Bitcoin Trading and API Setup

So I'm sure you've heard about bitcoins, and how valuable they've become since their inception. The value of a single bitcoin was as high as $266 on April 9th, 2013, and is currently fluctuating around $115(according to the MtGox exchange). I assume you understand what a bitcoin is, if you have absolutely no clue, check out the FAQ on the bitcoin wiki.

There are different exchanges around the world that will take my USD or whatever currency, and let me invest in bitcoins. I can always mine bitcoins, but the focus of this post is on trading bitcoins. There's currently no licensing required to trade bitcoins, and no minimum deposit for a trading account. An exchange is just an organized market for trading. The most prominent exchange with the highest trading volume is MtGox which seems to be based out of Japan. Recently they've been caught in some trouble, causing the US Federal Gov't to get involved. There are other exchanges like campbx, but the price of a bitcoin between exchanges vary (arbitrage anyone?!). The price of a bitcoin at campbx may be a couple dollars off MtGox at any given time, and MtGox could trade at values that campbx never reaches just because there are more people trading on MtGox to move the price.

Before going any further it's important to note how much information I can see about the orders. Ideally I would want to see not only the highest bid and offer (seeing only the top bid and offer is the 'top of the orderbook'), but the second highest bid, and the third, and so on (seeing all orders would be full book rather than top of book). It also makes a huge difference to see the volume of the order. If someone puts an order in to buy bitcoins, I want to know how many bitcoins they're looking to buy or sell. There are 3 different levels of order insight in tradable markets, Level I, Level II, and Level III. They're described fairly well here at investopedia.

Ideally I would want Level III. I want to be able to see all the orders, the size of those orders, who's ordering, and I want to be able to put an order in at any time to execute a trade at the press of a keystroke. Unfortunately once I set up an account on any bitcoin exchange, the options given by the site UI are barely giving me Level I access, and it's all with the mouse(ugh). So trading is tedious and is meant to be for long term holding. I can only input one buy or sell order at a time, and it's extremely time consuming to flip through different pages of the exchange's site, trying to modify, cancel, or add more orders.

Luckily there's hope! All I have to do is write my own program, that connects to the exchange's API through a full-duplex websocket connection. A nice challenge would be to make an program that will make it easy to trade on multiple exchanges, all with a simple keystroke, such as with popular trading platforms for stock trading. There's a nice charting and Level II type resource for bitcoin that's publically available, and that's bitcoin.clarkmoody.com. If you want to dedicate a screen just to the chart, just go to http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/widget/chart/. As you can see the service only reflects prices on MtGox. It's nice just because the clarkmoody site uses the charts from RTBTC, and RTBTC is currently in private beta, so there's no real other way of getting these charts short of creating your own or begging RTBTC.