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Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is only MtGox. Other places, like https://btc-e.com/, show a much lower price

btc-e is having market issues right now. There are literally no coins for sale. Everything has been bought up by arbitrage bots to push to mtgox.

I'm relatively ignorant on BitCoin but would this not be a huge arbitrage opportunity...?

It would be if it was easier to get money in and out of the exchanges. As it is now it can take days/weeks to move money between accounts, especially on Mt Gox.

EDIT: It seems I've got the details wrong, please excuse this comment. I'm just leaving my original text intact so the replies make sense.

The MtGox USD price is not real. At least not for the purposes of arbitrage. Although it says $600 USD, no one (or almost no one) is actually buying or selling BTC on MtGox for $600 USD. They are buying/selling it for other currencies and MtGox is using an internal exchange rate to convert it to USD. Their internal exchange rate does not reflect the risk free rate you can actually get if you were to try to arbitrage it across borders (namely china/japan). MtGox does not allow you to withdraw USD.

People ARE buying/selling on Mtgox at 600. However, the price is not "real" because it is inflated by the inability to withdraw USD from Mtgox.

What is happening is that people are buying BTC on Mtgox and then transferring it to other exchanges to withdraw their USD.

For more accurate price information I suggest goign off coinbase or bitstamp.

This is not true. Look at the price on BTCChina and you'll see it's pretty much equivalent to the USD price on MtGox. Bitstamp and Coinbase are lagging behind because BTCChina and MtGox make up most of the volume.

MtGox does allow you to withdraw in USD, it's just that you get put on a long processing queue. The problem is that their Japanese bank has restricted them to only 10 international wires per day. They've been having a really tough time with banks. Interestingly, if you have a Japanese bank account, you can withdraw Yen from MtGox within a few hours.

Regarding price - MtGox's has been fairly in step with BTCChina's price. BTCChina and MtGox both represent the top exchanges by 30-day volume, so it would seem to me that MtGox's price is more accurate than BitStamp's price which lags miserably behind every rally.

They've been having a really tough time with banks

Although from what I was reading the last time this came up, these issues are largely caused in no small part by poor decisions on the part of MtGox.

That is not true.

According to graph at the top of mtgox.com there are about 1000-3000 bitcoins being sold for USD every hour.

This volume is huge compared to the volume for euros or any other currency on Mtgox.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/EUR

Hm I had read previously that they only had one order book for all currencies, but now that doesn't seem accurate (or reasonable). Guess that's what I get for believing it without looking into it myself :/

No, there is no way to get your US Dollars out of Mt.Gox, after you sell you BitCoin, in a reasonable timeframe. Supposedly they only process about 10 total USD wire transfer withdrawals per day. There is also a question of bankruptcy risk as it is common knowledge that the US Government seized several million dollars from MtGox earlier this year.

Anyone that quotes MtGox as the reference bitcoin price almost certainly has little experience trading bitcoin. Bitstamp is a much better reference price or if you want to be US centric CoinBase.

It's not that arbitrage opportunities don't exist in the Bitcoin world. There are some rare and fleeting ones. This just isn't a good one.

This is silly. If you have the liquidity, who cares if you have to wait 6 weeks for free money? This is why other exchanges are dry. Not everyone is a broke college kid for whom six weeks waiting for money is a life-stopping crash

MtGox withdrawal issues are huge. I wouldn't downplay their issues at all. Speaking from personal experience I had a $10,000 June/July withdrawal stuck for 8 weeks. Customer service wouldn't give any timeline.

After a lot of back and forth they said I could pay a 5% fee and get my USD in 7 days. Basically a bribe for them to convert to JPY and send the transfer through..

At the time, they said withdrawals would take 2 weeks.. Now if they say 6 weeks you should pray :p

I ended up buying back some BTC (at about 10% loss due to price) and then selling later on bitstamp due to the recent price rise. Worked out okay for me but please DO NOT USE GOX FOR USD.

Problem is, it isn't just 6 weeks. Not to mention restricting withdrawals is the same strategy you would take to prevent a run on the bank if you were insolvent. You should give it a try though and let us know how long it takes.

One could argue that the prices posted at MtGox have always been reached :)

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