Quote from: Nathonas on March 24, 2014, 09:38:40 PM

Quote from: BittBurger on March 24, 2014, 09:33:29 PM

Quote from: crazyivan on March 24, 2014, 07:35:13 PM

Heh, that is really cunning plan. But I am really interested in experiences of people who have been actually doing arbitrage. With this constant 2% spread on average between exchanges, there must be some people who profit on this. Am I the only one making money on BTC arbitrage?

Well, among all my friends, yes. Every one of them ultimately lost all their BTC trying to play the system. Or got it stolen out of their online accounts. Seriously. All of them.
I would be interested in what kind of money you are making. I know there are some guys making money in this forum doing arbitrage. But part me assumes its not very much, and not worth the risk.
If for example you've brought yourself from 10 BTC to 20 BTC, I would be interested in hearing about it. It takes guts honestly.

PS: Go to the Economics forum, then Speculation subforum and you'll meet 500 dudes who are doing this.
PPS: Starting a thread on arbitrage and having those signature URL's might be considered strange.

-B-

I'm inclined to agree with this. I'm sure you DO make a small amount of profit with every trade by doing this, but there are risks, and of course you are spending a good amount of time doing this (and waiting for confirmations every time you move BTC). I remember this topic actually coming up quite a lot on reddit's bitcoin sections when I used to frequent them, and most of the time people's general sentiment would be that it's not worth it and I tend to agree. If you are making money with it good for you but I doubt there's a lot of people doing it, and I doubt even more that they would share their successes.

Thank you for your post, yes, this is something I agree with. The entire arbitrage is risky but what related to BTC ecosystem is not? Mining speculative coins and waiting for the price to go up? How many of those people have in their wallets never to use again? Investing into cloud hashing which absolutely never reaches ROI? Tons of people do that. Investing tons of cash into Butterfly labs and similar ASIC machines which get delivered a year after their deadline and are next to useless. Lots of people did that. Mtgox? Do not even want to go there.
My point is that all these are EXTREMELY risky ventures and still people do it, a few make money, the rest lose money. Personally, I have managed to make a nice ROI so far. This is not something you can live on, you are correct but the main problem is that people focus only on Bitstamp and BTCe and prices there. The most money I made taking advantage of BTC prices on smaller exchanges.