Quote from: Trader Steve on August 08, 2011, 12:19:22 AM

(perhaps you can take on a partner who is bullish on BTC and is willing to finance you?)

I have definitely been thinking about this and am considering it very strongly now. It would be a way for someone who wants to accumulate bitcoin (well, that's me--I guess I mean someone who wants to accumulate bitcoin and has the capital to do so) to accumulate them without paying exchange fees and without moving the market, but I would continue to do all the work.

If anyone with very deep pockets is interested, let me know!

Quote from: Trader Steve on August 08, 2011, 12:38:45 AM

Another idea: Sell products and services on your site that have a higher mark-up (say 30% to 100%). This could possibly give you enough profits to make the "thin margin" sales (Amazon) worth the trouble and risk.

Another great idea. You'll be getting a PM from me soon!

Quote from: Anonymous on August 08, 2011, 12:49:21 AM

Trader Steve gave some good advice. You can use the mt gox api to sell the coins straight away.

I know there is an api to sell the coins straight away, but does that include getting the coins from my wallet to Mt Gox straight away?

Quote from: kjj on August 08, 2011, 04:07:10 AM

Resist the temptation to speculate with them. Either you don't know what you are doing and will take unnecessary losses, or you do know what you are doing and really should keep that activity separate.

Yeah, I learned my lesson on that one. I was following the "high for the week is on Wednesday or Thursday" rule but news that causes a slide down can happen any day of the week and I don't have enough capital to hold the bitcoins till they go back up again AND keep running the business. I have tightened things up and am not losing nearly as much as when I was trying to speculate, but still am going the wrong direction.

Quote from: milk on August 08, 2011, 03:10:09 PM

Maybe you should charge a little. 0.0000001 cent @ whatever is not a real price. The average for a larger sum like 50 btc is always lower.
Try 0.5% .Thats not really much. I hope you will continue

Don't worry, I'll definately continue.

It will be back up just as soon as I can code a proper exchange rate. 0.5% would not be enough to keep the 24-hour average as the exchange rate, but someone has PM'd me an excellent idea for the exchange rate--the lower of last price and the 24-hour average. That should stop the losses (on average anyway) as long as I automate trading. Does everyone reading this think that is a fair exchange rate (still with no added fees!)?

On a side note, I'm not a programmer. I'm having trouble grabbing the 'last' price from Mt Gox. Here is the current php that grabs the '24 hour weighted average' from bitcoincharts.com:

Quote

$string = file_get_contents("http://bitcoincharts.com/t/weighted_prices.json");
$json_a=json_decode($string,true);
echo $json_a['USD']['24h'];
?>

My site then just calls what this code echos whenever it needs the current BTC rate.

2 BTC bounty to whoever can rewrite this code (not give me hints on rewriting it myself, actually rewriting it, remember, I'm not a programmer Wink

to echo the lower of the Mt Gox 24 hour weighted average and the Mt Gox last price.

Thanks for the help everyone (don't stop now, though, happy to hear any more ideas on making this profitable!).