Realtime Bitcoin Stats • Hacker News Board

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#61

Post by andypants » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

damon_c wrote: post #60

Jebbers wrote: post #51

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

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 : exce…

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.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#62

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#63

Post by gibybo » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:36 PM UTC

amalag wrote: post #52

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.

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.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#64

Post by drcode » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:37 PM UTC

btipling wrote: post #55

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

...or the takeoff ramp for a new technology. I'm not sure, either.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#65

Post by camdykeman » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:40 PM UTC

btipling wrote: post #55

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

Definitely a bubble forming - bitcoins marketcap was 1B only a week ago (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).

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#66

Post by drcode » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:50 PM UTC

camdykeman wrote: post #65

btipling wrote: post #55

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

Definitely a bubble forming - bitcoins marketcap was 1B only a week ago ( 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 ).

I should point out I'm wearing a bitcoin t shirt printed months ago that has the Ƀ so this has clearly already had wide adoption before then... don't give anyone undue credit.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#67

Post by tlrobinson » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:51 PM UTC

khet wrote: post #46

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.

I'm not sure how this particular site is doing it, but Blockchain.info has some convenient APIs (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...) or parse the block chain (https://github.com/znort987/blockparser https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcointools)

For price/trade data most (all?) exchange have APIs (e.x. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API)

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#68

Post by LAMike » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:52 PM UTC

brianbreslin wrote: post #42

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" ?

That's why I bought BitcoinMining.tv

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#69

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:52 PM UTC

brianbreslin wrote: post #42

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" ?

[deleted]

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#70

Post by deepblueocean » Mon, Apr 08, 2013, 2:56 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #54

deepblueocean wrote: post #53

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…

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 There is a linear relationship between the hash rate and the difficulty (there is further discussion at that link).

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.