This is how to buy Quark Coin – using Quark Coin exchanges. However, there are several such exchanges and the prices fluctuate a lot. You should make sure you’re getting the better deal out of this.
Quark Coin is an alternate crypto-currency to Bitcoin, one of the so-called altcoins. It is designed to be CPU based only. This has an advantage of being more democratic in the mining process. However, the flip side is that people with botnets tend to mine a lot of these. This is a common problem with CPU based coins such as ProtoShares as well. If you want to know more about Quark Coin, check out the official announcement thread. There are links to other resources, forums, mining pools, etc.
Quark Coin got a lot of attention in the crypto-currency community in the month of November 2013 when it broke into the top 10 crypto-currencies by market cap and then into the top 5. According to CoinMarketCap, at the time of this writing, the top 5 crypto-currencies by market cap are Bitcoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, QuarkCoin and Namecoin. Quarkcoin also had a lot of interest from the Chinese and is listed on major Chinese altcoin exchanges.
I want to discuss the best ways to buy Quark coin. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly!) Quark coin is one of those altcoins that has a fairly large price spread between the major exchanges. This means there are some arbitrage opportunities with buying Quark coin on an exchange that prices it lower against Bitcoin and selling on an exchange that prices it higher. I’ll discuss briefly about this arbitrage below. You’ll mostly buy Quark coin though Bitcoin, so also check out the Buy Bitcoin section of this blog. Also, there was a good analysis of Quark Coin by Vitalik Buterin that I don’t fully agree with but would still recommend it to Quark coin investors.
- Cryptsy: Cryptsy is one of the major altcoin exchanges and contains the most variety of altcoins for you to trade. You can buy Quarkcoin on Cryptsy with Bitcoin, i.e. the currency pair QRK/BTC is traded on Cryptsy. People in the altcoin community seem to have a love-hate relationship with Cryptsy, so also check out some alternatives to Cryptsy before you commit your money there. It is not unusual for Cryptsy to be down or have a high trade lag. Sometimes the transactions take a long time to confirm. If you want to buy sooner, you might consider the alternatives that are faster and more efficient.
- Bter: Bter is one of the Chinese exchanges for altcoins, but it has an English version too. I like Bter more and more, although the last few days the site was down for maintainance a few more times than I would have liked. Still, the trades are very smooth and efficient. Besides, one of the best features of Bter is that the fees are lower than Cryptsy, especially when selling altcoins. For most trades, including selling Quark coin, the fees at Bter are 50% lower than the fees at Cryptsy, which can add up depending on how much you’re selling. The fees for buying Quark coin are same on Cryptsy and Bter (0.2%). I’ve had far smoother withdrawals at Bter than Cryptsy. I’ll also talk about how Bter is a good place to include if you’re looking for altcoin arbitrage trades in general and Quark coin in specific.
- Vircurex: I mention Vircurex mainly because I’ve yet to see the site down, so if you’re in a hurry or find a great opportunity to buy Quark coin, Vircurex might be a good bet. In addition, the price at Vircurex to buy Quark coin is the lowest, usually, among the major exchanges. This is a nice benefit of this exchange, and again, a great place to buy for long-term holding, short-term trading or arbitrage trades. They also have a new very small ‘dividend’ program from their transaction fees, so you might like that if you are holding a lot of Quark coins in your account at Vircurex.
- Coins-e: This is a fairly new exchange that looks promising. I haven’t personally bought any altcoins here, so I cannot vouch for this personally, but people on the forums seem to like it. They don’t seem to have a lot of market depth though, so if you’re looking for high volume of trades, this may not be the best place. However, such smaller exchanges can also be a great place to find the best rates sometimes, if you’re a small trader.
Quark Coin Arbitrage
Just a quick note on Quark Coin arbitrage. I’ve found that Quark coin seems to have one of the highest price spreads among the different exchanges. One possible explanation is that the Chinese really like this coin, so the price tends to be higher on Chinese exchanges and slightly lower on American/European exchanges. In any case, if you are able to maintain adequate liquidity on two different markets, then you can get into a good amount of Quark Coin arbitrage. Just be aware of the trading fees on the platforms though. In my experience so far, Cryptsy has the lowest price to buy Quark coin and Bter has the highest price to sell Quark Coin.
As a quick demonstration, see the images below. These are the trading histories on the three major exchanges for QRK/BTC and you can clearly see the arbitrage opportunities even after taking the trading fees into consideration.
QRK/BTC on Cryptsy
QRK/BTC on Bter
That’s my analysis of buying quark coin with BTC. Do you have any other methods? Do you have any experiences with the exchanges that I listed above that you want to share? And have you tried any Quark coin arbitrage? Let us know in the comments!