The security and technical challenges aren't as high as most people seem to think and are pretty familiar to people who work on the technical side of trading in the financial world. I would imagine though that most of the people with the knowhow are already in jobs lucrative enough that theres little incentive to write a BTC exchange.
Or at least that's how my calculations go - while I've got the technical and financial background to make me tempted to write a derivatives platform for BTC, I already make a decent salary and my perceived risk vs profit calculation doesn't work out to a number that would make it worth my while. Unless I get bored enough to do it anyway!
Exactly! Your unwillingness to solve those challenges on the cheap, against an entrenched and well-funded leader, is what creates the "high start-up costs".
I don't think they'd be quite as hard to displace as people assume either. I've not spent very long looking at MtGox but I'm sure that all the usual tricks that real-world exchanges use to boost usage would work against MtGox as well - offering tighter spreads, lower transaction fees, encouraging market makers with incentives such as refunded fees as long as they're covering the market for a certain portion of the month, etc.
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The security and technical challenges aren't as high as most people seem to think and are pretty familiar to people who work on the technical side of trading in the financial world. I would imagine though that most of the people with the knowhow are already in jobs lucrative enough that theres little incentive to write a BTC exchange.
Or at least that's how my calculations go - while I've got the technical and financial background to make me tempted to write a derivatives platform for BTC, I already make a decent salary and my perceived risk vs profit calculation doesn't work out to a number that would make it worth my while. Unless I get bored enough to do it anyway!
Exactly! Your unwillingness to solve those challenges on the cheap, against an entrenched and well-funded leader, is what creates the "high start-up costs".
I don't think they'd be quite as hard to displace as people assume either. I've not spent very long looking at MtGox but I'm sure that all the usual tricks that real-world exchanges use to boost usage would work against MtGox as well - offering tighter spreads, lower transaction fees, encouraging market makers with incentives such as refunded fees as long as they're covering the market for a certain portion of the month, etc.