Is there any reason why Ixcoin is so volatile now?
It can go up to 10k and back to 6k in a few days.
Highest buy price on the books vs lowest sell price on the books.
If you sell to the existing orders instead of listing your coins for sale on the sell side you dump them to highest buy order on file, which tends to be quite low, especially since the bitcoins I sent to Vircurex have not arrived despite emailing them about it for several months. When I was able to keep sending bitcoins to Vircurex daily or even several times a day I was able to keep replenishing the buy side, but until the last bitcoins I sent there actually arrive I am not sending any more. So people keep dumping on me at lower and lower prices.
Similarly on the other side, if you simply buy from existing sellers instead of just placing your buy order on the buy side to wait for someone to dump on you, you get the lowest current sell offer price, which tends to be quite high.
There tends to be a huge gap between the highest buy offer and the lowest sell offer, and the usual robots do not attempt to close the gap unless they battle each other, since they just place buy offers as low as they can while still being top of the pile (aka first in line to be taken) and sell offers as high as they can while still being lowest offer aka first to be taken.
The sell offers not coming lower is probably due to dumpers not being willing to place their coins at a price and wait for a buyer to meet that price. They just throw away their coins at the existing buy offers, thus do not help build up the sell-side order-book.
I guess it is possible too that I might not be the only person who is no longer sending coins to Vircurex due to waiting still for bitcoins sent there many months ago to actually arrive there...
I keep wondering how anyone is buying stuff with bitcoins on Vircurex at all, maybe deposits of bitcoins are working for other people or maybe they have to sell something for bitcoins first before the have bitcoins there to buy anything with...
-MarkM-