You need a LOT of capital and you need to use exchanges where you don't need to worry about your assets being froze. Ideally you'll short sell on the more expensive exchange and purchase on the cheaper exchange. This way you can replace the bitcoin you shorted with the cheaper bitcoin, meaning that you can eliminate a lot of the risk. Then arbitrage also involves the recycling of funds, which is the tricky part. You need to pay a bank to transfer your money, which is generally on a sliding scale of fees.  Higher total amounts of currency will naturally require lower % fees to transfer.  If you use normal individual consumer level banking, you can expect the whole arbitrage process to take 6-10 business days from account all the way around again to your account.

I think I'm going to write a blog post about this topic.

It just doesn't make sense to me... like are they matching orders between buyers and sellers only or are they dictating the price or are they exchanging on another bigger or underlying exchange that's merely not visible?

Hi everyone! Seems like a great community here and this is my first post. I've been in CC for about a year.

Has anyone else noticed that the only coin trade-able with fiat currency (JPY only) in the Bitflyer exchange is Bitcoin? Bitflyer allows BCH and ETH trading but only through BTC. When it comes to Litecoin and Monacoin, they don't even offer trading through BTC or any direct mechanism for marketplace participation. Instead, I am prompted with a buy price and a sell price that are several % apart, and if I enter a quantity to purchase or sell, the median difference is automatically populated between these buy and sell prices.  There is no option to enter my own price. I am required to take this apparent middle ground, therefore I can't place a lower bid and let it sit for a few days if I wish. It's take it or leave it pricing that sort of looks like a market pricing.

Am I understanding this incorrectly? Am I missing something in the BitFlyer Lightning trading platform, or is my account somehow restricted and I can't see the other exchanges? I assume what they're doing is participating in a sort of artificial arbitrage, where they try to represent the market in their own website and then exchange directly on another underlying exchange elsewhere. The spread must allow them surety that they'll never lose money performing the exchange for their customers. Or maybe by fixing the price like this, they're enabling rapid facilitated exchange where they use an algorithm to move the price slowly based on the frequency of bids to asks.  But why not just open a marketplace where users can directly bid/ask in BTC units as they have already done for BCH and ETH? I'm sorry if these questions are naive, I just have never seen such selective opening of services before.