Hacker News Reader

Well, a chosen price is a limit order, which can go unfilled. If I order 1000 BTC for 0.01$ am I going to get filled? At current market prices no, because currently there is no supply of BTC at that price. A market determines the price. If a good is well defined a market will automatically be centralized. Gold and oil are extremely liquid markets traded on exchanges, that means traded based on limit order books.

View on HN

Exactly, that's why we will include some graphs about the state of the market so people can figure out their prices

The NYSE processes millions of orders per second, MtGox hundreds per second. So you have machines which work over a protocol (FIX) to establish the price mechanism. In a exchange system there are limit orders and the limit orderbook. You basically have a timestamp problem, which is kind of prependicular to the bitcoin system. At every point t in time, there is a fair value of BTC-USD. And a system which solves that problem will be highly centralized, by definition. So unless you come up with a new system for processing limit orders, people will be arbitraging between a slower system and MtGox, Bitstamp, etc.

We know, you cannot get informed of every single trade made because of the P2P architecture. But you can still use the exchange if there are enough trades that you are informed of!

What problem you are actually wanting to solve? I don't see why I would use a slower system. waiting can be very costly if the price is moving against you. you need quick traders to provide liquidity. which is what you will find if you get users onto such a system. the high volume traders won't like it. I think there is actually room to reinvent the worldwide exchange system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com