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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

Europeans buying BTC because of the crisis seems unlikely to be driving the latest rally because EURBTC is rising similarly to USDBTC.

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They always rise and fall together. If europeans are rushing in, so will the dollars price.

I am from Spain and I operate with USD only.

My main motivation isn't the crisis, but don't asume that all europeans are trading in EUR ;)

Wouldn't any significant difference between the two create an arbitrage opportunity that would immediately correct them back to where they were? Any imbalanced triangle in exchange rates can't last long.

There are actually lots of arbitrage opportunities in BTC. Check out the difference between BitFloor and MtGox.

It's easier to deposit USD into bitfloor through BoA than it is to deposity USD into MtGox. So customers of a certain site use bitfloor to buy BTC with USD.

Thinking about it now you're probably right about the USD/EUR prices.

I looked into it. Problem is transaction cost. Currently, the deposit and cash-out fee's plus the trading fee's of various BTC exchanges just do not justify the arbitrage profits.

I hope someone could create a BTC ETF that allows people to trade BTC to USD on the conventional market.

I have been building an arbing program for bitcoin over the last couple of weeks, you need about $3000 US for liquidity and size (and not to get eaten up by fixed fees etc) over exchanges. So far I've made 2.5K NZD. (42BTC)

This is over and above the monstrous returns in BTC over the last month!

Any chance you would like to collaborate? I've done a fair bit of arbitrage in my day. Hit me up, my email is in my profile.

That's less than I was estimating. Is this custom development? Do you need more capital?

I'm fairly certain that that correlation is due to day trading.

You're probably right.

Speculators buy btc for usd to sell for eur and thus keep the same usd/eur ratio as outside btc exchanges.

Arbitrageurs, not speculators.

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