Bitcoin Forum

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People waiting for stamp to creep up before pushing further on gox.  Today will be interesting.

Why on Earth would it overtake it?..

Gox is running out of coins, it might completely decouple from the rest of the bitcoin universe.

The funny thing is that Bitstamp has nowhere near the liquidity it should given its volume relative to MtGox. Those coins are not going anywhere. ???

on bitcoin.de we had a purchase at 94,99 Euro. This are 127 dollar. Strange. Most ask/bis are around 92 Euro (123 dollar). So btcde is higher than bitstamp, very tiny gap to gox.

Since it is acknowledged as a currency in Germany, institutional traders start to move now  ;)

I'm pretty happy with bitstamp, but market depth can be terrible there. Had some nice, early trades that should have given me a decent profit ruined by excessive slippage.

Which is surprsing. Looking at the overall volume (say, 30d) bitstamp volume is about half of mtgox, maybe a bit less. However it seems that at any given point, bitstamp market depth is perhaps a quarter or less of mtgox depth. I have no good explanation for that.

Could be part of an overall price increase related to possible expansion of the war in Syria.  Oil and gold are up too over the past couple days, while equities are down. 

Gox is running out of everything.

The Stamp is kind of more of a boutique exchange. Their focus is on simple, easy and good looking. They don't (from what I know) come from a finance background and I'd be scared of them hitting the same issues GOX hit when it comes to getting bigger. Lets leave institutional trading for trade institutions to build.

From what is known. A return on a BTC investment in Germany within the first year is taxed at 25% as Capital Gains. If you chose to hold onto the investment for a year then there is 0% Tax on the return.

This is a great way to encourage merchants to accept bitcoin for payment of goods and services and then hold onto them for 1 year before moving the BTC to other forms of currency or investments.

This is also a great way to get the more of the worlds economic BTC activity.

Here is a quote.

That's not really an answer to the question I raised. Just noticed, a few posts before me, Pruden made a similar point (btw: Pruden = proudhon? Confess!) about liquidity on bitstamp, given its volume.

Fact is, both mtgox and bitstamp come from very, hm, nontraditional backgrounds. Mtgox being a trading card exchange, bitstamp basically writing its own little trading engine, complete with rounding bugs. It's all pretty unprofessional, but it works, for now.

The question is, why is so much more money on the order book of mtgox than that of bitstamp, when their trading volume is getting closer. Or to turn the question around: why is there so much trading volume on bitstamp when the order book is so empty, compared to mtgox.

I don't know ... there are other ways to get euro, cheaper ways, e. G. btce or happycoins or localbitcoins ... On ebay sellers with high trust status receive higher prices, maybe we see the same on the exchanges. Gox is special, bitstamp is nice to let dollars out, bitcoin.de is a litte bit slow, but very secure resp. riskless. People pay for it, the risk is prized in the course, and maybe this is fine

Perhaps because the Bitstamp interface encourages you to buy/sell with market orders, with a very prominently placed "Instant order" button? Although this would only be relevant if most of the traders there were beginners.

Interesting. Does that mean the "default" on mtgox is limit order?

Not that I think that would account for the gap entirely, but at least in parts, it might.

I noticed that bitstamp have lots of bot orders/market maker orders, like those $200 and $100 orders

I have an explanation.  Market making bots are using MtGox API through the huge amount of open source code available.  Show me a ruby gem that covers what I need for the BitStamp API and maybe I'll move over.  Sure, it wouldn't be too hard to do it myself, but I'm a full time student, teaching two classes, and my MtGox bot is still pulling in profits.

Edit: Okay, there is a bitstamp gem available, but still it is not a drop in replacement for what I have running on mtgox, so it will have to wait at least until my next long weekend.  And to be clear, I'm not saying my bot is significant here, but other operators are likely in the same situation.

Encouraging people to hold bitcoins for a year will hurt bitcoin traction as measured by economic activity, no?

Guess I don't get it, since I never ran a bot for trading... does your bot place orders well ahead of time (i.e. they become part of the order book)? I alway thought the point of bot trading was to wait until the very last moment, when some price action triggers the bot's condition set, at which point it will place an order, which could be only minutes before the order is executed, so that the money/the btc never really appear on the order book. Can you clarify this for me?

There are different types of bots.  Mine maintains orders on both sides of the book.  In other words, I profit from dampening the swings.  Historically, MtGox has been too laggy for the type of bot you are describing to work well.  It might be better now, but I haven't investigated recently.