the arbitration at the exact same time (buy order on one exchange, sell order on the other with no delay). The only time you'd then transfer between the exchanges is much later when funds from one pairing have depleted, or you want to cash out a little.

even this strategy doesn't make sense today because you have unlimited currency exposure
arb bots can make you richer in btc or eth but your total net worth in fiat won't change so what's the point?

bitcoin is down 35% since january 1 and falling further every week, so why would one hold any crypto when regulators are about to crack down big time

This uppurtunity seems to be very unreliable in the last few days. Perhaps due to the falling price but at least there is no consistency in the price difference these days as it used to be. I'll keep watching it though.

There is no way for a human to pull that off anymore, you will need arbitrage bots to do it for you, and those are costly and difficult to configure, any mistake you make is going to cost you a fortune and a lot of time to recover, that is why arbitrage is not an strategy that is so common despite the apparent benefits that we can get, besides that assumes that the exchanges are going to pay you fast and we know that some exchanges are taking weeks to process a withdrawal.

This is the issue on doing arbitrage things which transfers would either be instant or not depending on the coin you are transacting and depending on which exchange you are in. I agree on the thing you do said that some of them would possibly take some days or weeks to get such withdrawal which this would really be a big problem on doing arbitrage because any delays would really cost you money.

Since there are literally a lot of exchanges expect these sort of price gaps,the main risk involved with these sort of arbitrage trade is that,it is really impossible to send or receive the coins in time,there was a time when you were able to get faster transaction even with bitcoin and alt coin and i used to take advantage of this price difference,but now that is not the case,even if you send an ETH based token,some exchanges ask for thirty confirmation,which will take hours to confirm which negates the profit.

I notice it herein i am worried because when i tried some amounts transfer fron the exchange i used to buy from one another it was a really hard time and sometimes some alts had been hold for withdrawals so instead of making profits it is a loss. I have many factors concerning to arbitrage. The price difference makes an attractibe but the majority is not good one to do. The gap of price and the time in transferring is also a bad experience at me when the deposit was arrived the price was dump already the worst cases.

Which is another limitation for this strategy, in order to obtain significant profits the amount of money you need to risk is huge, a trader can get huge profits by investing a small amount of money in the right coin at the right time, but with arbitrage, you need to have a huge amount of money to obtain small profits, and those profits get even smaller when you get into account transactions fees and the fees of the exchange.

If you do really like to feel profits on arbitrage trading then you would really need big funds in able to feel it because doing it on smaller funds would really be not worth it considering on the fees on each transactions been made it will surely affect. Price differences or gaps on any exchanges do really occur and as a trader its up to you if you would take the risk on doing it or not.

I have also found great arbitrage opportunities in different exchanges that I use, but delays in transactions and sometimes the disadvantageous fees are a great impediment to carry out the arbitrage in an efficient and profitable way. Some occasions I have observed variations of up to 30% for several hours, but when I tried to carry out the exchange, the three-hour delay that took me that transaction made the opportunity absolutely inconvenient.

The possibility for arbitrage trading is there, but the execution part is more difficult as we have to take into
consideration the small liquidity of the market at some coins, different transaction and withdrawal fees ,
transaction time. All this is more realistic to be calculated and realized fast by trading bots.