What's so special about the country I'm living in? And what? "financial fraud"?
While I don't really understand what you mean, I have to say that the Bitcoin market is open for all, and new ideas are coming out every day. I urge you to look at the product itself instead of judging by other factors.
I'm not interested in unethically making other Bitcoin fans' money in this united community. What we want is to enlarge and enrich the Bitcoin market and Bitcoinica does the job of bringing in Forex traders.
Zhoutong, I truely think that you are a genius. It so just happens that you seem to have an innate ability to come up with evil schemes. I truely believe you when you are saying that you don't know what I'm talking about.
Wikipedia has a good introduction to bucket shop concept and why it is considered a fraud in most of the civilized world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
Jesse Livermore was the most famous bucket shop promoter, although he never was a bucket shop operator. In fact the actual bucket shop operators went to the extreme to avoid being associated with him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lauriston_LivermoreYour country is significant in my mind, because the South East Asia was/is a heaven for bucket shops. In not sure about Singapore, but Hong Kong and Macau have a long and continuous history of fly-by-night hole-in-the-wall financial "exchanges". You have extended the long tradition with your offer of accepting single USD accounts to allow wagering on bitcoin.
Thanks for the explanation. However,
1. Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, it's a brokerage. All the hedging will take place if our clients place orders in a particular direction. The spread seems high now, but will be eventually lower.
2. We don't bet against our clients. We never want them to lose. There's no incentive to do that.
3. There are large scale transactions coming in Bitcoinica. First day we got 3700+ BTC, ranked number 3 among all trading platforms. Bitcoinica has more than 5% of total Bitcoin/USD trades. A bucket shop can't survive this amount of volume.
4. Because of stop orders and margin calls, we are partly responsible for the crash. Our orders are already influencing the market.
5. I'm not a Singapore citizen. I just live here. Thank you for teaching me the culture.