2
On the btc-e most Sell and Buy Orders are with fraction numbers:
price BTC USD
922.1 0.01 9.221
926.002 0.111922 103.63999584
928.127 0.23490692 218.02345493
928.128 0.0227344 21.1004332
928.129 0.0227444 21.10973722
928.725 0.78773138 731.58582589
why is nearly none selling rounded up amounts like 0.01 or 0.5 but instead 0.111992?
3
I suppose trading bots are the reason here. They calculate usually with big precision, so such orders are normal for them.
It is also possible that btce is doing some crosspairs (MtGox does it for sure):
Someone wants to sell 1 BTC for 800 EUR. Exchange insert this order also to USD market with the price 1100.123123 USD. Due to price USD/EUR the amount might look like this.
Finally, some exchanges can reverse pair, e.g. BTC/USD and USD/BTC. Then the price will look so strange.
0
Generally, people tend to use round integers as in "I will sell at $900". Some users may want to make sure to sell before the market starts taking a crack at such a natural accumulations of offers, but still want to get the highest price. For that they might create an offer just slightly below $900, i.e. $899.9837922. In that case, they would lose two cents per BTC, but their offer would be matched before a big set of offers.
that would explain 899.9 and maybe 899.98, but why the trailing random numbers? – rubo77 – 2013-12-05T11:08:08.290
Perhaps they feel that it is useful that they can see when exactly their offer was matched from a site like bitcoinity. – Murch – 2013-12-05T12:49:10.697