05 June 2011

Baffled by Bitcoins

I am flummoxed by bitcoins. Checkout the markets. What's the catch? Are these things fungible or not? If so, why would I be able to cross bid/ask everywhere? I must be missing something, because someone with even the most rudimentary trading skills should be in there ripping everyone's faces off.

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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6 June 2011 at 14:58

    Markets are always and everywhere efficient - if there were arbitrage opportunities they would already have been exploited.

    :)

    This does look extremely strange. I don't even know how to think about this market. The EUR is particularly strange. I wonder if settlement problems against other currencies will be the demise of bitcoin.

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  2. pyker6 June 2011 at 19:11

    Also odd, from the bitcoin.org faq, is this:
    "While it's possible to find an individual who wishes to sell Bitcoin to you via Paypal, (perhaps via #bitcoin-otc ) most major exchanges do not allow funding through Paypal. This is due to repeated cases where someone pays for Bitcoins with Paypal, receives their Bitcoins, and then fraudulently complains to Paypal that they never received their goods. Paypal too often sides with the fraudulent buyer in this case, and so exchangers no longer allow this method of funding."

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