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Realtime Bitcoin Stats

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Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#111

Post by SkyMarshal »

omni wrote: post #90
dj2stein9 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Or much much less, and it has been known to fall precipitously as well.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#112

Post by gibybo »

mrb wrote: post #108
gibybo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% bogus? I'm not sure what bad/incorrect statistics you are referring to since it's relatively straight forward to find. The current target hash is "0x000000000000022FBE0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000" This means that to solve a block, you must find a SHA-256 hash of that block's transactions + nonce that hash to a value equal or below that target. Since the output of a SHA-256 hash is essentially r…

You have errors. 170 blocks have been found so 170*3.3e16 = 5.6e18 hashes have been computed. Divided by 86400 = 64.9 Thash/s (and the site currently reports 65.2 Thash/s, not 6.5).

Ah oops, you are correct. Looks like I cannot edit my post otherwise I would fix it :/

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#113

Post by gwern »

Pyramids wrote: post #33

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

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

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#114

Post by maxerickson »

deepblueocean wrote: post #70
maxerickson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#115

Post by bredren »

vidyesh wrote: post #36
netcan wrote: post #26

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.

You can buy most of the online stuff with BTCs i.e. servers, VPNs, hosting services, seedboxes, most cloud services, music, gambling, games etc Many sites have started accepting BTC now. ( http://bitpay.com makes it possible ) Some sites which are quite popular and known http://www.bitcoinin.com/ http://www.bitcoinblaster.com/ http://www.coinabul.com/ https://www.bitcoinstore.com/ ( Not sure if updated , but here is…

We did a quick survey of what is for sale for Bitcoin on various craigslist exchanges this morning: http://blog.gli.ph/2013/04/08/things-you-can-buy-today-with-...

Spoiler: you can buy aquarium shrimp in Portland right now for .0164 BTC.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#116

Post by wamatt »

gigantor wrote: post #76

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.

>"It seems there's a hesitation of spending bitcoins knowing if you just wait a day it will go up"

So this argument seems to be rather popular, and on the surface it does seems to make sense. However, it glosses over an important consideration.

Are you buying goods in USD or BTC?

Now if it's the latter, then yes there may be stronger psychological pressure (even though rationally there is not much difference).

However, increasingly goods are being traded in USD using BTC as a backing, in which case it would make little difference if you spend in USD from a bank account, or USD with a bitcoin wallet. Because it is possible to trade USD for BTC almost instantly. (Let's ignore the issue of wire transfer delays for now, because that doesn't change the overall argument).

Consider the person holding say 200 bitcoins today. In this situation, if the transaction is a small amount (say a cup of coffee ($3), at 180USD/BTC is about 0.016 BTC at todays rate. I'd have no problem spending that.

In fact psychologically it may be more likely that people trade with their BTC "winnings", because like a casino it has been shown that that is treated as more disposable than "real money".

Thus if one is spending a fraction of a bitcoin priced in USD, and this amounts to a small percentage of your overall position, it's unlikely to endure as a significant purchasing disincentive.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#117

Post by dragontamer »

sneak wrote: post #105
astrodust wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be explained by rampant speculation.

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.

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%.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#118

Post by deelowe »

dj2stein9 wrote: post #83
gigantor wrote: post #76

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.

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?

Savings accounts don't beat inflation. No guaranteed and insured investment does to my knowledge(if you find one that's not a ponzi scheme, let me know). If savings accounts were paying out double digit % point gains, you can bet your ass people would be shoveling money into the accounts and not cashing out.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#119

Post by treeface »

wamatt wrote: post #116
gigantor wrote: post #76

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.

>"It seems there's a hesitation of spending bitcoins knowing if you just wait a day it will go up" So this argument seems to be rather popular, and on the surface it does seems to make sense. However, it glosses over an important consideration. Are you buying goods in USD or BTC? Now if it's the latter, then yes there may be stronger psychological pressure (even though rationally there is not much difference). Howeve…

I've spent many years studying economics, but I'm also a programmer. One thing that annoys me about the discussion that tends to crop up on Hacker News is that you have too many of the latter issuing too many uninformed opinions on the former. Currencies that are doomed to deflate are doomed to enter liquidity traps. There is nothing special about BitCoin that prevents this from happening, regardless of its position against other currencies. There are probably ingenious ways to implement distributed digital currencies, but I'm fairly sure that in the long term BitCoin is not one of those ways.

Re: Realtime Bitcoin Stats

#120

Post by gojomo »

tlrobinson wrote: post #67
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?)…

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.
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