I noticed you see things different, there is however only one arbitrage approach where you keep the BTC balanced at all exchanges(no gains or losses in BTC) and only gain on each exchange in $ from the BTC shifting/swapping on scalping, this is called arbitrage and it has 0 risk
Oh just one final brainfart
when you have 10BTC and the market price is $7 per BTC, you still only have 10BTC. You only have $70 at the time that you sell the BTC
I wasn't supposed to answer but whatever...
This is how I see things: an investment has a duration and a ROI. So if I invest $1000 right now and collect $1300 in 3 months I am earning 10% a month. If I invest $1000 right now and collect $700 in 3 months I am losing 10% a month. I honestly couldn't care less about what happens during those 3 months. All I see is X money goes in and X money comes out.
See where I am getting at?
Yep I see what you mean but that approach doesnt relate to arbitrage. Arbitrage isnt a longterm investment, its short term and ideally multiple micro transactions.
What you refer to is dealing with one investment ie. buying BTC for $ and then only keeping the BTC hoping the price will rise and then sell at a high. Scalping deals with 2 different investments which entails short term which would be the $ scalping from the BTC which is a 0 risk game along with the longterm BTC investment to sell at a high. If the BTC price matters to someone making use of arbitrage between exchanges they should simply not keep huge volumes of BTC to scalp with.
I see what you are both talking about. In the above scenario if you want to cash out the entire system back to USD then yes, you have a $100 loss.
But in our case everything is in BTC so there is no problem if the value of the BTC goes down. Everyone still has their BTC and we can all cash out and get our BTC back. Yes everyone lost relative to the USD in the scenario but we do not care (well we might care when we - the customers - go to pay our bills in USD and have to convert) but that is not Bitscalper's problem. They do all accounting in BTC and move all profits from fiat back into BTC so as long as they have some sort of profit on average on each pair of trades the total BTC in the system can only go up.
nmat: also note that if you just held BTC and it went down you have now lost money. But if you put it into the sytem, make a small gain in BTC and the value goes down you have lost less money (in USD) than you would have lost if you did nothing.
Exactly what I am getting at, a big scalper with enough to cover most of the arbitrage volume would not convert his BTC at the end of the month to pay for bills. He would simply use the $ earned from swapping BTC between exchanges and withdraw that to pay the bills.