quote:
. Usually you'll never execute all of your order at the best quote even in the most liquid currency markets unless you're doing over-the-counter*. So you'll start laddering up the blocks which you can see start widening out pretty damn quickly.

Thanks, Benny. Good explanation.

The most common quantity of btc on the buy (bid) side on the exchange wiki pasted (BTC-E) is .01 btc.

That's right...a whopping order for 71 cents worth of bitcoin!

The message board that accompanies that website sarcastically calls those orders "bots" because their only purpose is an attempt to drive up the bid price for btc, thus skewing the actual spread and price for any usable quantity of btc.

The site I linked (LINK ) shows the bid/ask prices for a "meaningful quantity" of btc. Their designation of a meaningful quantity appears to fluctuate somewhere around 5.00 btc, although when the trading is VERY slow, I've seen it drop to 3.0 btc. That's the "ladder" of cumulative quantity of btc you're referring to.

And that 5.0 btc quantity on both the buy and sell side results in a spread of anywhere between 1.5% and 4% in USD prices.

As I type this the bid price is $72.26 and the ask price is $71.00, a price spread of $1.26, or a spread of 1.8%. And in this case, there are only 3.13 btc available to be traded at that spread so the spread is very narrow with such low volumes of buy/sell orders in place.

The activity is almost nil with only 6 transactions in the last 20 minutes. (That data is shown.) The total volume of btc traded in those 6 transactions = 5.67 btc.

So, you see, wiki, it's not a lie when I tell you what the "real" spread is. Learn from Benny's explanation and stop with the childish temper tantrums and name calling.