MtGox vs TradeHill

[ThomasV]

The relative market shares of MtGox and TradeHill did not change much since TradeHill was open:
according to bitcoincharts.com, the volume reported on MtgoxUSD in the last 30 days is about 9 times
the volume on thUSD.

I believe that this apparent stability hides a change.

The volume at MtGox is due to a large extent to massive sales of more than 10k bitcoins at once.
When you want to sell that amount of coins, you better go to the market that has the best liquidity.

The volume at tradehill has been increasing lately, which shows that they are able to attract smaller trades.

At some point, the market will run out of very large sales, because these sales tend to distribute bitcoins
among more and  more people. When that happens, the volume at mtgox will be strongly reduced.

my guess is that in 6 months from now, the volume ratio between mtgoxUSD and thUSD will be very
different from 9:1, probably something like 2:1, maybe even less

[finway]

Glad to see that happen.

[epetroel]

I for one would be happy to see this.  Having the market more distributed should make it much harder to manipulate.

[Bigpiggy01]

I for one would be happy to see this.  Having the market more distributed should make it much harder to manipulate.

+1

Glad to see that happen.

+1

However the question is if Tradehill is in a position to be trusted with the type of market share the OP is suggesting. MtGox have had and probably will continue to have a large number of technical difficulties but at least they haven't been involved in the laundering of stolen bitcoins and they're fairly clear in their TOS and communication as opposed to Tradehill, this I believe will be a serious deterrent from the more widespread adoption of Tradehill use. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52377.0 for more details. I had a similar issue at MtGox a couple of days ago (withdrawal not executing) 2min on IRC and the issue was resolved as opposed to this debacle.

What I'd really like to see is more growth in regional exchanges like WBX, BTCDE, BtcChina, IntersangoGBP etc...  they overall provide much better solutions (low fees etc) for their local users and are therefore growing at varying speeds.

For example BtcChina (ok not the largest exchange but still) offers more or less instant 2way funding following completion of your first in or outgoing funding     @ 0.4-0.5% in fees. This is a feature that most other exchanges would kill for just imagine being able to sell coins then being able to spend the cash within minutes on your credit/debitcard.