I don't understand how you could have transferable owernship in such a network, because owernship is a legal term. If I hold one stock of AAPL corp this is a legal concept subject to US law. If I hold a stock of BMW in Germany, this is subject to German law. Similarly ETFs and Futures have a lot necessarily regulation. We don't have a legal layer for this (yet), so I can't even transfer the most simple asset from one country to another without a lot of hassle. So whatever these kinds of concepts are, they have little to do with shares as they currently exist. Markets and property without laws are not very useful. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies are really the exception, because they are an entire new construction, but they don't standard for anything else. Money is a medium and assets are not money. In order for something like this to work I think one first has to have the legal constructions in place, which I believe will take decades. Hopefully the economic system will function much better by then.

Thanks. Any posts welcome. I will restructure the list as detailed above, so this is only a temporary dump. Perhaps with a voting system coming pretty soon. Also, any suggestions welcome.

Good idea, yes. But solving this issue technically is very hard. Putting "some thing" on the blockchain doesn't solve anything.

It does not make sense to ship any code to an unknown location. If I can be "certain" then one might be able to ship code to a "brokered-cloud", similar to the electric grid. And this with potentially very advanced capabilities. I think you should have a look at docker and trusted computing + containers. The worlds second biggest exchange (and by far the most sophisticated) is currently working on a cloudexchange. Overall this might take 5 or 20 years to build. But it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. But there are many legal layers which allow exchanges to work in the first place. For example: why is it today not possible to have one world-wide global common law? Definitions of contracts are not at all the same in different countries. And of course there is no such thing as a global court, which enforces global contracts. By way of analogy, Bitcoin is a bit like TCP/IP and many problems are really on a much higher level (HTTP, "SOAP", ecommerce). Just because there is a website amazon.com based in Seattle, doesn't mean they can sell things to everyone in the world. Amazon has 88'000 employees, and most work is probably dealing with local issues.

I think you have to be clearer on what a transaction is, and for what transactions Bitcoin is good for and why.

Sure. Any debate with exchanges is welcome. Perhaps I will move communications onto an exchange watch platform as well. The central goal here is objectivity. I try to make not any judgements, but to provide tools for judgements of market participants. Tools can be data and ratings. The goal should be to make the (BTC exchange) system more stable. I believe this can be quite independent of BTC alone, although of course there are overlaps. In general some cooperation between exchanges make sense as well, in terms legal/political issues.

Having said that, I very much appreciate that you have opened up your sourcecode. Opening up the source of the exchange is a very good idea IMO, see https://github.com/justcoin/snow . It makes sense that the BTC community (if such a thing exists) channels through exchanges which have the interests in mind, such as a) low prices b) no manipulation c) safety and security.

A question I have is: what deposit mechanisms do you allow? SEPA, International Wire? I believe that in most countries the legal status, especially cross-border, is very much in the open, with regards to bitcoin, but also bitcoin exchanges.

The general idea is that the list is complete, but there will be some mechanism (t.b.d.) which will then allow for people to make their judgement. I.e. the exchange watch project is then a plattform, not a simple unordered list. Perhaps in the longterm this might evolve into an API based plattform. For instance each exchange has a ticker and then one can route through a distributed network. This kinds of systems are common in the established international markets. If exchanges have interoperability the users can route between them. All of this will hopefully facilitate better exchanges. In my view the end game is that exchanges will operate at near zero margins.

I note that there are various models of exchanges. Some exchanges are OTC based, such as Localbitcoins and BTCde.

Trust ratings

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php

OTC market is a possible channel between regulated exchanges.

Note: all of this is for BTC only at this point.

Moneypak
Dwolla
WU

IMO this should be an opensource project. I have evaluted some Rails projects. https://github.com/radar/forem looks alright for a start. If anyone wants to work co-jointly on this please let me know.

Perhaps there is value in a layered forum with different access levels. At least that is one possibility of a trust-mechanism which I have seen been used before for partly sensitive information.

Some further links which have to be sorted.

Paypal to Bitcoin

http://www.coinmama.com/

Coinmama gets fees via brokering (making money on price differentials).

Portal:

http://bcchanger.com/

Payment networks
In general I'm very interested in country-specific restrictions and how the banking network looks like. I.e. international wires are not necessarily possible out of Europe. The credit card network is a seperate channel. In Europe there is SEPA and some changes coming next year. I think this applies to Euro-based countries only.

Any input appreciated, especially with regards to Emerging economies.

As noted this is perhaps the kernel of a wider project, so any contributions welcome.

With regards to the point you making about costs. Spreads have come way down in the last 10-20 years due to computers. I mean the whole point is that computers are more efficient than people in some regard. The bandwith HF trader is really not that much compare to the volume they trade. And they pay for the bandwith.

Sure, batches are interupt periods and standard in good exchange markets. You can even trigger them based on volatility measures.

The bitcoin network is absolutely not the same as an exchange. There is a lot of potential in this direction, but in quite different ways. You want transactions to be very, very fast. For example in the first of trading this morning the SPY ETF was traded in cumulative volume of 600M$. That's one product in one hour. Total stock market volume is in the trillions of dollars. You need a lot of speed and efficiency to trade that, and that's what (computer) traders provide. At the point almost all short-term trading is done by computers and there is very good reason for that. Markets work pretty well compare to other institutions (banks, states).

There are many myths surrounding HF trading. If you impose a time limit the market is going to be terribly inefficient. Actually the amount of volume an exchange is a direct function of time, which should be easy to see I hope. I'm amazed that anyone sympathetic to bitcoin would condemn computer trading. Having said that, there are probably better good rules one can come up in a bitcoin driven system. Btw, the exchange outages of NASDAQ have to do with the fact, that they use people for trading.

Hello,

I find this forum endlessly fascinating and useful. Thanks for all the work.

Wouldn't it be great to a (re-)build a public internet forum with advanced functionality? Some part of the forum are much more than a message board and it would be really cool to facilitate that kind of activity (taking ideas from newer message boards, Stackexchange, Github, etc.).

Somebody requested an API a few days ago and I think that is a great idea. Why not go all the way and (re-) build something from scratch? Two quick examples: a) I would like to be able to have a feed to a user's posts (realtime, feed). b) if somebody chooses to be public that should be indicated. Basically the idea would be to opensource the forum software and have the community working on that, too, building on top of other projects.

Thanks for the feedback and interest.

This could be a Github repo at some point. What I imagine is an open-protocol on which markets can co-operate. This will not necessarily be in the interest of the markets themselves, but competitive pressure will lead to very little tx costs over time. B24 had 0.00% but is out of "business". In other words transaction networks will be become public goods. Not only for payments but complex transactions as well.

To be added to the list.

http://bex.io/
https://coinmkt.com
https://btc.sx

I want to gather some information about BTC exchanges, to evaluate how accessible they are from which country and monitor them in a structured format. All posts only on-topic please.


Caveat emptor

Quality of services obviously varies very widely. Posts are not endorsements of any kind at the current state.


List of exchanges

The current biggest exchanges by BTC volume are (according to http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/) (MtGox listed several times for different currencies).

mtgoxUSD 9752.45680602
bitstampUSD 8231.1511873
btceUSD 2507.51043954
btcnCNY 1918.332
btcdeEUR 522.3637794
virwoxSLL 493.43
cbxUSD 489.69346826
virtexCAD 475.612
bitcurexPLN 366.92670515
btceRUR 332.90685044
localbtcAUD 110.5349

Transfer methods

MtGox

All fund transfer methods below require either a verified or trusted account status.
Bitinstant
Japanese Domestic Transfer - Only for Japanese residents.
Polish Domestic Transfer - Only for Polish residents.
International Wire Transfer - Please note that we are unable to accept funds coming from any entity or country listed by the OFAC*
SEPA - Only for european residents

Bitstamp

SEPA deposits: FREE
SEPA withdrawals: 0.90 €
International wire transfer: €, $, £
Inter exchange and cash deposits

Graveyard

Dead exchanges:
Bitfloor
B24
...

As explained in the other thread there can not be crypto-USD. Imagine I say I have 10$ in my virtual account (i.e. electronic cash). How do I prove that in the system? There is no way, so what I do is a have central clearing authority, the central bank. Every transaction then goes through this central point, essentially to verify this fact. In this sense proving that account A is worth 10$ is the same as verifying transactions from A to B . The whole point of Bitcoin is get around this fact. I thought that was obvious, but I'm surprised to find out it is not. However the problem is that a Bitcoin network has nodes which interact with fiat money. Which makes these outside facing nodes a target. This part isn't solved yet, but has little to do with blockchains. I highly doubt it can be solved. Which means the main network BTC can be shutdown by governments, because without e-processing from bank to BTC the use is very limited. And then there are legal issues to solve. Anyway...

Ver interesting. There are some important elements, especially the dividends idea.

But there is also a lot of confusion here. Honestly, I would recommend to studying how a paper fiat money system and an exchange works first. Its not at all trivial. Did you know that every bank transaction gets wired over the central bank? Every bank holds an account at the central bank. The way banks exchange money is that they use the central banks system. And the central bank is backed by the government.

In any case: think about it - how can you convert 1$ into 0.01 BTC? You have to transfer the 1$ to a place or a person who has BTC and wants $. The only way to transfer $ is through an entity that has an account at the Federal reserve, aka a bank. Or the entity has USD cash, and you can accept cash. Those are the only ways to transfer fiat money without an IOU scheme. Every holder of USD has a counter-party risk against his bank and against the central bank. Which is why Bitcoin is so brilliant in the first place. But the legal frames make a total bootstrap very unlikely IMO. In some ways it implies that nation-states can't tax people. And they don't like that. Compare the AAPL discussion recently and the broken international tax regime.

Compare that with Ripple where you have all kinds of layered couterparty risks. In your personal IOU network and against the network overall. Which it makes it worse than fiat in a way.

First of you need to be much clear of how such an exchange would allow throughput of 100'000 of orders per day. Then you will see the problem. Take the MtGox volume and calculuate the necessary throughput time. Take into account the speed of light (no kidding). The maximum time for execution would be rather in the 50 ms range or lower (in fact the speed of light makes auto-trading across the globe impossible, but auto trading is the base requirement to process most than 10M$/day). Certainly a blockchain makes such an exchange simply impossible. Just do the calculations of execution time that are needed, say based on 100x current volume at MtGox. Imagine BTC would rule the world, then you need up to 10^12 more volume, which is roughly what the current markets handle. (Global money in circulation is very roughy <10 Trillion$ per day, compared to ca. 10 million $ per day at MtGox). Of course nobody would trade significant volume at 1% fee. Bitcoin exchange fees should in theory approach 0.01%.

An exchange works like this. You have a central datastructure, which is the limit order book. Because it is central, by definition, a distrubted block choin simply does not make any sense. An exchange has to be fast, and so a good exchange has to have a synchronous architecture. In fact that is its primary feature, namely liquidity attracts liquidity. If one single trade takes 10 minutes, you simply can't operate.

If you study this you see where Bitcoin differs and how it improves it. But there is a significant problem (not vulnerability) in Bitcoin in terms of potential adaption. And the problem is that Bitcoins has to interface with fiat banks. Which makes the BTC exchanges act as banks. So if I want to use BTC I have to receive money in BTC, be it a wage, or capital income, etc. Otherwise I have to go through the exchange, and the governments of the world have the ability to shutdown the exchanges, as they already have.

However, what you could do is to have gateways which are liquidity providers. These could meet at an efficient exchange. The gateways would handle fiat money and the exchange handles orders.

Say you are in a country, where you don't run the risk of getting jailed for ML, like you would establishing such a system in most developed countries (have you thought about that?). Then you would do this in a TOR like fashion. Doing this I would consider very, very risky though. Even it would work the first customers are going to be people who want to ML. I would suggest you look at B24 and how this has been going. SH now faces serious charges and in part rightly so, because his exchange clearly enabled ML. Which shows some of the big problems with Bitcoin, and why my enthusiasm is now greatly reduced after seeing this. Essentially BTC in part leads in part to what is considered criminal in most jurisdictions. Which at some point there will be massive backlash. B24 and Bitfloor are closed now. MtGox potentially could be closed at any time.

What a bunch of nonsense. But there is probably be a reason that the US military is going insane right now. Perhaps they want to expand the budget, now that some wars are ending. Perhaps that is why they are flying stealth bombers over North Korea, threatening Iran, etc. I'm glad the empire is running out of money.

Some good points in this thread. While these things are interesting, you have to consider the legal implications, the risk and reward for participants. It's a bit like running a TOR node only much riskier.

Just a couple of points :

*) you have identities and bank accounts. Say you have a file which holds a ledger of this kind. The network would have to hold portions of it.

*) say you have two nodes transacting in this established network. Instead of exchange from A<=>B you have an intermediary A<=>X<=>B. Now, A and B are not transacting directly. What are the legal implications? On what knowledge does this depend? This is very similar to TOR. This network could mirror the BTC network in the banking network under certain conditions.

Certainly Ripple doesn't solve any of this. Obviously one wants to have a distributed network instead of layering different risks. Its much like a user of money holds counterparty risk against the individual bank, the central bank and the state backing the central banks and banks at the same time. In this Ripple case you have counterparty risk as well as network risk. Which is the opposite of what we want.

I think the logical step is to carefully study the laws of different countries. What is illegal and dangerous in country U, might be perfectly legal in another country Z. The way to push Bitcoin forward is in my mind to focus on places where no prior infrastructure exists. Simply mirroring the banking world is not that interesting by comparison.

Unfortunately these half-baked ideas are not worth very much. You realize that people have accounts at exchanges which are matched by fiat bank to bank transactions? Why would anyone distribute a matching engine like this? Who is in charge? etc.

Without framing the test, this is not very meaningful. I assume you are running on one local machine, you're not dealing with latency issues, not with protocol issues, etc. For instance if you go through a web-browser how much latency does that add - perhaps 10x? Or perhaps 10^4 x? 300k probably means all of this is in RAM?

Why not instead have a bunch of distributed agents submitting messages and then measure performance with some helpful metrics? Much more interesting than average latency is latency distribution of worst cases.

Err, and who operates the ATM and how? Somebody has to deliver the BTC for fiat.

"There are tons of conspiracy theories ..." that's how the best threads start.  Yes, there is manipulation and that's in part normal. Anyone can put bid and asks where and however they want. Longterm there will be new exchanges, and the users of the exchanges will decide what's best for them.