Quote from: scomil on July 17, 2012, 07:21:53 AM

The kind of price action that we are currently witnessing is to be expected and reminds me of my early days trading futures. Back in early 2000, or so, Eurexchange opened up a electronic futures exchange which competed with London's LIFFE, which was open outcry and very very corrupt. Banks where tired of all the slippage caused by the open outcry system and decided to shift their trading to Eurex. All of a sudden everyone had access to trade multiple markets at once (as opposed to being stuck in one pit), and spread trades between different futures contracts became a lot more tradeable. Furthermore, in the early days all order-entry was manually done by a carbon based person, no bots, no algos, no co-located servers etc, so it was all up to the speed and ingenuity of the trader. During the early Wild West days of futures trading, before all the bots made it very hard for humans to gain any edge, there was a legendary trader rumored to be based in Ireland, nicknamed - The Flipper. This trader didn't so much make money out of the market as he did spoofing bids and offers, pulling them all at once and shifting the market and essentially capturing his money from other traders. This lasted until 2005 or so when the market outgrew his capacity for gaming it. You can read about it here:

http://www.traderdaily.com/08/insight-from-the-flipper-catching-up-with-paul-rotter/

On another note. Bitcoin needs to have a global exchange that pools all of the smaller exchanges volumes so as to ensure greater order depth. It's silly that a few USD 100K can push the price of bitcoin around by 10+% or so on a single day. Just shows how small and undeveloped this market is.

Yes undeveloped in the sense that the price of bitcoin is grossly undervalued.