Can someone make money by cycling through currencies and exchanges?
I recently got this idea from ...  You're not the first. (Or the 8000th.) Arbitrage (pronounced in French) is "the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same asset in different markets in order to profit from tiny differences in the asset's listed price. It exploits short-lived variations in the price of identical or similar financial instruments in different markets or in different forms. Arbitrage exists as a result of market inefficiencies and it both exploits those inefficiencies and resolves them." Sadly, no, you can't make any money off of it, because other people already have. EDIT: "cryptocurrency" is not a Magic Word which makes trading negate the laws of economics and sociology. The answer to whether one can arbitrage cryptocurrency is the same as whether you can answer all other currencies: how inefficient (slowness in price changes reflected from market to market) the cryptocurrency markets are. I guarantee that you're not the 8000th person to try and arbitrage cryptocurrency. If there's still a difference in prices between markets, the whole cryptocurrency market is seriously broken.