Quote from: swaptaker on December 17, 2017, 06:02:13 PM

Quote from: Yakamoto on December 17, 2017, 05:24:39 PM

Quote from: sukoon on October 19, 2017, 09:02:38 AM

Why there are significant differences in current BTC value between different exchanges.

It comes down to the natural price differences due to arbitrage being a challenge for the Bitcoin network, due to confirmation times and everything. It also comes down to choices on the exchanges too, since exchanges are almost closed systems and don't experience any significant influence from the outside as they are quite limited in their incoming Bitcoin (most of the time) and a lot of Bitcoin is exchanged within whatever exchange it goes to; it doesn't move around a lot.

There are also some issues with having money in other currencies or countries that you would not necessarily be able to access all the time.

Arbitrage is really expensive, you need capital in fiat money and bitcoins to make simultaneous transactions between different exchanges. And each excahnge is independent from each other and they're free. So it's normal to see price differences between them.

Not only that you need to have a bunch of accounts in many exchanges and countries and you also need to have a substantial amount of money so you are able to benefit from those differences in those prices, and you also need to have some way to do this automatically since doing this by hand is going to be impossible so as we can arbitrage is something that is going to take a significant amount of effort to do it right.