I have been following IOTA for a while now and while concept of IOTA is very neat, it appears that the community/leadership surrounding it are in shambles. The network is not really working unless you run a full node, and even then if you send your IOTA to an address you have transferred IOTA out of you can lose them forever. These issues make me very nervous about the whole project.
Also, does each user operate under the same settings?
Seems like more users = less arbitrage opportunity because we're competing against each other.
Who gets priority when trading? Or is it more like we're pooling our money for arbitrage, and then each node gets a proportional split based on their deposit amount (like a mining pool)?
We don't want to get into too much detail as we are aware of few competitors (though they don't offer their platforms to public but to selected clients instead) but we can tell you that your thinking is on the right track.
Historically we've been able to make up to 8 % profit a month. This is reasonable arbitrage profit - anyone claiming to make more is probably fraudulent, so beware.
I can't answer the pooling question but will tell you that we make sure it's 100% fair for all users.
I'd say your best bet is to check out some of the high quality themes at http://themeforest.net -- if you don't want to deal with html / css the wordpress themes are really easy to setup and look amazing.
Thanks so much for the advice! My primary concern with Wordpress is that it has been around long enough that it could actually be harder to set up because of out of date tutorials, and that I've been told it's got a lot of security issues. I also have a vague horrible memory of trying to install it in 2006 or 2007 and it being a disaster to customize... but I don't want to hold that against it in 2014. On the other hand, I've been told that because it's a blogging platform (is it really?) it's easier to update content through the web interface, and that makes it get higher rankings on Google (for now).
I don't know enough to evaluate any of these claims or worries; do you think that they're still true? I certainly absolutely positively have no problem paying for a high quality theme, I'm much more worried about creating a mess on my server that will take dozens of hours of attention to clean up.
These days, Wordpress is quite secure for most uses - especially a simple corporate site. Here's how I'd go about it-
1. Buy theme from themeforest or similar.
2. Buy a shared hosting account from webfaction or similar (less than $10/month)
3. Use their one-click Wordpress installer to install Wordpress
4. Install theme in Wordpress install.
Wordpress is actually not that hard to setup these days, but maybe a better approach is to start with hosted WP (e.g. wpengine) just to get the site up and running asap, and then later transition out into your own WP install when you have the time/resources.
For what you're trying to do, I'd definitely bet on a hosted CMS + a nice theme. You'll get a pretty website that's easy to manage, and it will cost very little in terms of time and money.
Still waiting for someone to invent Soylent Ramen...
I bought all the ingredients and made DIY soylent from one of the hacks someone posted... The taste was a serious problem. I wanted to drink it for a week, but there was a 0% chance of that happening the way it tasted.
Then I tried making Soylent Pasta, but boiled out all the nutrients and the water turned piss yellow (http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta-bad-decis...)... But if there was a way to not mess that up, I think that could be really interesting.
Still waiting on my official Soylent, hopefully it tastes better than my catastrophe.
Seems like you have a nice handle on the 'selling for bitcoin' space. I'd love to chat and see if we can join forces in some way (I'm the founder of SellSimple.com).
Hit me up on twitter or via my blog if interested :)
I don't think bitcoin could integrate their tech since it's not a blockchain, but a DAG (what they call a tangle).
Interesting stuff.