Why I've stopped using TradeHill and gone back to MtGox

[Grinder]

Wanting to buy some coins, and having seen how the last trade price tend to be a bit lower on TH than MG, I decided to give TH a try. This is my experience after buying a few hundred coins.

- Bots
This is what ruined the whole point of using TH. The reason why the last traded price is some times lower on TH is that the spread (difference between buy and sell price) is often larger than on MG. However, if you try to take advantage of this by adding an offer that is slightly higher/lower than the current ones, the bots will add another offer that is $0.0000000002 or so higher or lower than yours in a few seconds. Most trades on TH are small and far between, so most likely your bid will never win unless the price on MG changes enough that the bots can use it for arbitrage. The spread on MG is much lower, so usually you'll get a better price by just buying/selling at market price.

- Fees
Cheaper on MG unless you trade for less than ~$300/month.

- User interface
The most important part to me is order book/last sales. Not very good on either site, but at least MG's web based order book is not completely useless. I ended up making my own script that uses the API. When you try to add an order TH does no calculations for you. MG will calculate either the total of either BTC or dollars, depending on which number you change. This makes it much easier to avoid mistakes and spend or get exactly the amount you want. The only plus for TH is that the pages seem to load somewhat faster, but they are both much slower than they should be.

- Funding account using Paxum
Seems to only be processed once a day on either site.

Edit: Fixed spread, don't know what I was thinking.

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[brendio]

I think the word you are looking for is spread, not float.

I use the high spread on TH to my advantage with the less traded currency. Placing a bid or and ask well outside the money can be quite profitable when someone comes along wanting to buy or sell coins and willing to pay over or sell for under the odds. I feel I am adding liquidity in this way.

[nmat]

Try CampBX then? 

MtGox is the best due to its high volume and market depth. Other exchanges don't even come near that. However, everytime I need bitcoins I specifically don't buy them at MtGox, even if I have to pay a few cents extra somewhere else. I have nothing against them, but "80% volume as of July 2011" is not my idea of a decentralized currency.