Quote from: SgtSpike on March 07, 2013, 05:27:40 PM

Not really. Day traders are going to trade on the exchange with the consistently lowest spread. Because MtGox is the most used exchange, it'll have the lowest spread. And because it has the lowest spread, it is the most used exchange.

Exchanges already exist with fees below MtGox, but they aren't as successful, because they all have various problems. Bitfloor was hacked and not smart with security. Coinbase has issues with downtime. Most other exchanges aren't available for one particular main currency or another - MtGox has the most world-wide currencies supported AFAIK.

MtGox isn't nearly as good as it could be, but nothing better has yet presented itself.

+1 I agree with General Spike for once. Cheesy

Speculators go where the volume is. It's the easiest and most lucrative place to separate amateur "investors" from their money. It's like trying to catch salmon during their run up the river, rather than trying to catch them in the ocean.

Plus, for the big pump-and-dump artists, they can control the reference exchange rate for the entire Bitcoin world there.

This is the "good" MtG now. For those who remember, it was a real POS with dark pools (to make things easier for the pump-and-dump brigade) in 2010-11, before the 611 crash and the Karpeles era. Cheesy