My first arbitrage experience: 75 Hive up!

I didn't even know what the definition of the word 'arbitrage' was until I looked it up having watched a recent video by @taskmaster4450 (thanks man!).

Arbitrage

the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.
"profitable arbitrage opportunities"

My immediate reaction was that 'this wasn't something for me' but I stumbled on an opportunity to 'arbitrage' some HIVE-BTC, if that's the right way to put it?

This is all thanks to my having just recently opened up an @ionomy account and the fact that Bittrex has just recently opened Hive trading and deposits.

I noticed a buy order on Ionomy for 300 Hive at 4152 satoshis, so I put in a buy order on Bittrex for 3799 satoshis, topping the buy orders, which filled after about 5 seconds, then I just sold the Hive I already had on Ionomy. I'd had 300 on limit sell at crazy-pump prizes, so all I had to do was cancel those.

I then repeated the process with another 500 Hive immediately afterwards, but i had to transfer in that 500.

What I liked

Well I made $18 for about 15 minutes 'work' - what's not to like there!

And it's quite nice seeing this in my account, knowing I've got another 0.003 BTC sitting in my account... 0.3% closer to my overall goal of owning 1 whole BTC in its entirety!

What I didn't like

• It is a risk! You are in competition with other people trying to do the same thing, and those orders can be snapped up within seconds - imagine how annoying that would be! And one typo on the figures and you're majorly screwed - there's plenty of people queuing up to buy my 500 Hive for 0.0000039 BTC rather than 0.000039 BTC!
• As a result the whole experience is quite anxiety inducing- you have to be quick off the mark moving currencies about.
• I ended up with that 0.003 BTC on @ionomy, where it wasn't before hand, and it cost me $3 to get it out, I didn't want to leave it on the exchange overnight. I've already got a fair amount of BTC there on limit orders.

Final thoughts

I'm glad I did this little experiment, I'm gladder I didn't fuck it up, I'll take the $15 thanks very much, but I probably won't be doing this again, it's not my thing.

P.S. got my crazy limit sells back in place, and some crazy limit buys too!

And that 0.003 BTC will end up on Hive, eventually!