I think bitcoin is a great idea but my friend doesn't

[REF]

Mt. Gox charging a fee is the same thing as a stock broker charging you a fee when you buy or sell stocks. Mt. gox is a middle man looking to make money....

If you dont accept bitcoin as a form of currency then it will look like a pyramid scheme to you. If you accept it as money then "buying" bitcoins is exactly exchanging currencies when visiting a foreign place. Which by the way there are investors and trades who do try making money by exchanging money back and forth between standard day currencies.

[jerfelix]

Mt. Gox charging a fee is the same thing as a stock broker charging you a fee when you buy or sell stocks. Mt. gox is a middle man looking to make money....

The beauty of a decentralized currency is that if you think MtGox is too expensive, you are free to perform deals without the middle man.  I can buy and sell Bitcoins to my family and friends, with no fee whatsoever. 

The bid/ask spread is a little high right now, but the .65% transaction fee seems pretty cheap.  But as zillions of Bitcoins change hands, if that .65% fee proves to be too expensive, then someone will step in and offer a competing service for half the price.

FYI, the 30 day transaction history shows that $5.7 Million transactions took place.  So the Mt Gox owner pocketed $37,000 last MONTH for this valuable service (less costs, of course).  Not bad for a side project, and if you are looking to make a few bucks on Bitcoins, set up a competing exchange with half the fees!  It can't be that tough!

[rebuilder]

FYI, the 30 day transaction history shows that $5.7 Million transactions took place.  So the Mt Gox owner pocketed $37,000 last MONTH for this valuable service (less costs, of course).  Not bad for a side project, and if you are looking to make a few bucks on Bitcoins, set up a competing exchange with half the fees!  It can't be that tough!

Apparently it is quite tough, since there are competing exchanges yet Mt Gox is overwhelmingly the most popular. What would it take for another exchange to gain popularity. I mean what could a competing exchange offer, not what Mt Gox might do wrong.

Is there another exchange that acts as escrow in the way Gox does? I think that's a big part of the appeal, only having to trust the exchange,  not the people you're trading with.

[jerfelix]

FYI, the 30 day transaction history shows that $5.7 Million transactions took place.  So the Mt Gox owner pocketed $37,000 last MONTH for this valuable service (less costs, of course).  Not bad for a side project, and if you are looking to make a few bucks on Bitcoins, set up a competing exchange with half the fees!  It can't be that tough!

Apparently it is quite tough, since there are competing exchanges yet Mt Gox is overwhelmingly the most popular. What would it take for another exchange to gain popularity. I mean what could a competing exchange offer, not what Mt Gox might do wrong.

Is there another exchange that acts as escrow in the way Gox does? I think that's a big part of the appeal, only having to trust the exchange,  not the people you're trading with.

I didn't mean to trivialize how tough it would be to compete against Mt Gox.  When I made the comment, I was thinking more about how easy "technically" it would be to program an exchange.  Surely a similar program to Mt Gox's could be written for thousands of dollars.

It's the trust thing that Mt Gox has over the other exchanges, and how easy they made it to conduct transactions.  From a US-centric perspective, I'd think that if Charles Schwab or eTrade set up an exchange, with escrow, and easy money transfers to and from your current account, they could easily pick up that kind of money (37K/month and growing).