
Show HN: CoinMarketBook – CoinMarketCap, but with a different metric - DenGorbachev
https://coinmarketbook.cc/
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modeless
One of the problems with this metric is it's easy to manipulate. Exchanges can
easily lie about their book depth and/or people can put in lowball buy orders
they have no intention of ever filling. To find out if those buy orders are
real you would have to purchase them _and all the orders above them_ , which
would be very expensive and move the price a lot.

On the other hand, the instantaneous price of a coin is easy to verify.
Everyone who buys or sells at the exchange can verify it, so exchanges can't
easily lie about it.

Here's an interesting solution for ranking exchanges by their order book depth
in a way that's more difficult to manipulate. Perhaps it could be adapted to
rank coins.
[https://bitcoinity.org/markets/rank_explanation](https://bitcoinity.org/markets/rank_explanation)

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DenGorbachev
Amazing idea - will implement their algorithm for all coins.

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eriktrautman
Unfortunately as a metric this is far too easy to game and is heavily
influenced by algorithmic order regimes. Maybe decent as signal in trading
strategies but not useful for real fundamental analysis. Market makers create
phantom interest all the time to try and scare the market through stop loss
orders.

Also why not focus on the selling interest too? Any one sided metric is even
less trustworthy.

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DenGorbachev
Yes, you're right - it's possible to place fake orders and cancel them as soon
as the actual trades start happening near them. However, from my experience,
it only happens during the pump (when the whales are pushing the price
higher).

You can see the explanation for including all buy orders here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162456)

Sell pressure is a bit different: while the lowest price is zero, the highest
price is unlimited (technically, there is a limit enforced by exchange engine,
but it's very high anyway). So actually, sell pressure should be calculated in
base currency (in coin itself) instead of USD.

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maged
There is $1.5T of outstanding buy orders for BTC right now? That seems
inflated.

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DenGorbachev
Last time I checked, the orders were actually there (based on API responses).

Please note that some markets may allow leverage - we'll mark them with
asterisk on next deploy.

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MuffinFlavored
What is one really to do with the metrics? Right now, HOT has the highest
support/cap % for a lesser known coin. Does it mean to buy HOT?...

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DenGorbachev
In crypto, it's always better to do your own research instead of following buy
recommendations. That said, you can use the numbers in your research: for
example, if two coins have a similar market cap, but one has much higher buy
support, then it might be a better investment.

Buy support shows demand for this coin.

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slivym
As someone who is not very financially orientated, I find this difficult.
Firstly because I don't really have a feeling for what that % _means_ \-
presumably the ratio of market cap to book depth gives an indication of how
sensitive the market cap is to large orders. So it combines liquidity and
total volume - but I don't know why you would combine them into one statistic?
Either I want a single number which means something clear, which this fails
on. Or I want more information, in which case isn't it just better to tell the
market cap AND book depth?

Also whilst market cap is easy to measure, book depth seems more difficult.
How far away from the touch do you count? A million dollar offer which values
bitcoin at 3cents represents almost no information. Firstly because by the
time the price drops there's no way that offer will still be good and secondly
because even if that offer were still good that change in price would
represent a total shift in the market.

Also, this seems to compare apples to oranges, because some coins will contain
market makers who are likely to leave orders in the book and cancel in
response to signals, thereby creating phantom liquidity whilst others won't
have enough volume to attract market makers and so all the depth is real.

~~~
DenGorbachev
Ratio (%) is calculated as "Buy support / Market cap". You can also see
separate metrics for both "Buy support" and "Market cap" in the same row.

We count all buy orders (on all prices). It's true that low-hanging orders
might be cancelled before they are executed. We've decided to count them
anyway, because even low orders provide support during flash crashes.

Flash crash horror movie:
[https://youtu.be/R7WfSTePuA0?t=171](https://youtu.be/R7WfSTePuA0?t=171)

This was possible because there wasn't much buy support. And that's ETH -
imagine what can happen with lowcap altcoins.

P.S. The fact that some altcoins don't even have market makers is a little...
unsettling, don't you think?

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DenGorbachev
With CoinMarketBook, you can evaluate cryptocurrencies by a different metric:
"buy support".

Buy support is the sum of buy orders in USD equivalent from top 20 exchanges
(planning to include more in future). It shows the actual amount that people
want to buy.

One might say that it's easy to place a large buy order at very low price &
increase buy support artificially. However, because of low price, the increase
will be negligible.

What do you think? Tell us in comments.

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gokhan
So do you suggest that buy (and sell) orders on Bitfinex, for example, are
genuine and there's no wash trading, no other tricks to make people believe
market will go one way or another? LOL.

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DenGorbachev
_Real_ wash trading happens without orders.

As for manipulative orders - you're right, they flash in the orderbook on and
off. However, when I needed to exit, I actually filled a couple of them - so
they were real.

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Geee
There aren't many fiat trading pairs for smaller coins. That means, if people
are holding fiat, they most probably put it on low buy order for Bitcoin. I'd
like to see exactly which markets are calculated in the results.

~~~
DenGorbachev
Sure, we'll add the markets in a tooltip on next deploy.

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shoshino
> Buy support is the sum of buy orders from top 20 exchanges. > This is the
> actual amount that people want to buy.

Curious how you have arrived at $1.5T of buy support for BTC?

Given an example, a $1 bid on 100 BTC equates to $100 of buy support. In this
example, would you count this as 100 * current price?

For reference, my custom tool reports BTCUSD pairs across major exchanges and
shows approx 40kBTC of liquidity 10% either side of the current price. This is
approximately $0.25B.

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DenGorbachev
You're right, $1 bid on 100 BTC = $100 of buy support. We include it into the
metric as "100" (without multiplying by current price).

So your tool counts the closest 10%? Would be interesting to expand it to 100%
and compare the metric.

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tromp
I look at Daily Issuance (last column in
[https://onchainfx.com/v/SMT45r](https://onchainfx.com/v/SMT45r)) as a measure
of how well a (mineable) coin is doing, as this reflects the cost of energy
spent on mining that coin every day.

This is one of the very few measures that is not easily faked...

~~~
DenGorbachev
Interesting metric - noted.

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impostervt
\- What does support/cap tell us? I see that it's a "gamble vs investment"
metric but I don't understand the logic behind that statement.

\- Is buy support at any level? As in, there's hug buy support for bitcoin,
but is this counting people who have buy orders at the $6500 range all the way
down to the $1 range?

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DenGorbachev
\- It shows you how much of market cap is backed by actual buy orders (~
whether it's vapor or not). The more buy support, the higher the probability
that current price will hold (discounting for manipulative orders, of course).

\- Yes, we sum buy support at all levels. You can see the explanation here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162456)

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secondtom
Whatever that validity of the metric itself, it's an interesting idea that if
a market is different "enough", standard market metrics fall short of their
goal.

On the website design, a fixed-width font would be helpful for the numbers.
Currently, ETH at $22,898,033,476 looks one digit larger than BTC at
$113,768,712,510.

~~~
DenGorbachev
Thanks for the comment.

Good idea, we'll switch to fixed width.

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DenGorbachev
Just fixed an important bug in calculation:
[https://medium.com/@dengorbachev/coinmarketbook-bugfix-
new-m...](https://medium.com/@dengorbachev/coinmarketbook-bugfix-new-
metric-665a786b1dbd)

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cdiddy2
Market cap isn't perfect by any means, but if there was a better metric that
could be used to get a quick valuation of something then the stock markets
would already use it.

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_nalply
How did you get the data from which exchanges?

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DenGorbachev
Currently, it's `'bitmex', 'binance', 'bithumb', 'bitfinex', 'okex',
'huobipro', 'bittrex', 'poloniex', 'kucoin', 'cryptopia'` (planned to include
top 20, just fixed the message on home page)

~~~
tstyle
The general idea is awesome. Excited about ranking using the bitcoinity metric
mentioned by the top comment.

Any plans to include the top decentralized exchanges?
([https://etherscan.io/stat/dextracker](https://etherscan.io/stat/dextracker))

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megadragon9
What does the "Tell Friends" column mean in the table? Was it supposed to be a
metric or just a placeholder?

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DenGorbachev
Just a placeholder. We were looking to reach wider audience with this message
(difference between market cap & buy support).

Do you have any advice on how to encourage sharing?

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aerique
Can the list not be sorted on other columns or are my mobile browsers failing
me? (Firefox and Chrome on Android)

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DenGorbachev
Added sorting, thanks for suggesting it.

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aerique
Thanks!

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I_am_tiberius
An alternative to the 24 hour price change would be a price change since a
specific date.

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DenGorbachev
Interesting. Could you please explain why you needed that?

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I_am_tiberius
I'm just interested in the value movement relative to my investment - and as I
did not invest 24 hours ago, the information does not help me much.

