Topic: BTC mispricings since DHS (Read 339 times)

So I'll try to say something vaguely interesting as part of my 5 just-for-the-sake-of-it posts.

Since I've been watching BTC it has seemed that in general the BTC price on other exchanges has seemed to follow mtgox pretty well, accounting for a sensible delay or discrepancy down to the difficulty in transferring funds between exchanges. This is usually ensured by arbitrage between exchanges, but is not perfect due to delays in money transfer etc.

Since the DHS announcement it has seemed to me that the BTC/USD price has been markedly lower on other exchanges than Mtgox. This must be because people don't think they would easily be able to remove funds from (or deposit to) mtgox at the moment or in the near future, or possibly also because people envisage mtgox's position as the most liquid exchange being threatened in the near future.

You might argue that the higher price on Mtgox highlights the benefits of bitcoin, people are willing to pay over the odds for it, in the knowledge that it will be easy to transfer their funds off very quickly, other currency might be much harder to remove.

In the medium term I wonder what this means for mtgox and BTC/USD. Mtgox is presumably going to lose a lot of US business, and there are other exchanges who are (at least somewhat) licensed in the US ready to pick up the slack. Also, once this business drains off mtgox over the coming months, will this upward pressure on the price be released, and lead to a little relaxation in the price? Pure speculation, who knows.