Financial Regulations And Price Inconsistencies Across Bitcoin Markets

We document significant differences in Bitcoin prices across 11 different markets representing 26% of global Bitcoin trade volume. These differences must due to the identical nature of all bitcoin-result from characteristics of markets themselves. We examine differences across the markets and find that those which do not require customer identification for establishing an account are more likely to deviate from representative market prices than those which do, but we cannot identify an element to predict the timing or the size of the deviation. This implies that standard financial regulations, specifically know your-customer regulations, can have a non-negligible impact on the market for Bitcoin. This finding also implies that bitcoin price data can differ across exchanges demanding a careful approach to data sourcing. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.