There are plenty of bitcoin exchanges in Europe (bitstamp, btc-e, HitBit, cryptonit, nextcoin, ...) and Asia (itBit, Bitfinex, ANX, ...).

But what are the main U.S. based bitcoin exchanges besides kraken and coinsetter?
(And coinsetter seems to mainly duplicate bitstamp orders ...)

We'd like to add more north and south american bitcoin exchanges to our realtime aggregated bitcoin orderbook and order them by best price.

http://www.orderbook.info/

Input welcome !

How do we know that one entity (e.g. ghash.io) is in fact still below 50% ?

Maybe the ghash.io guys own or control additional pools or miners. In that case they might be way above 50%.

Yes, sometimes funny things are going on.
In a podcast about bitcoin exchanges it was said that there are many exchanges with stealth and with phantom orders. There are also rumors that bitcoin exchanges get liquidity from mining pools. As I understood it, bitcoin exchanges sell the bitcoins that mining pools did mine.

Using http://www.orderbook.info and filters I observed that bitstamp and coinsetter often show the same side / size / price triples - actually the price varies a tiny bit. On bitfinex some orders disappear and re-appear just some seconds later.

After listening to the side-chain and tree-chain podcast on letstalkbitcoin I had the idea of creating a side-chain .... not for bitcoin ... but for the current banking system. Maybe based on Ethereum, Mastercoin, OT or Counterparty.

Has this been discussed before? Is that a new or an old idea?

I don't know, but I did a little experiment and did create a digital asset using counterparty.

I've chosen fiat currency "asset": 20 Swiss Franc bill with the serial number 08L5222570 (because that was what was available. But of course you can use Greenbacks or Euros or Yuan ...

http://orderbook.info/CHF:20:08L5222570
CHF: underlying fiat currency
20: amount in fiat currency
20:08L5222570: serial number of the CHF bill
A: (not yet in URL) generation of CHF bills

This bill should then be withdrawn from the fiat currency banking system and (paper-) cash economy ... because it move into a "sidechain" of that respective fiat currency system ;-)

I used counterparty https://counterwallet.co/ to create an asset in crypto-currency space that represents that 20 Swiss Franc bill.
edit: screenshot: https://twitter.com/romanix/status/461801792892719104


After roughly 30min the asset was created and ready to use. Then I transfered the possession of fiat currency the asset through counterparty and bitcoin blockchain (instead of using banks or paypal) to another address.

An approach like that might be much more natural for non-geek people to start with crypto-currencies. This among others because it is backed by "real" cash and the user interface can show the picture of the actual bill that represents the value. http://orderbook.info/CHF:20:08L5222570 and transferring from one wallet to another would look like handing out bills.

Question to the community:
Is there a project that is working on something like that?