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Show HN: BitJoy

bitjoy.org

41 pointscjm44 comments

MtGox at $90 and BTCe at $83. Easy arbitrage money? Probably not, but why not?

transaction fees and liquidity.

Looks that way - which says something about the maturity of the bitcoin system.

Looking at it another way. Considering the maturity of the bitcoin system, it's amazing how much attention and money has gone in.

I tried but it was too much effort.

All the api's are unreliable, it's hard to tell if your order went through, if it did you have no idea how long it will actually take.

Then, once you've run out of money on one of the sites you have to go through the expensive and lengthy process to get more on, and you have to go through the same again to actually withdraw. It ends up just not being worth the time

Actually I was planning on writing something of an arbitrage bot. It's hard though, I don't have any technical analysis knowledge. However, I did make over a grand on BTCe just buying and trading between LTC, BTC, and USD, and other small numbers that used to get "pumped". Quite fun.

I haven't had time to polish these, but would be interested in collaborating with someone to make something robust.

Automatic trader:

https://github.com/abrkn/margin

Common interface to several exchanges: https://github.com/abrkn/hail

Margin would be very nice with more tests and state.

Good luck transferring USD to BTC-e, and good luck getting a wire through from Mt.Gox afterwards.

Exchanges have really difficult liquidity problems... Unlike localbitcoins.com ;)

Disclaimer: I run an exchange

To do arbitrage, you need need the ability to move both BTC and USD between MtGox and BTC-E quickly. BTC is moved easily, at 6 confirmations (~1 hour) However, people are waiting up to 7 weeks to have their USD withdrawn (see Bitcointalk). Combined with lawsuits aimed at MtGox and lack of transparency, this leads to a situation where USD on MtGox is worth less than USD on BTC-E (or Bitstamp)

Looks great (FireFox v22), loaded after 45 seconds.

Can you give some specifics as to what the tech is behind BitJoy and what your plans for it are?

45s is waaaay too long :) will make that better.

The goal is to create a real-time snapshot of the bitcon ecosystem & to build context around the data so it's simple to consume and understand. Price was a logical place to start, hope to add more types of data in the future.

4-5 seconds in FF here.

As far as tech it's node + engine.io + backbone. I can go into more detail though if you have any questions.

Also check out, https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream

so here's a naive question : why aren't people simply playing off the price differentials between mt gox, bitstamp and btc (more than $7 when I just opened the OP's page) and making a ton of money? or maybe they are? or maybe commissions / fees are so high they eat up any profit?

Yep, it's pretty hard and slow to move the money around (in and out of the exchanges) and all the fees eat away almost all profits.

Buy 10 BTC at btc-e.com for 831.66 USD

Sell on MtGox for 591.18 GBP = 901.73 USD (my account is set to GBP)

That's 70.07 USD profit from 10 BTC, or ~$7 USD per bitcoin traded.

Seems like a good opportunity. The problem is you can't cycle your money quickly, it takes time to sell bitcoin for cash and withdraw it ready for the next cycle.

But I mean there's the potential to make ~8% on each cycle. Buying, transfering and selling should also be a fairly quick process so you're not exposing yourself too much.

I think as soon as instant cash deposit/withdrawls are available through various exchanges these gaps will close up pretty fast.

You can also play arbitrage between altcoins (BTC to LTC, or LTC to XMP, or any other). On Vircurex, Cryptsy, BTC-e, etc.

Even with liquidity being lower you can see them being rather close on the different exchanges.

Do you know of an economic or finance course that can help me understand how to use Bitcoin or any other currency. There's all the articles explaining Bitcoin but none treating it like a foreign currency and teaching how to apply foreign trade. I'll just search foreign trading at the library in the mean time...

Look at commodities trading books too. Bitcoin et al are not quite as liquid as most forex markets, so they tend to behave more like a commodity.

I heard mtgox is not paying out lately

Chrome 28.0.1500.71 OSX, works ok. A little unresponsive sometimes.

Really cool. I trade in EUR though, so it would be nice with a mtgox EUR listing.

The access rights it wants to my twitter account is unacceptable though, so no chance i am going to bind my account to bitjoy.

Cool, more currencies coming soon -- will look at the permissions. Thanks for the feedback.

Wow what a great interface. Really great clean design and I like the fact that you've used two seperate btc exchanges. I think this tab will be pinned in my browser once I begin my new career as a bitcoin dealer on localbitcoins.com ;)

Takes a while to load (Firefox Dev) but it's really nice when it does!

thanks :)

Looks really good. One thing to point out that is probably a one-line fix: the month being displayed for news articles is exactly one month before the actual date they came out.

Hrrrrrmm :) thanks for spotting that.

Any plans to add other cryptocurrencies? Litecoin etc?

Yeah, possibly -- focus will be on filling out bitcoin data and other currencies first though.

Looks great ,would love to talk more about it , what's the best way to reach you?

thanks, cjm712 -at- gmail

Loaded slowly, but really nice UI imo. Nice work.

Thanks -- will work on the initial load time.

It crashes Chrome on the iPad.

Ok, will look into it. Works fine for me Chrome on iPhone -- don't have an iPad to test with. Thanks for the feedback.

It doesn't crash safari though on my iPhone. Loaded in like 5 seconds for me.

nothing loads for me in Chrome either that or it is taking an age.

hrrm, ok, i'm watching it -- everything is loading fine for me

It loads fine for me. In Chrome 28 Windows. Plus, very nice. I really enjoyed this :)

thanks! :)

Can kinda confirm. Took 1 min to load background color (!) at first, then nothing else loaded. On a second attempt it seems to work.

works well with the latest version of firefox

this is cool, but it would be great to also see volume

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