Bitcoinica order book is not used for matching. We only consider Mt. Gox prices for order execution.
The order book is provided for no purpose.
The order book is provided for no purpose.
Have you checked out btccharts.com/#m=btca-BTC-USD? Is it an accurate representation of your book?
Not that it really matters since orders aren't checked until time of execution anyway, so it's easily gamed.
It shouldn't be. We have mentioned again and again that you shouldn't use this order book for any trading decisions. They do not represent the actual liquidity.
We have always been processing orders in this manner, since the launch of the service. We had reasons to hide the order book from the public, and one of them is to avoid confusion. However, since so many people are asking for transparency, we just release our raw data to the public. (Actually in the back end, we don't really have such a nice sorted order book. In fact, I didn't even try to see aggregate orders from our customers before the order book is public.)
We *may* improve the data quality in the future, but that's not our priority. If you don't know how to use the data or don't trust it, just pretend it isn't available at all.
To put it simply: We are giving you the equal access to the data that we have, even though it could be useless for trading.
Interesting.
Zhou, can you please explain how you hedge yourself against risk when people take leveraged bets?
