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With the bitcoin Halving Day quickly approaching I received a quite a few emails from people asking where to find market data and a few asking for where to buy some bitcoins.  I am not going to go into the purchase of bitcoins at the moment, perhaps I will go into that at a later date (to tell the truth, I have never bought bitcoins, I mine them).

I will however give you a quick primer on where I go for exchange market data.

First off, there are A LOT of exchanges.  Just look at as the Exchanges page over at the bitcoin wiki.  I have not even visited most of them and I have only actually used two them (perhaps one day I will find the time to explore more).

The source I use most and get my data feed from (and is reputed to be largest) is Mt.Gox.  If you visit their home page you will see a dark grey strip along the top of the page that has current live spot prices at the Mt.Gox Exchange, even better though if you click on the strip a very nice candlestick chart will drop down.

With the Mt.Gox chart up (or down depending on your point of view) you will see a few buttons that allow you to zoom to Day, Week and Month data.  You will also see a link to Mt.Gox Live, a rather creative way of charting market data.

Mt.Gox also haves an API or application programming interface for the truly geeky among us that allows us to pull data directly from their exchange to use in our own applications, the MtGox USD Price box to the right is a simple example.  For another (and far better example) go have a look at what Clark Moody does using the API, JavaScript and WebSockets.

A word of caution: I am not affiliated with Mt.Gox and neither recommend or recommend against using Mt.Gox for financial transactions, I do however recommend looking at their market data.



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