Also there's no arbitrage opportunity where buying nine shares of a NYSE stock at 2.01 and one share at 2.00 means the "real" price is 2.009 but the NYSE stubbornly won't trade in fractional pennies (made up example numbers). The BTC transaction would just be one simple 2.009 transaction not some foolishness involving ten thousand trades or whatever.
You could have a BTC derivative market with somebody acting as the market maker just like NYSE, although thats kinda at cross purposes to the whole idea of a distributed currency.
There is no market maker so picking winners or losers by deciding who gets to front run vs who doesn't, is also kind of meaningless.
Or the TLDR short version is no it isn't gonna happen due to some inherent design issues.
There are some interesting issues. There's no particular technological reason GOOG couldn't say F the stock exchanges and issue a derived cryptocurrency and let people arbitrage between their new stock equivalent and the rest of the world. Well, there are a couple legal and accounting issues, but like I wrote, no technical issue.
Would not be totally surprised to see a BTC-like infrastructure replace existing monolithic market maker trading structures. Probably the same crooks owning the whole works, I'm talking about it as a deployed technology not a social phenomena or whatever. Much as running TCP/IP in 2014 doesn't mean anymore that you're part of DARPA.
A great plan if you want to buy coins for $632.58 and end up getting $260 for them because of a centralized system failure in an inherently decentralized protocol.
There's an old saying about idiots, idiot proofing, and long term trends in idiot breeding under idiot proofing environmental conditions. So invent a decentralized massively redundant system, someone WILL find a way to centralize it, and SPOF it, yet still blame the designer when it blows up. Like a law of human psychological nature.
It's not a gamble that I'm taking, but I understand the motivation of those who would.
There are certainly people out there with trading bots hooked up to the various exchanges. I know at least one guy who was trying something a few years ago. Because the volume is so low (~ few $M daily) I don't think there are any big players there. Also the market data and order entry protocols don't look like they would be suitable for the really high speed stuff.
That said, the market data and order entry protocols are really simple and I think most exchanges offer them for free. An automated bitcoin/dollar trading program would be a pretty easy thing to whip up. It would probably be a good introduction to automated trading for people that are interested in that sort of thing.
There are a lot of people building trading bots for cryptocurrencies, and it's pretty easy to get started by yourself. But not everyone has the chops or patience to do it well; for example gathering, aggregating and storing data across the various exchanges is a huge pain. So my site abstracts away that stuff.
You can't do real HFT with Bitcoin (and others) as the infrastructure just isn't there yet. The lowest I've heard is 15-30 second trades and even that's rare. Most people go for 1-2 hours.
Kind of:
https://github.com/maxme/bitcoin-arbitrage
I'm not a Bitcoin expert but I believe the problem is that moving money between exchanges takes quite some time and that reduces the volume that can be traded.
(Although mine is running in the cryptsy exchange, not gox)