Bitcoin Forum

If you google "bitcoin services" and click on the 1st link "Trade - Bitcoins" you can open the file up and "save file as" to desktop.  Below is the file size.  To me it means the bitcoin economy grew 10% in 3 days, and about 25% in a week.

Trade.htm   KB
6-27   152
6-28   169
6-30   179
7-01   181
7-04   202

May I ask that you keep doing these stats? :)

Also... brilliant! :D

agreed - brilliant.

a valuable economic indicator.

Can you imagine if growth in US dollar trade was 25% PER WEEK?  :o

Anyone know of a site with a transactions per day graphs?

While this is indeed a somewhat positive indicator, keep in mind that different entries have different amounts of text explaining what their service or good they are selling for BTC.

Just going off of the filesize growth in terms of actual economic growth is going to be very misleading. However, it DOES mean that there has been growth in general, and that is a very good thing :)

This will give you a somewhat more accurate metric.  Though it's still not foolproof.

Anyone with a reasonably-reliable server want to set something up? :)

Very, very nice. I hope you continue following this.

date   blk0001.dat     MB/Day growth between periods
5-17   163.9   
5-24   179.0   2.06
6-02   201.8   2.40
6-07   218.3   3.67
6-13   248.1   4.85
6-20   283.5   5.00
6-29   321.3   4.24
7-03   335.1   3.96

I have also been keeping track of the total size of blk0001.dat  It is interesting to note when the 0.0005 transaction fee went in the average growth in the total blocks went down.   I like small block growth and would like to see higher transaction fees or preferably a transaction fee that changes automatically to keep block growth at 1 mb/day.

This is not real growth but websites starting to accept bitcoin again after the mtgox hack.

I've been counting the number of links on that page and there is a huge drop 2011-06-20.
This numbers are back to normal on 2011-07-02
I'm missing some data between 2011-06-22 and 2011-07-02 but you can see below

2011-06-01: 318 links
2011-06-02: 332 links
2011-06-03: 344 links
2011-06-04: 352 links
2011-06-05: 359 links
2011-06-06: 373 links
2011-06-07: 383 links
2011-06-08: 398 links
2011-06-09: 407 links
2011-06-10: 415 links
2011-06-11: 425 links
2011-06-12: 428 links
2011-06-13: 442 links
2011-06-14: 450 links
2011-06-15: 458 links
2011-06-16: 461 links
2011-06-17: 470 links
2011-06-18: 485 links
2011-06-19: 500 links
2011-06-20: 505 links
2011-06-21: 468 links
2011-06-22: 470 links
2011-07-02: 585 links
2011-07-03: 595 links
2011-07-04: 596 links

Let's not start tooting our own horn. The bitcoin economy is still EXTREMELY tiny. It will have to grow a lot more for it to become a real economy.

Cool analysis though, I hope you keep it up.

Great stuff guys

What a load of crap. If you actually try selling anything here (as I have done multiple times) then you would know that there are no buyers of goods and services (not including those related to mining).

People are hoarding and are not spending, even with massive discounts.

Take it from someone who makes a living from selling goods and services for USD, there is NO bitcoin economy.

I've spent hundreds of BTC. You're obviously missing something.

There are 2 ways to get btc mining and selling.  2 weeks ago there was no reason to sell because the mining margins were massive.  Now, things are starting to get interesting.  It won't be true economy until mining electricity costs = $ bitcoin.  I have bought stuff with bitcoin and made some donations.

sirk, that is a great list, how did you find number of links (a php script)?

This will happen no matter what if Bitcoin keeps working. Mining has a very low barrier of entry, so it will happen. How long it will take to get there depends on the price of the ASIC's (if they ever appear, but it seems they will). But the Bitcoin economy is not directly related to mining profits.

Yeah. What happened was that some offer had been deleted. The person offering reverted the deletion in a bit heavy-handed way and with this all additions of the 5 days before.
I've inserted these entries again on July 2th, therefore the number jumped up again.

Anyway, if that growth rate of number of entries is related to real trade (a big if), and it could be sustained for a year or two, this would become a remarkable market place.


But what kind of items are sold successfully? I made a page with photographs for my friend (she creates awesome images) but so far, nobody has bought for bitcoin. And I'd say this can be a really excellent way to sell things like photographs and music.

OTOH, there needs to be a point of intersection of people who are 1) technically savy, 2) have good and interesting offers, and people which 3) are technically savy as well and 4) have the money to afford these things. Selling art for income isn't easy.

Could you collect some hints for merchants, artists and creative people? What are your experiences?

I just brought a Bitcoin Weekly t-shirt from Square Wear.  ;D

Ya telling me people are hording money? I got .70 BTC for the articles and one comic.

You cannot say these directly represent the size of the economy. These are only services offered, not services patronized.

I have sold over $25,000 worth on my site in the last week, all in bitcoins. No discount, just the 24 hour average exchange rate applied to the purchase.

Take it from someone who makes a living from selling goods and services for BTC, there IS a bitcoin economy.

You're serious?

I set up a few craigslist ads for computer/electronics offering to accept Bitcoins as payment and got a buyer in the first day. This is in a very rural area too.

There are thousands of people spending btc. I've purchased six or seven things myself (none related to mining). It is still a very very small economy, of course, but to say "what a load of crap" is pretty silly. It can be thought of as a small town - very few services, and many things are inconvenient. But, this town is growing month on month at an incredible clip. Dismiss it at your peril.

 If you can't make sales, maybe you're just not offering the goods/services which the market desires at your offered price?  What exactly are you selling? Maybe I'll buy?

Yes. Why?

I've spent thousands myself on Jeremy's site.  The guy is awesome, and YES, there is a Bitcoin economy.

Jeremy, my wife and I spend dozens of BTC worth of dollars on Amazon.com each month.  I'll definitely try to route that trade through you in the future.  I just "discovered" you this evening, unfortunately right after I had bought 5 BTC worth of books on Amazon.com.

The price decrease was probably a good thing - it encourages people to actually go and spend their bitcoins, which in turn shall hopefully make BTC less volatile :D

It's 25 thousand dollars worth of bitcoin in one week. You think we not be skeptical, even if we are bitcoin proponent?

So I've run the script I posted earlier for the last several days, and the result is approximately 7-8 new vendors per day.  That's an annualized growth rate of over 400%, which is pretty good, even if you consider duplicates.  These are the numbers:

Optimistically, if you assume compound growth (which I'd guess has happened so far), it will be more than 400% per annum.

Starting from 612 (last figure), I added 1.144% per day (from "7 new vendors per day"), for a total of 38,865, or 6250% growth per annum.

At some point the wiki page might need to be replaced by something more scalable.

Thank god its a wiki, so we have easy access to historical data:


It really seems to grow roughly exponentially which is not too surprising.
Nice to see the Bitcoin economy flourish!

Hey Jeremy? Any reason bitcoinz.ca and bitcoinworldmarket.com are not listed on your site? They look pretty cool, and may even persuade me to part with some of my bitcoins.

No reason other than that I have just heard of them and haven't made any agreements with them.

This pretty chart is not proof of anything and you know it.

Oh but the graph does "prove", that the number of entries on the trade page grows roughly exponentially. My second statement was just about a personal observation which happened to correlate with said graph.

Where do you read something erroneously proofed?

I'm working on it ;)

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11181.0

Trade.htm   KB   links
6-24-11   152   
7-1-11   181   
7-7-11   216   
7-13-11   224   
7-15-11   223   603
7-18-11      616
7-25-11      642

decided to switch to links.  seoquake a firefox addon gives you this info.  Things are looking strong.

This has a name: Bubble!  ::)

The 'problem' is, IMHO, that people tend to spend what they did previously earn.

Right now mining is the easiest way to earn bitcoins, but given current difficulty only very early miners have enough bitcoins to spend (a lot of them just sells bitcoins for some currency to pay for their rigs).

A real economy needs an offer of some kind of work which pays you in BTC because, right now, converting a currency into BTC just to buy things in BTC has no real advantage you're better off buying things in your currency (less hassle).

spiccioli.