Thanks for clarifying things Rampion. I've been following the market depth at GOX daily for a month or so now. It has been looking a lot better lately. Though the depth is really an easily manipulated thing and even when it's not I wonder how valuable it is, consistently speaking (as orders are always pulled).
I'm wondering how much business is actually leaving Gox. Any ideas how much the Dwolla thing is really affecting them? I know Dwolla itself was probably not a huge funding source for them (more for small cats), but I think it scared people off Gox anyway, and rightfully so.
Anyone have any ideas on Gox here? I also wonder how much money is moving to Bitstamp. Any ways of seeing this via an order book / market depth comparison between the two?
A lot of coins disappeared from Gox - it looks that almost
BTC50k coins vanished from Gox order book just after the Dwolla situation, and obviously that figure does not count all the coins that were sitting on Gox without being on the order book. Anyhow, taking into account that the total amount of coins in the order book went from aprox.
BTC170k to aprox.
BTC120k, we can estimate that aprox.
30% of the total amount of coins sitting on Gox left that exchange after the Dwolla situation.
This huge amount of coins did not go to Bitstamp - only
BTC18k are sitting at Bitstamp's order book, so we can safely assume that the gran majority of the individuals that withdrew their coins from Gox just sent them to a local wallet.
On the contrary, the bid sum increased just after the Dwolla situation (as expected - fearing people converting their fiat to BTC to withdraw it fast), but then it stabilized quite nicely to aprox. $21M, which is still more than x20 times the amount of fiat at Bitstamp order book, and is still a figure very close to ATH ($23M).
In my opinion we are living a "wait and see" situation. The fearful already withdrew their coins from MtGox immediately after the Dwolla thing, and the ones which still have some of their coins and their fiat there (I personally do) are not very worried.
Honestly, I do not see Bitstamp taking away a lot of business from MtGox soon - you have to take into account that verification to deal with significant money is a lengthy process, and Bitstamp does not even allow EUR trades. Then, Gox has a long history and is very trusted - they had customers who dealt with million $ and they never run away with their money, which is a big plus for big-money traders. I really doubt big time investors will run from Gox unless some real, trusted alternative is launched - perhaps an exchange run by some big Wall Street player.
I guess the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin is a very big financial player buying MtGox to run their operations in a 100% legal and professional way, while improving every aspect of their trading engine.