
Realtime Bitcoin Stats - rwinn
http://realtimebitcoin.info/
======
gigantor
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.

~~~
dj2stein9
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
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.

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

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netcan
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.

~~~
ArikBe
You could attempt to replicate the analysis used in "Quantitative Analysis of
the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph" by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir.
(<http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf>)

In 2012 they noted that:

“If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only
receive and never send any BTC’s [bitcoins], we see that they contain
7,019,100 BTC’s, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC’s. Due to the way
bitcoins can be repeatedly moved to fresh addresses, some of which can be very
recent, we can not claim that all these bitcoins are out of circulation.
However,76.5% of these 78% (i.e., 59.7% of all the coins in the system) are
old coins", de ned as bitcoins received at some address more than three months
before the cut off date (May 13th 2012), which were not followed by any
outgoing transac- tions from that address after they were received. One can
also argue that very old dormant bitcoins were simply abandoned or lost by
users who experimented with the system in its early days, when it was very
dicult to buy anything or to exchange bitcoins into dollars. To be even more
cautious with our estimation of dormant bitcoins, we decided to ignore all the
transactions which took place prior to July 18th 2010, when Mt.Gox started its
exchange and price quoting services. The sum of the balances of all the
addresses which have not been active since that date is 1,657,480 bitcoins.
Clearly, by considering all these bitcoins as "lost" rather than "hoarded" we
are underestimating the number of bitcoins which are kept dormant in "saving
accounts". By ignoring these very old bitcoins and repeating the same
calculation, we found that 73% of all the remaining BTC's were accumulated at
addresses which only receive and never send bitcoins, and that 70% of these
73% (i.e., 51%) are dormant bitcoins in the sense that they were received more
than three months before our cuto date but after it became easy to exchange
them. If instead of summing the transaction values we sum the nal balances of
all the addresses that were active after July 18th 2010 but became inactive in
the last three months, we get that 55% of all coins in the system are dormant
in this sense. This is strong evidence that the majority of bitcoins are not
circulating in the system, and since it is based on the address rather than
the entity graph, this conclusion is not a ected by possible inaccuracies in
the way we associate addresses with users.”

~~~
liorn
That's _Adi_ Shamir, an Israeli cryptographer. You might know him as the S in
RSA.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shamir>

~~~
ArikBe
My bad, edited.

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

~~~
camdykeman
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>).

~~~
sneak
Many more people use ฿ than Ƀ.

Source: I've been studying and speaking on Bitcoin since 2010.
(<http://vimeo.com/27653912>)

~~~
camdykeman
This is a moot point. I recognize that more people use ฿ than Ƀ. I was simply
stating what was used on the site and congratulating the use of (what I
consider) to be a more visually appealing symbol.

Congrats on using yourself as your own source. Don't beg the question and stop
trolling.

------
ctoth
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>)
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
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
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

------
amalag
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
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.

------
khet
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
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...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list))
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>)

~~~
gojomo
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
<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
JSON_ _P_ _?

<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>

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.

------
spants
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!

~~~
vidyesh
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://coinbase.com/>

<https://bitbargain.co.uk/>

<https://bitfloor.com/>

<https://www.bitcoin.de/>

<https://btc-e.com/>

<https://www.bitstamp.net/>

<https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits> ( Hybrid wallet + small
exchange )

~~~
rjtavares
> 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.

All of those would be taxable too. The only question is when: every year at
their current market value, or when traded for (official) currency.

~~~
vidyesh
Yup it would be taxable I should have mentioned that.

What I meant to say for businesses accepting BTC would have other and extra
taxes apart from Income like Sales/Excise

For miners I assume it would be either considered as a owned commodity or
intagible personal property.

I would assume just like any other commodity the current market value is
considered if you have not traded in local currency.

Also if you have bought BTC and sold to make some profit by trading, there
would be commodity tax.

------
brianbreslin
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" ?

~~~
mkr-hn
Investor tools and services are how it's done with traditional currencies.

------
deepblueocean
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.

~~~
gibybo
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 random, the probability of finding
a nonce that evaluates to hash at or below that target is roughly
[target]/[possible sha256 outputs] or 3.51e60/2^256, or 3.034e-17. On average,
that means it takes 1/3e-17 or 3.3e16 hashes per block. To calculate average
hashes per second of the network, we look at number of blocks solved in the
last x unit of time (if you want a 24 hour average, take the number of blocks
in the past 24 hours). As of the time of this post, 170 blocks have been
solved in those 24 hours. This implies an expected 24*3.3e16 or 8e17 hashes
have been computed. Divide by 86400 (seconds in a day) and you get 9.26e12, or
9.26 TH/s. The site reports 6.5 TH/s, presumably because it uses a longer
window than 24 hours (probably 7 days).

Just because it's a statistical average instead of the exact rate doesn't mean
it's 100% bogus. If you want, you can use fairly standard statistical models
to find an acceptable error margin.

~~~
mrb
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).

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

------
mrb
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".

------
Aaronn
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
From what I've seen all websites work on the MTGox API

<https://mtgox.com/api>

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

------
kalleboo
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
Good catch, fixing

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

~~~
damon_c
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?)

~~~
nemothekid
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?

------
jes5199
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
Check out the "mining factor" metric: <http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts/> Mining
is as profitable today as it was back in July 2011.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I would prefer to have semi transparent graphs in background.

------
pazimzadeh
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
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.

------
n1c
Is "Estimated money sent" since you open the page?

~~~
rwinn
Yep, that's right

~~~
qznc
And the "total volume" below?

~~~
rwinn
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>

~~~
pazimzadeh
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?

~~~
davidjohnstone
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
Thank you. That's the most lucid description of bitcoin spending I've yet to
see.

------
one-man-bucket
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

------
known
<https://localbitcoins.com/>

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

------
baddox
It could use delimiters on "Coins in circulation."

------
andr3w321
Mind sharing what libraries you used for this?

~~~
rwinn
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.

------
jasonzemos
How does it know power consumption?

~~~
rwinn
It's based of that 40 megahashes per second consumes 1 joule of power (1watt)

~~~
ewillbefull
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
From <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison> and some
discussions on #bitcoin-dev

~~~
gibybo
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.

------
hp50g
That's awesome - great work! :)

------
afics
Hm, returns a 502 now.

------
tudorizer
lovely UI

------
myspace
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
>no one questions who posseses the first "coins".

This is thoroughly documented <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining>

~~~
myspace
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
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/ar...](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article2160028.ece)

You could have had any of those blocks. I had several.

------
itistoday2
Odd ... I can't select the bitcoin address at the bottom of the page in
Firefox, but it works in Chrome.

