Should the exchanges close on the weekends?

[Torminalis]

Yeah okay.

So, erm.. you going to tell them or shall I?

[pokermon919]

Yeah okay.

So, erm.. you going to tell them or shall I?

You from the gubermint?

[onesalt]

So wait, bitcoin is built in the principles of no regulation, yet you ask for some parts of it to be regulated? That's just stupid.

[TraderTimm]

The only thing exchanges can do is pre-announce downtime scheduling. Of course, there is always the unplanned type of downtime, but that is just how things work out sometimes. Given the current state of hardware and hot-standby for servers and the like, it would be possible to have a service that rarely has outages.

Like others have mentioned, when they are down - that costs them money. So their incentive to keep operating is pretty clear.

[MindFunk]

So wait, bitcoin is built in the principles of no regulation, yet you ask for some parts of it to be regulated? That's just stupid.

+1

[gst]

Great. We've finally got a distributed P2P currency that cannot be easily regulated - and you call for regulation. Way to go!

Just some food for thought:

At which time do you want to close markets? Night-time in the US? That's Daytime in my country.

And how do you define a weekend? Saturday and Sunday? In some middle-eastern countries Friday is the weekend and Saturday/Sunday are normal workdays. And of course there you've got the timezone differences too.

[netrin]

FOREX trading hours (23 hours / day, 6 days a week) or CME GROUP hours (15 minute downtime per day, weekends off)

15 minutes of sleep is better than no sleep at all!

[bitcoinminer]

Should the exchanges be close to what on the weekends?

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

There would be no way to enforce this. Exchanges can choose for themselves whether to be open or closed in the weekend or at other times.

Hi,

Were fine with the weekends. If customers wanted something different then we could change it up.

Regards,
Adam

[netrin]

There would be no way to enforce this. Exchanges can choose for themselves whether to be open or closed in the weekend or at other times.

Were fine with the weekends. If customers wanted something different then we could change it up.

Hi Adam, I think some of your darling users would prefer you remind them to get offline, go home, eat dinner, perhaps read them a bed time story and tuck them into bed. For a nominal fee, maybe you can also brew their coffee and ensure them not to worry, that the markets will be alright.

[Ekaros]

I belive in total 24/7/365 society. No artificial limits by time or cycles of cosmic events.

No, but banks should open on the weekends

[Lethn]

It's entirely up to the exchanges themselves, that's the beauty of a decentralised currency, I for one would be incredibly interested if Bitcoin businesses chose to stay open on traditional holidays compared to the conventional ones.

[ciphermonk]

Yes. Has a lot of advantages, also technically - gives them a maintenance window t  take down the site / update the programs withint incured downtime.

Adhering to FOREX trading hours (23 hours / day, 6 days a week) or CME GROUP hours (15 minute downtime per day, weekends off) means more planned stability. And, as I said, a window for handling maintenance.

Absolutely not. We don't play by old economy rules.

Make sense. Let's ignore reality and live ina a fantasy world.

Yes, you DO play by old economic rules. You also play by standard IT rules which LOVE planned downtime. 24/7 is extremely hard to maintain for anything not a joke website (mt gox still is there - joke website - wait until you see real volume, options etc.).

Plus somehow Bitcoins dont live in a fancy fantasy world - exchagne against funds requires funds available, and as the OP pointed out, lots of the non-bitcoiin infrastructure shuts down on weekends.

I'm sorry but only joke websites require 2 out of 7 day downtime ( that's 28% downtime or 72% uptime ). This is unacceptable by 2013 standards. Financial institutions, due to massive regulatory capture, are pretty much competition free. Which is why they are exasperatingly bad at any form of innovation - they just don't care. Would you imagine google or facebook being down on weekends ?

Bitcoin is reforming the financial industry.

[thoughtfan]

... Economics no longer apply because while the price can go down the but not up by counter buying at low prices because no new money can be put in until a certain time. And since crashes are due to the steepness of dropping prices the inability to counter buy until later increases the likelihood of significant drops leading to crashes.

Lack of new fiat going into the exchanges does change the circumstances but how on earth can you derive 'Economics no longer apply' from that?  The market is still the market and the circumstances are known creating opportunities to those who want (for instance by keeping some fiat on the exchanges specifically for the purpose) to take advantage of the lack of buying pressure from new money for themselves.  The Bitcoin to fiat markets are immature in terms of many of the self-correcting aspects that happen in well-established markets but it's getting there.  I am given to understand depending on the 'weekend dip' to buy low is no longer as profitable a strategy as it used to be.

Circumstances may be different but principles don't take a weekend break and the idea of even wanting to see markets close to suit our own vision of how they should behave seems to me to be the antithesis of the principles of Bitcoin.

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Lack of new fiat going into the exchanges does change the circumstances but how on earth can you derive 'Economics no longer apply' from that?  The market is still the market and the circumstances are known creating opportunities to those who want (for instance by keeping some fiat on the exchanges specifically for the purpose) to take advantage of the lack of buying pressure from new money for themselves.

Exactly, if a pattern becomes very predictable in trading, people will take notice and anticipate on it, so it will disappear again.

[John (John K.)]

No. Please remember everyone else at different timezones.

[franky1]

There would be no way to enforce this. Exchanges can choose for themselves whether to be open or closed in the weekend or at other times.

How about community enforcement? If enough of us (especially if we got all the miners onboard) refuse to do business in certain ways or certain time frames then there's no product to buy during those windows.

crypto exchanges should not be relying on banking infrastructure to dictate when they should trade. think of crypto as a whole country. you would never ask a whole country to shut its shops and go home for the weekend purely because it cant get hold of a different countries money.

people in the community should have the freedom to continue trading with the currency they already have. and crypto shops like memory dealers, cupcakes and alpaca socks don't want to have to wait to trade their crypto. (meaning they wont take any sales at the weekend). they want and rely on 24/7 service, and so they should.

in england a few decades ago all shops closed on a bank holiday days as they knew the banks would not be open to take their daily profits. Now shops are going against this and continuing to do business, because they are realising they dont have to rely on banks on a daily bases.

instead of demanding a revolt simply because some people cant get money in on a saturday..you should BUDGET your money to cover the weekend.

[hazek]

Exchanges *should* do what they *want* to do. But if their goal is to maximize profits then they should do what their customers want them to do and market conditions permit them to do.

[franky1]

Exchanges *should* do what they *want* to do. But if their goal is to maximize profits then they should do what their customers want them to do and market conditions permit them to do.

very true. and if customers didnt want a 24/7 service they would not be trading.  and exchanges would have already implimented daily closing or weekend closing during dull periods of business.

yet the community as a whole show that 24/7 is useful. and that a call of arms to boycott a service intentionally goes against freedom of choice.

im not saying people shouldnt stop using a service if they dont have the funds. but demanding a mass boycott purely on individuals circumstances, affects other individuals and other businesses. causing ripples.

much better to ask the exchanges for statistics of when they have typical dull periods of trade and ask them if they are considering a standardised shutdown period for those regular times. and if so to advertise a poll for people to vote on such an idea instead of boycotting a service without knowing all the details and effects it may cause.

[ralree]

Exchanges should never close in my opinion.  This is one of the reasons bitcoin is better than banks.