Bitcoin Forum

The market cap for bitcoin and altcoin in coinmarketcap is very misleading.
the simple formula of multiplying number of coins by daily price cannot be anywhere near accurate, if it was, we will be not having such market volatility.

I know its a hard question, but what do you think is the actual marketcap for crypto currency? 

Is Ripple already worth more then a billion dollar or are the owners manipulating the price to keep it at .014. >:(

Everything is pure unregulated speculation. It's all triangles, smoke, and ponies.

it is very hard to say.
I just can say - it is huge number of $$$ :)

I feel if there was a sell order of 200-300 million dollars for bitcoin the market will very quickly plummet, for ripple it might not even be 5 million dollars for the value to tank.

Define what an actual market cap is supposed to suffice.

yes, yes socrates  ::) , I get what you are getting at, basically I am asking is the crypto market actually worth what coinmarketcap is saying is the marketcap happy   :P

The actual market capitalisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_capitalization) is the number of issued coins (ie, not counting coins that have yet to mined) multiplied by the spot price. That is the definition of the term; to say any other figure is the market capitalisation is incorrect. Market capitalisation is not, by itself, a measurement of the value of entity, and no knowledgeable investor expects it to be.

market cap is a simple measure. it's useful for some things, like comparing two companies, while not useful for other thins.

The question is, what do you want to know?

Properly speaking, market capitalisation is normally applied to the equity value of a publicly traded company. Last year there was an interesting thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=142201.0) about alternative measures, such as monetary base, that might be closer to what the OP was after.

If you are trying to ask what is the total fiat available to bid up bitcoin, it is very low. Not even 10% of the present market cap.

Bitcoin is priced high because less then 200 people own or control up to 80% of supply. So you have the remaining 20% bid up by 500,000 participants.

Also most of the major exchanges are nothing more then dumping grounds for bitcoin insiders, as evidenced by the Mt. Gox documents. For everyone else, you run into compliance issues.

Crypto markets are more manipulated then any other.

More like 1% is being bid up by the small-fry, the amount of coin on exchanges has been measured in days or weeks worth of mining for some time now.  The market-cap numbers are meaningless in such a shallow market, people would be wiser to watch the USD depth on all exchanges and divided that by all outstanding coin to get a reasonable valuation.

Definition of market cap:


But to define what are the bitcoins actually worth we would have to assume a lot of things. Check how many bitcoins are up for sale and you find something like 6800@bitstamp+8400@bitfines+350btce+100itbit+65@campbx = 15715BTC

So if I go in and sell 15715BTC, I could basically create a flashcrash on US markets. It would take even less to crash EU or China markets. The fiat money I would get from selling this would be around 8 million USD.

So no I have sold 15715BTC and got 8 million USD. The market maybe crashed faster by people jouinng me in the selling, or people would send in fiat en masse to buy up cheap bitcoins.

So can we really say how much are the bitcoins worth right now? I say no. We can speculate about how much fiat would be up for grabs if an early adopter starts to sell off.