Bitcoin Forum

bitcoinsentiment.com (http://bitcoinsentiment.com) is a crowdvoting site where you can express your sentiment towards Bitcoin and see what other people think. Basically it is a poll that is running continuously.

Voting, viewing and downloading is free.

I believe that it is important that resources that rely on crowd participation are kept free of adds and stuff like that and I am not doing this to make money (though I would stand to benefit from BTC appreciation since I own some coins).

The more people that votes, the better it will work so I have tried to make that easy by creating a widget, that people can use if they want to contribute. There is an API so you can create your own widget if you want to.

 ;D

I suggest reposting this in the speculation subforum and keep a thread up to date which is dedicated to your poll.

This is a neat idea, but without at least an indication of sample size, there's no way to gauge how representative your numbers are.

Agreed. The volume is included in the download data and if you hover with the mouse over the graph you get the volume.

I should really plot the volume in the graph as well.

You might want to change "bull" and "bear" to just "up" and "down". Many non-finance people won't know those terms, especially non-native speakers.

Thanks for your input. Should/Can I move the thread or can a mod help me?

Cool - sorry, I didn't see that until you pointed it out.

it seems broken

Its not, it will display the HTML code you need to have the bitcoinsentiment.com poll on your site

i find it Extremely weird that this information is displayed after you vote, and then you have to vote again to see the results...
 

True indeed! Judging by the colours I suppose Bull is Up and Bear is down, right?

Nice idea nonetheless.

I changed it to Up, Neutral, Down and added arrows and added localization feature to backlog. Thanks for the input.  :)

EDIT: Yes green is up (bullish sentiment), while red is down (bearish sentiment). 

Thanks for letting me know of potential issues.

Broken
What exactly seems to be broken? Were you not able to vote?
If you are thinking about that you see some HTML-code, that is a feature. By copying the code you can create widgets on other sites. Perhaps I should add some additional graphics to make the more clear.

Wierdness
What information is displayed after you vote?
If you want to view the chart before voting, there is a link above the poll. But perhaps it was something else you were thinking of?

Again, thanks for your input. It is most appreciated.

Well,

this =>
does NOT sound good to me :)

It seems that you can vote as many times as you want. I was able to vote for up, click to vote again, then vote for down.

Some sort of IP analyzer only allowing one vote per IP would be good to protect the integrity of the poll.

The votes should be a for a specific timeframe: e.g. 1 day, 1 week, 1 month,  1 year or more

IP alone is a poor indicator of unique users.  Many schools and businesses have a single public IP.  Combine it with a user agent string at a minimum.

+1. Otherwise vote-rigging will happen.

lol, that is really bad. I have not seen that one myself, but I have a guess why it happened so I can see if I can fix it.

Yes vote rigging is a concern that I have. When I first thought about how to deal with it, I came up with the idea that voters would have to be members. To protect even further against trolls, a captcha would then be introduced so that member creation would be difficult to automate. Then I finally decided that it would for sure limit the number of voters and it could perhaps prove a little bit difficult to incorporate in the widget.

I have thought about storing the IP-addresses of people, but I decided against that mainly for two reasons. One reason was that unique users might share the same IP-address. The other reason was that I wanted the votes to be anonymous. For this reason I did not want use cookies either.

So what to do.... eventually I came up with a solution, but unfortunately I can not talk about it here because it is definitely not full-proof and for sure not if I write about it here. My hope is that it will at least fend of some of the most obvious attempts to manipulate the data. One of the most obvious ways, being repeatedly clicking on the links, which I of course did a lot myself when I was developing the site. Now, you can click repeatedly on the link without getting any error and without causing damage.

+1 for all your comments!

I would also have liked that, but then I had to give up the idea, because I became afraid that a potential voter would be "overwhlemed by the many options" and well... feel it was a little bit to much work. If there is only one option that is easy to understand, perhaps at least people would vote once.

Thanks for your input though, I am definitely have these things on the backlog if I can only find a good way of presenting them on the site.

Last week there were more then 400 votes. Thank you all! I am still testing it out and if everything runs smoothly I will try to raise some more awareness in the following weeks.

You should let people bet on this.

I have been thinking about what you wrote. It is a good idea I think, an incentive to vote and so forth and so on. I could add that a feature and keep it non-profit.

I am a little worried that it would be an incentive to manipulate the data though. Any ideas of how to counteract that?

I am thinking a little about how to attract visitors to the site.

What do you think about if I post interviews (related to Bitcoin) or something like that on the site. Do you think that could be a good idea?

I firmly believe a site should do only one thing and do it well, rather then do 10 things in a half ass manner.

so i suggest you add a lot more polls.

I really like that you now have a graph displaying the poll results, although I'm not sure this is the best way to represent this poll, maybe a pie graph? nvm i just got it, very nice  ;)

this site has gr8 potential and could become something all speculators watch.

keep up the good work

Thanks for the feedback. I can see your point and have decided to do as you suggest and focus on improving on the main feature instead of adding new ones.

A became dad (my first child) a few days ago, so I have not had time to work on the site, bit I am determined to keep it going and keep it non-profit, so please keep on voting - your voice is
important!

Next up on my backlog is to improve on the graph visualization. There is some cool things one can do with bull/bear ratio and so forth and so on. I am also playing with the idea of making it possible to create price overlays.

What kind of other polls would you like to see?

What price will today's daily candle close at?
What price will this weeks weekly candle close at?

IDK maybe word it differently.... but I'd like to be able to see / vote for, sentiment for short, mid, and long term.

also maybe a sentiment poll for how people feel about the projects overall dev. growth, are we going "Bitcoin Speed"?

VOTE VOTE VOTE PEOPLE

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123737.20

This is NOT useful. Only vote based on real money is useful like Bitfinex sentiment index
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/569/asd7c.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/401/asd7c.jpg/)

wtf is the bitfinex
https://bitfinex.com/

that looks like a short term indicator

It's the new bitcoinica, haven't you heard?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdvTkddp1F0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WiXMcsfvXE

i thought that one originally. it was the most entertaining to me but watching all the first one i posted, so good

Great feedback. I will see what I can do to about introducing more polls! I am a little worried that people would be discouraged if there are too many polls when they first visit the site - but there have to be a way of adding it anyway!

I think your suggestion on poll about peoples feeling about the project itself is interesting. I have not even considered those kinds of sentiment polls.

Hmm, I guess what ever poll there is, the phrasing would have to stay the same over time without loosing its validity. It would have to be general enough to be valid over time but specific enough to capture peoples sentiment.

low volume

Yes very low. I am working on making it easier for people to share the site with others.

New feature added.

Look at the charts page and scroll down and you will see the price of Bitcoin (MtGox) for the last 365 days together with up/down ratio. The ratio show how many voted that price would go up, divided by how many thought it would go down.

http://bitcoinsentiment.com/ (http://bitcoinsentiment.com/)

now we're getting somewhere :) just need at least 100 volume; need more people to vote

Thanks for the encouragement!

I am focusing on increasing the volume right now. I think that widgets are THE way to increase the volume. Though I have not really done any promotion there are already sites out there that have included the widget. I have contacted the site owners and asked for their feedback and so forth and so on.

I have listened to their input and I am right now focusing on improving the widget system. Those who put the widget on their site will be featured on a special "Supporters" page (had not had time to code it yet)

I have also created a ratio page http://bitcoinsentiment.com/?id=1025 (http://bitcoinsentiment.com/?id=1025) where you can view BTC performance measured in terms of other assets classes such as gold and S&P 500.

Though it might now be visible I am working continuously (while juggling full time job, writing a book and taking care of one month old baby) on improving on the site.

I am committed long term to this project!  So.... _thanks_ for voting and spreading the sites everyone!   :D

Created new chart to visualize sentiment, using this formula (up-down)/down. It provides another perspective on the data.

I have added a CLONE ME feature to the widget: http://bitcoinsentiment.com/w001.php?id=888888888 (http://bitcoinsentiment.com/w001.php?id=888888888)

When you click on the link, you get the HTML code for the widget making it easy to copy+paste it to other websites. Since the "new" widget also have the clone me feature the widget stand a better chance of being propagated to new hosts.

The number of voters is increasing all of the time. From what I can see it is very much thanks to the widgets. Since the widgets plays such an important roll I have created a referrers page, where the sites referring to bitcoinsentiment.com or sites including the widget is listed as a kind of a "thank you".

Thank you very much for all of your voting!  :-*

sentiment looks good

I don't understand. Charts show sentiment in freefall. Not sure how much credence I lend it, but, yeah.

https://i.imgur.com/7Qkj7eF.png
https://i.imgur.com/8CnU2w5.png

more UPs than DOWNS

Yes, but "up" sentiment is in freefall. It seems like that would be important to note.

There's almost always more ups than downs.
I fail to see any obvious correlation in the data. There are huge spikes of enthusiasm in late 2012 where the price hardly moved, and now sentiment is in freefall even during the post-crash rally.

so.....I should buy now right?