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Ask HN: Is Bitcoin's daily volume 3X what Apple stock is?

7 points by untilHellbanned 6 years ago · 4 comments · 1 min read

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It looks like Bitcoin's is $30B whereas Apple Stock is $9B.

data: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

https://www.barchart.com/stocks/most-active/daily-volume-leaders

LatteLazy 6 years ago

Why wouldn't it be? Bitcoin is a medium of exchange, so a lot of exchanges happen in it. Apple is a mature, Buy and Hold stock, so people don't tend to trade it much...

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 6 years ago

Two things to consider:

1. A large amount of BTC volume is fake volume or wash trading to benefit the exchange marketing. Particularly CoinMarketCap is an extremely misleading and unreliable data source. Their data is totally useless and means basically nothing. It's just a glorified ad site where exchanges pay money to list their fake volumes to get ranked high and acquire customers. Just look at the list of high-volume exchanges in your link and you can see that the vast majority of them are unknown and untrusted little companies inflating or completely making up their volumes.

2. Large amounts of BTC are traded OTC (over-the-counter) and would never show up in such data.

I don't know anything about Apple stock, but I can guarantee you that the $30B BTC figure is totally off. How off? Nobody really knows. It's impossible to get reliable data. True trade volume could be 1% or 10% of that.

Also, why do you care about trade volume? Depending on how it's generated it may not be an indicator of anything. If your goal is to measure liquidity, trade volume is not a good metric to look at.

  • parentheses 6 years ago

    the blockchain is public and immutable.

    one should be able to go through a 24 hour section of the ledger to determine how much BTC has moved and call that trading volume

    the only issues I see with this data are:

    - BTC is used as both a currency and a security and distinguishing

    - BTC is moved multiple times to obfuscate (read wash) transactions

    • WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 6 years ago

      BTC moved has nothing to do with exchange trade volume. When BTC is traded on an exchange, there are no blockchain transactions involved. It's all "internal" to the exchange because the exchanges are centralized.

      Trading on decentralized exchanges would result in blockchain transactions, but such exchanges have not yet caught on and make up only a tiny fraction (< 0.01%?) of trade volume. Maybe someone else has the exact numbers.

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