12 ms·

Realtime Bitcoin Stats

205 points by rwinn 14y ago

n1c 14y ago
Is "Estimated money sent" since you open the page?
- rwinn 14y ago
  Yep, that's right
  - qznc 14y ago
    And the "total volume" below?
    - rwinn 14y ago
      It's the total amount of money passing trough the network. But since bitcoin transactions work by sending "change" back to yourself this value is not that relevant. In most cases 90% of the transaction amount is sent back as change. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change
      - pazimzadeh 14y ago
        So you spend your entire wallet minus the price of what you bought every time you make a purchase? If the ratio of 'money spent'/'total volume' is 1/5, does that mean that people are, on average, spending one fifth of their wallet?
        dustcoin 14y ago
        It would mean they are, on average, spending 1/5 of the sum of the transactions' inputs. Bitcoin wallets generally contain multiple addresses, and transactions will be created with inputs associated with only a subset of these addresses.
        davidjohnstone 14y ago
        You spend the results of previous transactions. Each transaction can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs, so when you make a purchase, you select enough payments that you have received to cover the cost as the inputs of the transaction, and make the purchase price (to the recipient) and whatever is leftover (back to yourself) as the outputs. (I imagine software would take care of all the complexity; and whatever is leftover, typically 0.01, is given to the miners to incentivise them to spend the processing power to authenticate the transaction.) This means that the Bitcoins in somebodies wallet is conceptually the list of transactions that have been made to them (that haven't been spent yet). It also means that a nice big graph can be made of how money is (or isn't) flowing through the system.
        mfringel 14y ago
        Thank you. That's the most lucid description of bitcoin spending I've yet to see.
kalleboo 14y ago
Am I misunderstanding what "coins in circulation" means? Coins in circulation 10994200 that's 201798541 ɃTC edit: ah, it's showing USD value but putting BTC as the currency
- rwinn 14y ago
  Good catch, fixing
pazimzadeh 14y ago
Well done. I think that it would look cleaner if you removed the two decimal places. If it's estimated, then you probably shouldn't be showing them anyway.
- epscylonb 14y ago
  It's estimated due to the way bitcoin works. A transaction can be made up of a different number of inputs, if the inputs don't exactly match the output (the amount you want to send), there is "change". The change is sent to a new address (belonging to the sender). So blockchain.info and this site are guessing as to which of the outputs was the intended sending amount and which was the change.
spants 14y ago
Very nice rwinn! But I have a question. With the fast rise of bitcoins, lets say that I now have $10m worth of coins(I don't btw). How would I convert all to gbp/usd and would the governments tax you?. With anti-money laundering controls in place in the uk, such a windfall would cause huge problems!
- samratashok 14y ago
  I would be interested in the answer.
- andersaa 14y ago
  You would trade them for gbp/usd on one of the exchanges. Mtgox.com is by far the biggest. As for tax, this is probably taxed as any other profit you make on buying and selling stuff, at least in my country (Norway). If I buy an art painting and sell it with a profit, I am obliged to inform on this on my tax sheet. And the same goes for bying/selling other currencies as well, but bitcoins are harder to track for the government (but not impossible).
- vidyesh 14y ago
  Well for starters, you can go crazy and start spending BTC ( bitcoins ) directly and buy stuff instead of encashing immediately. Coming back to if withdrawn in as local currecny. Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, any other currency or even barter; is included in gross income, and would be subject to income tax. So practically bitcoins could be subject to self employment tax if BTC is considered a commodity like gold. If considered as a currecny or a debt then the gained currency could be taxed based on market value at the end of each tax year. Also, IRS never conisders currency as long-term investement so if treated as another currency then it would be taxed as holding an account in any non-functional (foreign) currency. All this is just assuming its your owned BTC via trading/exchanging and not via business which accepts BTC or via selling items online or via mining. Edit : Forgot to answer your question "Where can I buy BTC?" Here are few reliable places https://mtgox.com/ https://mtgox.com/ https://coinbase.com/ https://coinbase.com/ https://bitbargain.co.uk/ https://bitbargain.co.uk/ https://bitfloor.com/ https://bitfloor.com/ https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/ https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits ( Hybrid wallet + small exchange )
jasonzemos 14y ago
How does it know power consumption?
- rwinn 14y ago
  It's based of that 40 megahashes per second consumes 1 joule of power (1watt)
  - ewillbefull 14y ago
    Where do you get that figure? ASIC and GPU devices are completely different in power consumption for the same amount of MH, for example.
    - rwinn 14y ago
      From https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison and some discussions on #bitcoin-dev
      - gibybo 14y ago
        ASICs represent only a tiny fraction (for now) of the power consumed by the network though. The vast majority is consumed by GPUs at ~1-2 MHs/watt.
andr3w321 14y ago
Mind sharing what libraries you used for this?
- rwinn 14y ago
  Not at all :) The frontend is built with d3.js and geometry.js. Backend is node running express with browserify and less to bundle the client.
hp50g 14y ago
That's awesome - great work! :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
one-man-bucket 14y ago
You seem to have an integer overflow error or something. > Coins in circulation > 10994200 > that's 224,516,226.80 kr That's not right, $2,049,318,880.00 ~ 13,192,490,290.00 SEK
netcan 14y ago
Is there any way of estimating the 'real" bitcoin economy?IE, Use of bitcoin to buy & sell goods & services rather than exchanging bitcoin for cash & via versa? I mean lot of investing/speculation is obviously going on, but is there growth in bitcoin based commerce? That's ultimately the problem I hope bitcoin will solve.
- kolinko 14y ago
  Google up "bitcoin days lost", that's quite a good indicator for the traffic/volume. Also, most of the volume indicators ignore BTC trade, as that's done using the exchanges' internal systems.
  - eric_bullington 14y ago
    The metric you're thinking of is "Bitcoin Days Destroyed". A search for "Bitcoin Days Lost" brings up tales of woe from users who lost bitcoins. But I do agree that this is probably the best metric for measuring how dynamic the Bitcoin economy is. Incidentally, Bitcoin Days Destroyed has continued to rise, even in recent months. It has risen steadily almost since the inception of Bitcoin. http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulative http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulat...
    - kiba 14y ago
      The chart is cumulative numbers of bitcoin days destroyed. What you want is the rate of bitcoin days destroyed.
      - eric_bullington 14y ago
        Yes, I realize I linked the wrong chart -- was in a hurry. I meant to link to the rate. If you see my other comments mentioning BDD, they reference the rate of BDD.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      That chart is cumulative. Of course it goes up over time, there isn't any way for it to go down. The recent rate of BDD gives some fuzzy picture of current activity though: http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespan=30days http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespa... You can see that hoarding increased slightly during March (a day destroying more than about 11 million bitcoin days should roughly reflect the market loosening up, destroying less should reflect the market tightening). Early April is also among the fastest periods (over the entire history of bitcoin) of BD destruction.
Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
I would prefer to have semi transparent graphs in background.
tudorizer 14y ago
lovely UI
Pyramids 14y ago
Cool concept, however it never updates for me, and Money Sent is always $0 (left it open during a 10~ min break.) Chrome 26.0.1410.43, Linux
- gwern 14y ago
  I'm seeing Money Sent: $0.00 too; Iceweasel 10.0.12, Debian Testing
ctoth 14y ago
Hm. I hope that sites like this are not a new trend but fear otherwise. Visiting this page with my screen reader (NVDA from http://nvda-project.org http://nvda-project.org) shows all of a combo box with different currencies in it. There is precisely no other content. At least before the worst things the blind had to worry about were unlabeled links that you could eventually possibly figure out through trial and error. This? Nothing. I don't even see the clever little "Your browser sucks" message, as it's not my browser causing the issue. Just a complete lack of semantic markup of any kind that the screen reader could possibly interpret.
- rwinn 14y ago
  That's unfortunate. All text is rendered with SVG, so it should be technically possible for your screen reader to pick up on when new SVG text nodes are added. Perhaps i should add a "Your screen reader sucks message" :-P
  - ChrisClark 14y ago
    That sure sounds like you're saying, "My customer can't use my product. I know, let's blame him instead of doing something about it." :-P
polskibus 14y ago
The webpage is scrollable vertically (at least on my google chrome), why is that?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
brianbreslin 14y ago
All this hype and speculation gives me a bit of pause, and worries me about actually mining. However, I keep wondering, what opportunities are there left to "sell the shovels" ?
- LAMike 14y ago
  That's why I bought BitcoinMining.tv
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  Investor tools and services are how it's done with traditional currencies.
khet 14y ago
How do you get all that data? I am super interested in knowing how something like this is built. How do you connect to the bitcoin network and serve the stats via this app. I am butchering my question but I hope it makes atleast some sense.
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  I'm not sure how this particular site is doing it, but Blockchain.info has some convenient APIs (http://blockchain.info/api http://blockchain.info/api), or you can run a full Bitcoin node and either interact with the JSON-RPC API (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls...) or parse the block chain (https://github.com/znort987/blockparser https://github.com/znort987/blockparser https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcointools https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcointools) For price/trade data most (all?) exchange have APIs (e.x. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API)
  - gojomo 14y ago
    Have you found anyone with a public JSONP API? That'd seem to enable a new level of in-browser apps... though perhaps Blockchain.info/MtGox aren't ready for the accompanying level of traffic.
    - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
      http://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/ http://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/ has public JSON API for all the popular Bitcoin currency markets. For the other data (non-market transactions etc.) you can run the Bitcoin-qt client on virtually any hardware and then connect to its built in JSON API.
      - gojomo 14y ago
        JSON_P_? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP I suppose if the JSON endpoints support CORS that'd be as good... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing However, my (unauthenticated) test attempts against blockchain.info and bitcoincharts.com, with the "Origin:" header, didn't give the right "Access-Control-Allow-Origin:" header in response.
Aaronn 14y ago
How do you get this data? and will you post the source of the website on GitHub or something similar so we can see how it works?
- vidyesh 14y ago
  From what I've seen all websites work on the MTGox API https://mtgox.com/api https://mtgox.com/api
itistoday2 14y ago
Odd ... I can't select the bitcoin address at the bottom of the page in Firefox, but it works in Chrome.
Jebbers 14y ago
I got a "Your browser sucks" message because I had scripts disabled. Poor form.
- damon_c 14y ago
  Off topic... is this a correct ranking of preferred form in handling this situation? blank page or other such confusing non-function : bad "your browser sucks" - page still doesn't work : poor "please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page still doesn't work : fair "please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page works for non-js users but is somewhat crippled : good page works perfectly without js : excellent (you could use headers to have it auto reload every few seconds?)
  - andypants 14y ago
    I agree, this is a simple site displaying information in a very simple way. It should be very easy to fallback onto other ways of displaying this info.
  - nemothekid 14y ago
    If this was a company website or something maybe I would agree with you, but seeing how the draw here is "Realtime" bitcoin, the OP obviously put in a lot of work in the realtime aspect. If you look at the source it looks like websockets + canvas. Considering this, it seems OP would have needed to rewrite the whole service (he would have needed to write application layer + the alternate html) just to serve those without javascript, which would not be in realtime (and essentially a duplicate service of all the other bitcoin exchange boards). Whats the tradeoff in terms of development time vs. supporting a small set of users?
amalag 14y ago
I think the buy/sell prices are reversed. Bid/ask is of course common terminology and the buying price will be higher than the selling price.
- gibybo 14y ago
  I can see your interpretation, but I think the way he has it also makes sense. The buy price is what people are willing to buy it for (i.e. it's the bid). The sell price is what people are willing to sell it for (i.e. it's the ask). Perhaps switching to bid/ask would be a good idea to clear up the confusion, but it's potentially more confusing to people unfamiliar with financial markets.
deepblueocean 14y ago
How do you calculate the hash rate? I have spent some time trying to understand the various hash rate estimates people come up with. Basically, I've determined that they're all 100% bogus. People like to work from the difficulty using bad/incorrect statistics since that's the most obvious way to get to something in the units of hashes/s, but I can never understand exactly what the process is. I'm genuinely curious to know what people do in practice, since I'm genuinely curious to know the "real" answer.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  The network collaborates to adjust the mining difficulty, to keep the rate of new coins approximately the same over time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty There is a linear relationship between the hash rate and the difficulty (there is further discussion at that link).
  - deepblueocean 14y ago
    I'm aware of that. rwinn, can you tell me if this is what you're doing? It's in your last sentence that you go wrong. There's a relationship between the number of expected hashes per new block and the difficulty. That tells you something about the hash rate, but not the rate itself. Actually, it tells you something about the number of unique hashes being tried per new block (in expectation). And for some applications, that may, in fact, be what you care about. Specifically, the appearance of new blocks is, if you like, a random variable with an exponential distribution. You can, in principle, estimate the rate parameter for this distribution using the difficulty and the timestamps in the Bitcoin log, but it's not straightforward. The last time I got into it, I was halfway through building a Bayesian estimator for the rate parameter using the log before I had to give up and move on to real work. I'll do it soon.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      I don't see how a hash (as a token of bitcoin work) would be anything other than unique (for the result to be useful to me it has to include my address in the input). In what applications would the likely immediate hash rate be more useful than the historical average hash rate? I guess the obvious one is turning some bit of mining hardware on and off.
btipling 14y ago
I love the visualization, but wow almost $200. Greater fool theory is at work here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
- drcode 14y ago
  ...or the takeoff ramp for a new technology. I'm not sure, either.
  - dragontamer 14y ago
    http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions There are more bitcoin transactions... but not enough to qualify the 20x increase in value the last three months.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      That could be explained by rampant speculation.
      - sneak 14y ago
        It could also be explained by increased organic non-speculatory demand as Bitcoin shows up in the media more frequently, and more people begin to use it - against a relatively fixed supply.
        dragontamer 14y ago
        If more people are using Bitcoin, then there would be more transactions. Bitcoin transactions / day have grown from ~35,000 in August 2012 to ~55,000 in February 2012. Between February 2012 and today, the number of Bitcoin transactions/day has not grown at all, while Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed by 1000%.
- camdykeman 14y ago
  Definitely a bubble forming - bitcoins marketcap was 1B only a week ago (http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap). Note they also use the Ƀ (B with stroke) to represent Bitcoin. Kudos to ECOGEX for their discussion a few weeks ago that set this in motion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gigantor 14y ago
I have one new appreciation for fiat currencies - they're designed to circulate with a steady rate of inflation. It seems there's a hesitation of spending bitcoins knowing if you just wait a day it will go up, so it's being treated like a precious metal rather than a new way of paying for things. Edit: Thanks for the correction, meant to say fiat currencies tend to 'inflate', not deflate.
- asperous 14y ago
  I think you mean inflation, where the longer you hold on to it , the more worthless it becomes.
  - gigantor 14y ago
    Thanks and you're correct, I was thinking how deflationary bitcoin was while writing. Fixed.
- loceng 14y ago
  This would solve the issue of people buying Bitcoin for investment purposes, though I wonder if people would be able to spend Bitcoin fast enough to not keep the people / exchanges that act as banks negatively affected - or could this be differentiated easily?
- dj2stein9 14y ago
  I don't believe the argument that a deflationary currency, by itself, will make people not be willing to buy things. Consider a savings account - why would anyone take money out of their savings account to buy things? If all you need to do is keep it in the account, it will make more money, so why spend it?
  - omni 14y ago
    It's a question of degree. Your savings account with $100,000 in it will probably be worth about $100,002 tomorrow at current rates. The equivalent amount in Bitcoin might be worth much, much more at the rate it's been climbing.
myspace 14y ago
I'm surprised so many people in the tech community have fallen for this Ponzi Scheme. For example, many heard about "some guy bought a $25 pizza with 10,000 bitcoins", but no one has thought about what this means. It means someone now has that 10,000 "coins" (which is close to 2'000,000). This also means someone had this amount (and possibly much more). And, finally, no one questions who posseses the first "coins". That's why the creator is anonymous. Just my 2 cents.
- asperous 14y ago
  >no one questions who posseses the first "coins". This is thoroughly documented https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining
  - myspace 14y ago
    The whole thing of this is to remain anonymous. Again, no one questions and no one knows how posesses the first coins. So, this is a free Out of jail card.
    - sneak 14y ago
      The creator of Bitcoin included a newspaper headline from the Financial Times the day of Bitcoin's release in the very first block. While he may be in possession of the earliest coins, he obtained them after the public release of the software, as it would have been impossible for him to include that quote in the genesis block before the day he announced the release to the whole internet. The quote: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" From: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article2160028.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/ar... You could have had any of those blocks. I had several.
- ramblerman 14y ago
  I'm not sure how to interpret your argument. It just seems like your pissed of someone else has 2,000,000 dollars.
jes5199 14y ago
a thing I've been wishing I had is some sort of price-vs-difficulty comparison metric - you might think, for example, that the dramatic rise in bitcoin costs would mean that mining had gotten more profitable - but unfortunately, the first wave of "Application Specific Integrated Circuits" are being deployed, and they're not even available for sale yet - so the mining capacity is suddenly and dramatically in the hands of a small group of organizations. But that hasn't been obvious at all from the various charts online.
- wmf 14y ago
  Check out the "mining factor" metric: http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/ Mining is as profitable today as it was back in July 2011.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mrb 14y ago
There is currently 11M+ coins in circulation, but the site shows 10,994,200. It seems to lag a few days behind. Hardly "real time".
afics 14y ago
Hm, returns a 502 now.
known 14y ago
https://localbitcoins.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/
baddox 14y ago
It could use delimiters on "Coins in circulation."

205 points by rwinn 14y ago

n1c 14y ago

Is "Estimated money sent" since you open the page?

rwinn 14y ago
Yep, that's right
- qznc 14y ago
  And the "total volume" below?
  - rwinn 14y ago
    It's the total amount of money passing trough the network. But since bitcoin transactions work by sending "change" back to yourself this value is not that relevant. In most cases 90% of the transaction amount is sent back as change. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change
    - pazimzadeh 14y ago
      So you spend your entire wallet minus the price of what you bought every time you make a purchase? If the ratio of 'money spent'/'total volume' is 1/5, does that mean that people are, on average, spending one fifth of their wallet?
      - dustcoin 14y ago
        It would mean they are, on average, spending 1/5 of the sum of the transactions' inputs. Bitcoin wallets generally contain multiple addresses, and transactions will be created with inputs associated with only a subset of these addresses.
      - davidjohnstone 14y ago
        You spend the results of previous transactions. Each transaction can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs, so when you make a purchase, you select enough payments that you have received to cover the cost as the inputs of the transaction, and make the purchase price (to the recipient) and whatever is leftover (back to yourself) as the outputs. (I imagine software would take care of all the complexity; and whatever is leftover, typically 0.01, is given to the miners to incentivise them to spend the processing power to authenticate the transaction.) This means that the Bitcoins in somebodies wallet is conceptually the list of transactions that have been made to them (that haven't been spent yet). It also means that a nice big graph can be made of how money is (or isn't) flowing through the system.
        mfringel 14y ago
        Thank you. That's the most lucid description of bitcoin spending I've yet to see.

kalleboo 14y ago

Am I misunderstanding what "coins in circulation" means? Coins in circulation 10994200 that's 201798541 ɃTC edit: ah, it's showing USD value but putting BTC as the currency

rwinn 14y ago
Good catch, fixing

pazimzadeh 14y ago

Well done. I think that it would look cleaner if you removed the two decimal places. If it's estimated, then you probably shouldn't be showing them anyway.

epscylonb 14y ago
It's estimated due to the way bitcoin works. A transaction can be made up of a different number of inputs, if the inputs don't exactly match the output (the amount you want to send), there is "change". The change is sent to a new address (belonging to the sender). So blockchain.info and this site are guessing as to which of the outputs was the intended sending amount and which was the change.

spants 14y ago

Very nice rwinn! But I have a question. With the fast rise of bitcoins, lets say that I now have $10m worth of coins(I don't btw). How would I convert all to gbp/usd and would the governments tax you?. With anti-money laundering controls in place in the uk, such a windfall would cause huge problems!

samratashok 14y ago
I would be interested in the answer.
andersaa 14y ago
You would trade them for gbp/usd on one of the exchanges. Mtgox.com is by far the biggest. As for tax, this is probably taxed as any other profit you make on buying and selling stuff, at least in my country (Norway). If I buy an art painting and sell it with a profit, I am obliged to inform on this on my tax sheet. And the same goes for bying/selling other currencies as well, but bitcoins are harder to track for the government (but not impossible).
vidyesh 14y ago
Well for starters, you can go crazy and start spending BTC ( bitcoins ) directly and buy stuff instead of encashing immediately. Coming back to if withdrawn in as local currecny. Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, any other currency or even barter; is included in gross income, and would be subject to income tax. So practically bitcoins could be subject to self employment tax if BTC is considered a commodity like gold. If considered as a currecny or a debt then the gained currency could be taxed based on market value at the end of each tax year. Also, IRS never conisders currency as long-term investement so if treated as another currency then it would be taxed as holding an account in any non-functional (foreign) currency. All this is just assuming its your owned BTC via trading/exchanging and not via business which accepts BTC or via selling items online or via mining. Edit : Forgot to answer your question "Where can I buy BTC?" Here are few reliable places https://mtgox.com/ https://mtgox.com/ https://coinbase.com/ https://coinbase.com/ https://bitbargain.co.uk/ https://bitbargain.co.uk/ https://bitfloor.com/ https://bitfloor.com/ https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://www.bitcoin.de/ https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/ https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/ https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits ( Hybrid wallet + small exchange )

jasonzemos 14y ago

How does it know power consumption?

rwinn 14y ago
It's based of that 40 megahashes per second consumes 1 joule of power (1watt)
- ewillbefull 14y ago
  Where do you get that figure? ASIC and GPU devices are completely different in power consumption for the same amount of MH, for example.
  - rwinn 14y ago
    From https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison and some discussions on #bitcoin-dev
    - gibybo 14y ago
      ASICs represent only a tiny fraction (for now) of the power consumed by the network though. The vast majority is consumed by GPUs at ~1-2 MHs/watt.

andr3w321 14y ago

Mind sharing what libraries you used for this?

rwinn 14y ago
Not at all :) The frontend is built with d3.js and geometry.js. Backend is node running express with browserify and less to bundle the client.

hp50g 14y ago

That's awesome - great work! :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

one-man-bucket 14y ago

You seem to have an integer overflow error or something. > Coins in circulation > 10994200 > that's 224,516,226.80 kr That's not right, $2,049,318,880.00 ~ 13,192,490,290.00 SEK

netcan 14y ago

Is there any way of estimating the 'real" bitcoin economy?IE, Use of bitcoin to buy & sell goods & services rather than exchanging bitcoin for cash & via versa? I mean lot of investing/speculation is obviously going on, but is there growth in bitcoin based commerce? That's ultimately the problem I hope bitcoin will solve.

kolinko 14y ago
Google up "bitcoin days lost", that's quite a good indicator for the traffic/volume. Also, most of the volume indicators ignore BTC trade, as that's done using the exchanges' internal systems.
- eric_bullington 14y ago
  The metric you're thinking of is "Bitcoin Days Destroyed". A search for "Bitcoin Days Lost" brings up tales of woe from users who lost bitcoins. But I do agree that this is probably the best metric for measuring how dynamic the Bitcoin economy is. Incidentally, Bitcoin Days Destroyed has continued to rise, even in recent months. It has risen steadily almost since the inception of Bitcoin. http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulative http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulat...
  - kiba 14y ago
    The chart is cumulative numbers of bitcoin days destroyed. What you want is the rate of bitcoin days destroyed.
    - eric_bullington 14y ago
      Yes, I realize I linked the wrong chart -- was in a hurry. I meant to link to the rate. If you see my other comments mentioning BDD, they reference the rate of BDD.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    That chart is cumulative. Of course it goes up over time, there isn't any way for it to go down. The recent rate of BDD gives some fuzzy picture of current activity though: http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespan=30days http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespa... You can see that hoarding increased slightly during March (a day destroying more than about 11 million bitcoin days should roughly reflect the market loosening up, destroying less should reflect the market tightening). Early April is also among the fastest periods (over the entire history of bitcoin) of BD destruction.

Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago

I would prefer to have semi transparent graphs in background.

tudorizer 14y ago

lovely UI

Pyramids 14y ago

Cool concept, however it never updates for me, and Money Sent is always $0 (left it open during a 10~ min break.) Chrome 26.0.1410.43, Linux

gwern 14y ago
I'm seeing Money Sent: $0.00 too; Iceweasel 10.0.12, Debian Testing

ctoth 14y ago

Hm. I hope that sites like this are not a new trend but fear otherwise. Visiting this page with my screen reader (NVDA from http://nvda-project.org http://nvda-project.org) shows all of a combo box with different currencies in it. There is precisely no other content. At least before the worst things the blind had to worry about were unlabeled links that you could eventually possibly figure out through trial and error. This? Nothing. I don't even see the clever little "Your browser sucks" message, as it's not my browser causing the issue. Just a complete lack of semantic markup of any kind that the screen reader could possibly interpret.

rwinn 14y ago
That's unfortunate. All text is rendered with SVG, so it should be technically possible for your screen reader to pick up on when new SVG text nodes are added. Perhaps i should add a "Your screen reader sucks message" :-P
- ChrisClark 14y ago
  That sure sounds like you're saying, "My customer can't use my product. I know, let's blame him instead of doing something about it." :-P

polskibus 14y ago

The webpage is scrollable vertically (at least on my google chrome), why is that?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

brianbreslin 14y ago

All this hype and speculation gives me a bit of pause, and worries me about actually mining. However, I keep wondering, what opportunities are there left to "sell the shovels" ?

LAMike 14y ago
That's why I bought BitcoinMining.tv
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mkr-hn 14y ago
Investor tools and services are how it's done with traditional currencies.

khet 14y ago

How do you get all that data? I am super interested in knowing how something like this is built. How do you connect to the bitcoin network and serve the stats via this app. I am butchering my question but I hope it makes atleast some sense.

tlrobinson 14y ago
I'm not sure how this particular site is doing it, but Blockchain.info has some convenient APIs (http://blockchain.info/api http://blockchain.info/api), or you can run a full Bitcoin node and either interact with the JSON-RPC API (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls...) or parse the block chain (https://github.com/znort987/blockparser https://github.com/znort987/blockparser https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcointools https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcointools) For price/trade data most (all?) exchange have APIs (e.x. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API)
- gojomo 14y ago
  Have you found anyone with a public JSONP API? That'd seem to enable a new level of in-browser apps... though perhaps Blockchain.info/MtGox aren't ready for the accompanying level of traffic.
  - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
    http://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/ http://bitcoincharts.com/about/markets-api/ has public JSON API for all the popular Bitcoin currency markets. For the other data (non-market transactions etc.) you can run the Bitcoin-qt client on virtually any hardware and then connect to its built in JSON API.
    - gojomo 14y ago
      JSON_P_? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP I suppose if the JSON endpoints support CORS that'd be as good... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing However, my (unauthenticated) test attempts against blockchain.info and bitcoincharts.com, with the "Origin:" header, didn't give the right "Access-Control-Allow-Origin:" header in response.

Aaronn 14y ago

How do you get this data? and will you post the source of the website on GitHub or something similar so we can see how it works?

vidyesh 14y ago
From what I've seen all websites work on the MTGox API https://mtgox.com/api https://mtgox.com/api

itistoday2 14y ago

Odd ... I can't select the bitcoin address at the bottom of the page in Firefox, but it works in Chrome.

Jebbers 14y ago

I got a "Your browser sucks" message because I had scripts disabled. Poor form.

damon_c 14y ago
Off topic... is this a correct ranking of preferred form in handling this situation? blank page or other such confusing non-function : bad "your browser sucks" - page still doesn't work : poor "please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page still doesn't work : fair "please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page works for non-js users but is somewhat crippled : good page works perfectly without js : excellent (you could use headers to have it auto reload every few seconds?)
- andypants 14y ago
  I agree, this is a simple site displaying information in a very simple way. It should be very easy to fallback onto other ways of displaying this info.
- nemothekid 14y ago
  If this was a company website or something maybe I would agree with you, but seeing how the draw here is "Realtime" bitcoin, the OP obviously put in a lot of work in the realtime aspect. If you look at the source it looks like websockets + canvas. Considering this, it seems OP would have needed to rewrite the whole service (he would have needed to write application layer + the alternate html) just to serve those without javascript, which would not be in realtime (and essentially a duplicate service of all the other bitcoin exchange boards). Whats the tradeoff in terms of development time vs. supporting a small set of users?

amalag 14y ago

I think the buy/sell prices are reversed. Bid/ask is of course common terminology and the buying price will be higher than the selling price.

gibybo 14y ago
I can see your interpretation, but I think the way he has it also makes sense. The buy price is what people are willing to buy it for (i.e. it's the bid). The sell price is what people are willing to sell it for (i.e. it's the ask). Perhaps switching to bid/ask would be a good idea to clear up the confusion, but it's potentially more confusing to people unfamiliar with financial markets.

deepblueocean 14y ago

How do you calculate the hash rate? I have spent some time trying to understand the various hash rate estimates people come up with. Basically, I've determined that they're all 100% bogus. People like to work from the difficulty using bad/incorrect statistics since that's the most obvious way to get to something in the units of hashes/s, but I can never understand exactly what the process is. I'm genuinely curious to know what people do in practice, since I'm genuinely curious to know the "real" answer.

maxerickson 14y ago
The network collaborates to adjust the mining difficulty, to keep the rate of new coins approximately the same over time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty There is a linear relationship between the hash rate and the difficulty (there is further discussion at that link).
- deepblueocean 14y ago
  I'm aware of that. rwinn, can you tell me if this is what you're doing? It's in your last sentence that you go wrong. There's a relationship between the number of expected hashes per new block and the difficulty. That tells you something about the hash rate, but not the rate itself. Actually, it tells you something about the number of unique hashes being tried per new block (in expectation). And for some applications, that may, in fact, be what you care about. Specifically, the appearance of new blocks is, if you like, a random variable with an exponential distribution. You can, in principle, estimate the rate parameter for this distribution using the difficulty and the timestamps in the Bitcoin log, but it's not straightforward. The last time I got into it, I was halfway through building a Bayesian estimator for the rate parameter using the log before I had to give up and move on to real work. I'll do it soon.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    I don't see how a hash (as a token of bitcoin work) would be anything other than unique (for the result to be useful to me it has to include my address in the input). In what applications would the likely immediate hash rate be more useful than the historical average hash rate? I guess the obvious one is turning some bit of mining hardware on and off.

btipling 14y ago

I love the visualization, but wow almost $200. Greater fool theory is at work here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

drcode 14y ago
...or the takeoff ramp for a new technology. I'm not sure, either.
- dragontamer 14y ago
  http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions There are more bitcoin transactions... but not enough to qualify the 20x increase in value the last three months.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    That could be explained by rampant speculation.
    - sneak 14y ago
      It could also be explained by increased organic non-speculatory demand as Bitcoin shows up in the media more frequently, and more people begin to use it - against a relatively fixed supply.
      - dragontamer 14y ago
        If more people are using Bitcoin, then there would be more transactions. Bitcoin transactions / day have grown from ~35,000 in August 2012 to ~55,000 in February 2012. Between February 2012 and today, the number of Bitcoin transactions/day has not grown at all, while Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed by 1000%.
camdykeman 14y ago
Definitely a bubble forming - bitcoins marketcap was 1B only a week ago (http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap). Note they also use the Ƀ (B with stroke) to represent Bitcoin. Kudos to ECOGEX for their discussion a few weeks ago that set this in motion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

gigantor 14y ago

I have one new appreciation for fiat currencies - they're designed to circulate with a steady rate of inflation. It seems there's a hesitation of spending bitcoins knowing if you just wait a day it will go up, so it's being treated like a precious metal rather than a new way of paying for things. Edit: Thanks for the correction, meant to say fiat currencies tend to 'inflate', not deflate.

asperous 14y ago
I think you mean inflation, where the longer you hold on to it , the more worthless it becomes.
- gigantor 14y ago
  Thanks and you're correct, I was thinking how deflationary bitcoin was while writing. Fixed.
loceng 14y ago
This would solve the issue of people buying Bitcoin for investment purposes, though I wonder if people would be able to spend Bitcoin fast enough to not keep the people / exchanges that act as banks negatively affected - or could this be differentiated easily?
dj2stein9 14y ago
I don't believe the argument that a deflationary currency, by itself, will make people not be willing to buy things. Consider a savings account - why would anyone take money out of their savings account to buy things? If all you need to do is keep it in the account, it will make more money, so why spend it?
- omni 14y ago
  It's a question of degree. Your savings account with $100,000 in it will probably be worth about $100,002 tomorrow at current rates. The equivalent amount in Bitcoin might be worth much, much more at the rate it's been climbing.

myspace 14y ago

I'm surprised so many people in the tech community have fallen for this Ponzi Scheme. For example, many heard about "some guy bought a $25 pizza with 10,000 bitcoins", but no one has thought about what this means. It means someone now has that 10,000 "coins" (which is close to 2'000,000). This also means someone had this amount (and possibly much more). And, finally, no one questions who posseses the first "coins". That's why the creator is anonymous. Just my 2 cents.

asperous 14y ago
>no one questions who posseses the first "coins". This is thoroughly documented https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining
- myspace 14y ago
  The whole thing of this is to remain anonymous. Again, no one questions and no one knows how posesses the first coins. So, this is a free Out of jail card.
  - sneak 14y ago
    The creator of Bitcoin included a newspaper headline from the Financial Times the day of Bitcoin's release in the very first block. While he may be in possession of the earliest coins, he obtained them after the public release of the software, as it would have been impossible for him to include that quote in the genesis block before the day he announced the release to the whole internet. The quote: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" From: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article2160028.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/ar... You could have had any of those blocks. I had several.
ramblerman 14y ago
I'm not sure how to interpret your argument. It just seems like your pissed of someone else has 2,000,000 dollars.

jes5199 14y ago

a thing I've been wishing I had is some sort of price-vs-difficulty comparison metric - you might think, for example, that the dramatic rise in bitcoin costs would mean that mining had gotten more profitable - but unfortunately, the first wave of "Application Specific Integrated Circuits" are being deployed, and they're not even available for sale yet - so the mining capacity is suddenly and dramatically in the hands of a small group of organizations. But that hasn't been obvious at all from the various charts online.

wmf 14y ago
Check out the "mining factor" metric: http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/ Mining is as profitable today as it was back in July 2011.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mrb 14y ago

There is currently 11M+ coins in circulation, but the site shows 10,994,200. It seems to lag a few days behind. Hardly "real time".

afics 14y ago

Hm, returns a 502 now.

known 14y ago

https://localbitcoins.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/

baddox 14y ago

It could use delimiters on "Coins in circulation."