So, assume I already have Bitcoins on Coinbase and have a verified account to sell them easily. Theoretically, my plan for free money would look like this:<p>- Say I have 11 BTC on Coinbase.<p>Wire $10k to OKPAY ($25 bank fee, 0% OKPAY commission)<p>Send OKPAY money to BTC-E, $200 fee (2%).<p>- Now I have $9,775 on BTC-E.<p>Within ~1 second of each other, I enter a market order to buy 10.754 BTC on BTC-e for $9,775, and sell 10.754 BTC on Coinbase for $10,488.21 (after their 1% fee).<p>These are the real market rates at the time of this post (accounting for book depth). I make $488 with no risk other than holding the Bitcoin for awhile, which anyone holding Bitcoin does anyway.<p>Before I attempt to do this and find out the hard way why it ends up costing me money in the process, could someone please kindly point out the flaw in my plan?
I'd love to see this, but also including exchanges across different currencies (e.g. CNY) and normalized.<p>Kind of like <a href="http://bitcoinaverage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoinaverage.com/</a> does, but with a nice chart like <a href="http://bitcoinindex.es/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoinindex.es/</a>.<p>I suspect the visualized data will be much more interesting, since different local economies behave differently. For example, when BTC was "crashing" yesterday to $850 USD, Chinese trades were still holding well about $1000 USD. Eventually the arbitrage opportunity becomes too big and the gap is closed. Watching this is fascinating.
Now that I have a huge stash of bit coins I was thinking of making a service/startup where you could lend out your bit coins to people who would agree to pay you back a slightly higher number of coins in the future. Kind of like a bank but not corrupt and full of banksters like the federal reserve and JP Morgan. Once I have traction I can IPO but instead of sell my shares for cash I would sell them in bit coins.<p>I think it would have some kind of restful API.
Firstly, that's very cool. Well done!<p>Secondly, I know hardly anything about bitcoins - but here all I see is an arbitrage opportunity. Buy bitcoins from BTC-e and sell them on MTGox, which seems to be consistently around 150 (I assume USD) different.<p>Am I missing something here?
That's great. I put up a simple autorefresh page at: <a href="http://btcpricenow.com" rel="nofollow">http://btcpricenow.com</a> - still gathering my thoughts on Litecoin. <a href="http://bitcoinwisdom.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoinwisdom.com/</a> seems to be best for realtime charting.