Where market conditions are the same, the price across exchanges won’t differ greatly, which is the sign of an efficient market. If not, users would simply buy at the lowest price on exchange A and sell at the highest available price on exchange B (aka arbitrage).
Compared to more mature assets – like gold or fiat currencies – bitcoin has a long way to grow, but given billions are traded everyday, its price is becoming more efficient, meaning it rarely trades at a high premium across exchanges. Arbitrage does happen, but is only effective at scale – by professional traders – and not relevant for someone just learning about how to trade cryptocurrency.
There is, however, an important exception to bitcoin’s price discovery and the potential for significant variation across exchanges..
Where an exchange exists within different market conditions, such as countries with weak fiat currencies and heavy controls on the exchange/movement of that currency – such as Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria and Turkey – you’ll actually see the price of bitcoin being much higher as demand is higher.
This recent article from Coindesk illustrates the point, with bitcoin trading at a premium in Nigeria given the weakness of the Naira and the attempts to legislate against its use. The premium however, isn’t on bitcoin’s price, rather the informal conversion (black market price) of the Naira to the Dollar.
The controls placed on buying/selling in those specific markets obstruct the natural process of price discovery, because the demand from people in Turkey can only be met locally. Arbitrage is difficult because of the logistics of getting access to buy/sell across these markets.
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