I've been slowly selling my bitcoin 

I'm interested in who is making the money on this and how 

Observation of the day: The exchanges may be skimming 

I've been using BitPay. I like them because they are clear about their fees for exchanging and sending your USD electronically to your bank account. 

However, when I looked at the exchange rate just before dong a transaction, it was clearly $60 

Not $59.85 but $60 exactly 

So when I sent BTC5 why did it show up as $299.29? 

Bitpay doesn't take their commission until they transfer to my bank account. I checked their exchange rate again and it still read $60. 

Seems like there may be a small skim taking place here, which I suspect is pretty much the 'industry' standard. 

BTW, in case your are wondering this is not the BTC client transaction fee either, that was sent in addition to my BTC5 transfer, making the total transferred out of my wallet BTC5.0005 

[Postscript] 10 minutes after the transaction the Bitpay rate page updated to $59.8, meaning I got a better rate, but NOT the rate as advertised when I executed my transaction. They claim their rates are updated every minute. Apparently not. 

This btw is the oldest trading trick in the book, perfected by wall street.