Bitcoin Forum

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Bitcoin’s dominance rate, or its share of the total cryptocurrency market, is on the verge of falling below 50 percent for the first time in over seven months.

At press time, the world’s largest cryptocurrency accounts for 50.9 percent of the total capitalization of the entire market and fell as low as 50.54 on March 17, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Before 2017, bitcoin’s dominance rate was perpetually in excess of 70 percent, but it began to deflate as new cryptocurrencies were created and sold to investors in initial coin offerings (ICOs), causing bitcoin’s dominance rate to drop to a low of 32.48 percent on Jan. 13, 2018.

Since, Aug. 11 of last year, however, bitcoin’s share of the cryptocurrency market has not fallen below 50 percent.


Bitcoin dominance rate

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Having traded between $3,200 and $4,300 since Dec. 2018, bitcoin’s recent drop in market dominance can be attributed to a strong performance from the broader altcoin market, comprised of all cryptocurrencies excluding bitcoin, rather than any significant depreciation to its own market.

In the past 90 days alone, names like enjin (ENJ), binance coin (BNB) and litecoin (LTC) have witnessed significant price increases of 406, 181 and 97 percent respectively, according to data from Messari.

As a result, the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies excluding bitcoin has grown 33 percent since hitting a 2019 low of $51 billion on Feb. 6 to its current value of roughly $69 billion.


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In the same time span, bitcoin’s market capitalization has also seen notable growth, but to a lesser extent than the altcoin market. Since Feb. 6, bitcoin’s market cap has increased from $59 billion to its current value of $71 billion – a jump of 20 percent.

Bitcoin’s shrinking dominance could be seen as a sign the crypto markets are shifting to a “risk-on” environment where investors prefer riskier assets, as altcoins are perceived to be. The rate falling below 50 percent would be a greater indication of this type of sentiment coming to fruition.

As it stands, the total capitalization of the broader cryptocurrency market records $140.6 billion, down 83 percent from its all-time high of $835 billion set on Jan. 7, 2018.


Reference: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-share-of-total-crypto-market-slips-back-toward-50

As one member of this forum said, this percentage is only numbers, if we want to calculate the real value, BTC dominated by 99%.
On the other hand, it is considered a good indicator as it gives us a measure of how willing people are to venture and therefore a higher probability of higher prices due to more market flows.
Is the rise of bitcoin to 4000$ led to this increase? Yes, perhaps the extra sense of investors that the price has found a bottom and that in the last moments to buy more before further rises.

The quality of altcoins is improving at the top, especially tron, litecoin, and others that have continuous development. Bitcoin will still be at the top though, it is simply digital gold

Bitcoin's dominance will organically decrease depending on the site that's calculating the percentages.

If we look at CMC for example, it's not so much that altcoins haven gained on Bitcoin, but more so that the quantity of listed altcoins has increased. If you keep adding altcoins, which happens continuously, the dominance will eventually drop below 40% or even below 30%.

If you also add that altcoins are somewhat leveraged Bitcoin products due to their similar but exaggerated movements, there isn't much that you can do here. Bitcoin is very long term bullish, so based on that, even the most rubbish coins will gain value throughout the years. Welcome in the world of crypto.

The worst part is that you can't even short 99% of the altcoins. Up is the direction.

It's not about quality but greed. Bitcoin isn't offering big profits anymore as it's becoming less volatile. Traders are all about volatility and pumps and dumps even when they are a bit too risky.

Why do you think shitcoins that have no real life use and not much of a community are still receiving investors. What draws the average Joe to Elastos or Kin when there are much better projects to choose from? A hope that somebody will pump these low market cap coins and allow them to make money.

Total marketcap will decrease more after halving event in the chain of the bitcoin network.  Altcoins will surge more in this case. Honestly, I don't accept easily the fact about sharing the half of crypto marketcap in bitcoin. Correlations are useless if bitcoin has 50% dominance rate in crypto markets IMHO.

You are kidding, right? TRON is utter garbage.


This is the correct answer. There is an endless supply of new useless coins and tokens being created on a daily basis that contribute nothing, achieving nothing, do nothing, but they all contribute to diluting these useless numbers. It's why market cap is such a useless metric. I can create a new token with a supply of 1 billion, sell a single token for $10, and decrease bitcoin's market dominance by 3% in the space of an hour. It means nothing.

I do not think it's the new projects added and created out of nowhere that are influencing this dominance. I think it's some projects that have lost a lot of value over Bitcoin and are slowly recovering. This has happened several times. To really influence dominance, the volume needs to be very large, not just the price.

This reminds of an absolute shitcoin that was listed on CMC for a short period of time till it got removed, likely for blatant manipulation. It had a market cap of $1.5 trillion with only $30k worth of daily volume.

XRP is somewhat similar. They printed 100 billion coins out of nothing, where at current prices that means a $30 billion total market cap, and Ripple itself holds around 70% of everything. If this isn't a security, then the SEC is blind.

In the coming years Ripple will slowly gain access to the locked coins, which means that out of nothing, XRPs market cap increases with hundreds of millions. It's not even a blockchain. :-X

Doesn't matter if it slipped < 50%, Bitcoin is still the best coins out there so who cares about those loads of shitcoins being listed on cmc daily. And I far as I can remember, even during Bitcoin's peak in 2017 the dominance is also below 50%, so the numbers is really irrelevant. Tron? LOL, it's just another pump-and-dump, ENJ was pump due to the Samsung news, and BTT was pump due to it's Early Access Program. So nothing has chance really, just the same shit everyday in the altcoin markets.

It is really surprising that with all those 2k+ shitcoins listed on CMC we are still talking about "Bitcoin’s dominance". And we are not talking about its dominance over a particular crypto. We are talking about BTC's dominance over all of them combined! I mean, how is that possible? I know this "dominance" means nothing, taking into account the above comments, but still.

Yeah, I think this is one term that the environment has far outgrown the original meaning. Bitcoin market share is probably more accurate, and eff me good but 50% in a swamp of shitcoins just goes to show what a spectacular failure altcoins would be if their sole purpose was to displace Bitcoin's market share.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin hash rate has climbed to a 4-month high.

I'd like to know what Bitcoin's share of global crypto hashpower is. Anyone know a link?

Hashrate-wise, BCash is by far the largest SHA-256 altcoin, and then we have Bitcoin's hashrate being 28 times higher than BCash's hashrate. I think that says enough.  :D

https://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/bitcoin-network-hashrate-chart
https://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/bitcoincash-network-hashrate-chart

Admittedly, there aren't many SHA-256 coins left to mine, so people's hashrate will be pointed to Bitcoin.

Top 3;

Bitcoin 48Ehs
BCash 1.7Ehs
BCashSV 0.5Ehs

Agreed. However, it might also be the beginning of another altcoin bull market similar to what occured on March to June of 2017 where we have witnessed 10x - 20x pumps of some altcoins. That was months after bitcoin's dominance index was also dropping during that year.

I reckon it was not really a drop in bitcoin's dominance. It was the whales holding more altcoins and preparing for the pumping and dumping of the altcoin market.

With the development of the cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin dominance over other types of cryptocurrency will gradually decrease. It is simply inevitable. There will come a day when Bitcoin will lose its price dominance. Since the cryptocurrency is constantly evolving based on the experience of previous cryptocurrencies, there will be a lot of coins on the market by that time that will claim leadership for capitalization. Their level will no longer be very different, so the formal leadership among them will periodically change approximately as we see the struggle for second place in terms of capitalization between ethereum and ripple. Therefore, no coin will no longer really dominate the market.
 Maybe only then the cryptocurrency will become truly decentralized.

let's be honest here, why the hell do they continue to publish this type of article when they know that 90% of altcoin is shitcoin with large volume manipulations and many exchange also has volume manipulation. I saw an altcoin that was listed in just 2 weird exchanges jumping from position 150 to position 80 of the coinmarketcap in just 3 days that shitcoin had an 800% pump, it was unbelievable. After days the shitcoin fell back to position 300. this is all a big joke. Let's evaluate which are the cryptos that are being used in real life whether for means of payment or other purposes. that's what matters

We're currently going through an altcoin season, but one that seems to ignore Ether and XRP. It really seems that whoever the groups are behind the shitcoin pumps, they target extremely low liquidity coins. A few million is enough to pump their prices with 20-30% while the same money wouldn't be of much interest to Bitcoin. I would say that such amount is barely enough to increase Bitcoin's price with 1%.

Searches for altcoins are up a lot, so that might explain the increased average joe interest. Average joes buy what goes up, and let it be the shitcoins that are going up now. Some people will rekt themselves hard when the party ends.

This pretty much means nothing in terms of how the network is actually run, or the underlying fundamentals of bitcoin.

Nor is this the first time that we've seen this occur. Bitcoin dominance is known to fall drastically in bullish times, most likely because people seek to park their funds in the short term in other tokens which have higher volatility in order to "ride the wave". It doesn't mean that bitcoin itself is becoming less popular, or its adoption is slowing down.

As a result, I'd not be concerned whatsoever, even if it continues to slip down to 40%, 30%. Bitcoin simply isn't the only cryptocurrency in the market anymore, as others try to tackle particular economic niches. But as I said, the most important thing is recognising that this has nothing to do with bitcoin itself, but more about the sentiment of the traders.

So I stumbled across this article today: https://medium.com/@jpthor/bitcoins-market-dominance-a9693ff604bf

The author uses a different method for calculating "dominance", which essentially boils down to marketcap multiplied by daily volume. With this new metric, bitcoin actually has >80% market "dominance", and the trend is upwards. This number is certainly more in keeping with what we all know, and it removes the effect of trashcoins artificially creating a huge marketcap for themselves with no volume. That's not to say this number couldn't also be manipulated - a coin's creator could simply trade a large number of their coins back and forth with themselves on a daily basis to artificially pump its volume - but it's certainly a more accurate representation than simply using marketcap.

It's definitely a better representation of Bitcoin's dominance, but what's even better is to drop this entirely. People have been so focused on this or that coin reaching x rank, that it is impacting the way newbies look at crypto.

Import thing is that the more people focus on market caps, the more infrastructure is being built to accentuate this, because there clearly is the demand for it. CMC has become the most influential site because of this.

Bitcoin is superior in every possible way. People will find out eventually. Most 2014/2015 Bitcoiners started as altcoiners, and so did I. It will take time before the current get rich quick noobs get there. It's just a matter of time.

I completely agree with you, but I just can't see it happening unfortunately.

If we were able to rank coins by some less tangible quality such as "working product", "real world use", "future potential", etc, then we all know that bitcoin would come first by a long, long way. But it is human nature to try to find order, even where none exists, and people like making lists with easy to understand metrics and numbers (such as marketcap), regardless of how useful or not those lists may be.


Yup, but as soon as we hit the next bull run, there will be a new influx of get rich quickers ready to throw their money away on any and every new useless token.