Bitcoin Forum

What is the 'tick' of a bitcoin price? What exactly does it measure? How is it calculated, for example, is it the average of buy and sell orders currently? Are "market orders" executed at the tick price? Google search on "what is a bitcoin tick" only leads to current tick prices or aggregates of ticks, but no info on what a tick actually is and how it's calculated. New to this so please fill me in.

there is no such thing called bitcoin "tick" and the word tick on its own has a different meaning.

what you saw is probably called bitcoin price ticker. and ticker means something like a price watch where it updates the price for users to see in real time on every tick (time intervals).

and if you want something similar either use a live exchange service to see the live price or use trusted sites like http://www.preev.com/ or coindesk's price ticker. don't click on any random link you find on google search.

Thank you for your reply.

Though I'm not sure if you answered what I was asking... the fact still remains: What is the "ticker price"? How is it calculated? For example check current "ticker" price at BTCC: http://data.btcchina.com/data/ticker?market=btccny ... it gives you a "buy" price and a "sell" price. Are these calculated based on the books? Are these what the market orders (not limit orders) are executed at?

so your question is about the "API Response" of an exchange service. now it is a different story.

for that you have to consult the API documentation of that particular service that you are using for more information and making sure.

but from what i see here https://www.btcc.com/apidocs/spot-exchange-market-data-rest-api#ticker :
{"ticker":{"high":"4949.67","low":"4734.74","buy":"4869.43","sell":"4870.28",
"last":"4869.44","vol":"3715566.31290000","date":1477820421,
"vwap":"4837.89","prev_close":"4898","open":"4898"}}

ticker is the price of the orderbook (buy and sell) plus the last/history of price like highest/lowest price

p.s. https://www.btcc.com/apidocs

Ah I see. So it really depends on the exchange what the definition of the ticker prices are. Could be anything, depending on the exchange I suppose.

A tick is usually the minimum price movement possible. It would depend on the currency you are trading Bitcoin in.
For example, if you are dealing in dollars, the tick could be 1 cent.

This is what I understand also, and this ticker prices varies from various exchanges. Some are higher compared to other exchanges that is why other are doing arbitrage.

Tick price simply define as price at certain short interval of time and it keep changing with every new order getting executed. Several price ticker are available and all of them have different time set to check the last market pirce so you may find price different in each and every price tickers this also may be due to the source of price those ticker service depends on.

If you see https://markets.blockchain.info you can see price of bitcoin in different exchange platform have really high difference so better to stick with one price ticker if you are calculating total amount of bitcoin received or sended in fiat terms.

are you thinking about the ticker price which is just the current price ?

I think you are talking about the price tickers, where the average price are calculated from different exchange sources like Bitfinex, Bitstamp

BTC-E and LocalBitcoins and displayed in real-time. It resembles the stock ticker, where  a report of the price for certain securities, updated

continuously throughout the trading session by the various stock exchanges.  :) ... The ticker resembles something like this : Preev.com

Thanks for the input everyone.

Is the assumption incorrect that market orders buy/sell at the ticker buy/sell price?