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Show HN: I built a live Bitcoin price aggregator with multiple indexes
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoThe server had a blip making me lose about an hour of data, but I was really excited to show it to you.
- odonnellryan 13y agoThis is pretty cool! What do you use for a stack?
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoSuper small. Node JS/express and flat files for history.
- aabraham 13y agoI want all time history! But on serious note, if you could dynamically add other "indexes" as well as show other currencies besides USD, that'd also be good. But I'm assuming this is a side project you're just messing with?
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoMaster plan: Add many other indexes. Let you choose the one you want. Let you embed it wherever you want. And more.
- alanbyrne 13y agoFirstly, that's very cool. Well done! Secondly, I know hardly anything about bitcoins - but here all I see is an arbitrage opportunity. Buy bitcoins from BTC-e and sell them on MTGox, which seems to be consistently around 150 (I assume USD) different. Am I missing something here?
- warfangle 13y agoSelling on MtGox, from what I understand, takes days (if not weeks). Buying is more straightforward.
- throwaway0094 13y agoIt is impossible to withdraw USD from MtGox.
- jawr 13y agoExcuse my ignorance, but can you elaborate?
- Tenoke 13y agoIt isn't impossible but users have to wait arbitrarily large amounts of time in order to withdraw - some people report waiting for months.
- TallboyOne 13y agoPeople have said they're nearly insolvent. They're also being sued I think. So, withdrawing USD from Mt. Gox you're screwed... I waited 3 months and gave, up, converted my dollars into bitcoin and sold it elsewhere.
- jcfrei 13y agowithdrawing USD from mtgox and transferring them to btc-e takes roughly two hours, depending on which payment processor you choose. okpay is usually pretty fast, but you loose about 50$ on commission. furthermore unless you are verified on mtgox, you've got a withdrawal limit of 1000$ per day. add to that the time interval during which your money is locked up either in the blockchain or the payment processor and you end up with substantial risk between the trades. EDIT: This only worked until the end of may - I've just noticed that OKPAY withdrawal is no longer an option: https://www.mtgox.com/pdf/20130528_okpay_statement.pdf https://www.mtgox.com/pdf/20130528_okpay_statement.pdf
- saosebastiao 13y ago
- dan1234 13y agoIt'd be great if you could include an overall average of the exchanges and also convert USD into other currencies.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shazow 13y agoI'd love to see this, but also including exchanges across different currencies (e.g. CNY) and normalized. Kind of like http://bitcoinaverage.com/ http://bitcoinaverage.com/ does, but with a nice chart like http://bitcoinindex.es/ http://bitcoinindex.es/. I suspect the visualized data will be much more interesting, since different local economies behave differently. For example, when BTC was "crashing" yesterday to $850 USD, Chinese trades were still holding well about $1000 USD. Eventually the arbitrage opportunity becomes too big and the gap is closed. Watching this is fascinating.
- aiaf 13y agoShows a blank page for me or a "Whoops, something went wrong!".
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoYep. You guys are hugging it to death. :)
- minimax 13y agoNow that I have a huge stash of bit coins I was thinking of making a service/startup where you could lend out your bit coins to people who would agree to pay you back a slightly higher number of coins in the future. Kind of like a bank but not corrupt and full of banksters like the federal reserve and JP Morgan. Once I have traction I can IPO but instead of sell my shares for cash I would sell them in bit coins. I think it would have some kind of restful API.
- stingraycharles 13y agoThis would open up the possibility of shorting Bitcoins. Could get big.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jnbiche 13y agoYou can already short Bitcoin; it's been possible for several years on Bitfinex and previous platforms (I forget the predecessor's name).
- jprice 13y agohttps://btcjam.com/ https://btcjam.com/ ??
- edwardy20 13y agoWhy would anyone want to borrow money in a deflationary currency (Bitcoins) rather than an inflationary one (dollars)?
- minimax 13y agoYou want to borrow bit coins so that you can improve your business and then pay back the coins with increased profits due to the improvements. Isn't that obvious? I'm not interested in dollars because I don't think they are particularly useful. I convert all my dollars to bit coins whenever I can. Look at the price of bit coin in dollar terms and you'll see everyone else is doing the same thing. Do you think the API for borrowing a deflationary currency should have a different API than an inflationary one?
- TallboyOne 13y agoAre you working on re-upping it? I would like to see.
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoYou mean a server issue? If re-upping means re-selling the data, send me your ideas. :)
- johlindenbaum 13y agoLooks nice, would like to see cavirtex exchange.
- M4v3R 13y agoThis is awesome. Where can I donate?
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoFiguring this out now. Thanks!
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoDonate here! 1FXxhiSRtEcJ9s6YteTyvV2uk2bvJqR9vC
- M4v3R 13y agoThanks, grab a couple of good beers :).
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoThanks!
- resu 13y agoLooks good! X and Y axes with price/time ticks would be really useful...
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoThanks! To get Y value at least, hover over a series and it'll give you the price at that point.
- gibybo 13y agoSo, assume I already have Bitcoins on Coinbase and have a verified account to sell them easily. Theoretically, my plan for free money would look like this: - Say I have 11 BTC on Coinbase. Wire $10k to OKPAY ($25 bank fee, 0% OKPAY commission) Send OKPAY money to BTC-E, $200 fee (2%). - Now I have $9,775 on BTC-E. Within ~1 second of each other, I enter a market order to buy 10.754 BTC on BTC-e for $9,775, and sell 10.754 BTC on Coinbase for $10,488.21 (after their 1% fee). These are the real market rates at the time of this post (accounting for book depth). I make $488 with no risk other than holding the Bitcoin for awhile, which anyone holding Bitcoin does anyway. Before I attempt to do this and find out the hard way why it ends up costing me money in the process, could someone please kindly point out the flaw in my plan?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Aqueous 13y agoThere's no flaw. It's called arbitrage. If enough people do it expect the gap to narrow, though. It just takes too much time to buy bitcoins with dollars/sell with dollars on some of these exchanges, which is why this is possible.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- highbees 13y agoIt works, but now you have to get your cash out of Coinbase, into your bank, and into BCT-e before you can do it again. You could also simply buy on BTC-e, transfer bitcoins to Coinbase, sell on coinbase. It's pure arbitrage.
- brown 13y agoThat's a classic arbitrage strategy. It works. The only reason that traditional "big" finance isn't doing it yet is that Bitcoin is too small/new. As for risks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage#Risks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage#Risks
- fchollet 13y ago
- jackgavigan 13y agoV.nice. There's a plethora of applications for good dynamic graphing. I'd suggest adding a time axis.
- Heliosmaster 13y agoSorry to break it out, but the plural of index is indices :(
- adrianwaj 13y agoThat's great. I put up a simple autorefresh page at: http://btcpricenow.com http://btcpricenow.com - still gathering my thoughts on Litecoin. http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ seems to be best for realtime charting.
- btbuildem 13y agoLooks good. Perhaps add BTCChina, and label the horizontal axis?
- patrickmay 13y agoDo you have any data on volume of trades you could add? I'm curious as to how liquid the market is.
- rafeed 13y agoNice, is this on github or similar?
- jstalin 13y agoJust an FYI - for some reason the HTTPS Everywhere plugin kills your site.
- timothyjcoulter 13y agoThanks for letting me know! We don't support https (yet) so that could be why.