Bitcoin Forum

http://www.picamatic.com/show/2010/04/21/11/36/10211653_732x161.png

This goes out to all the exchanges, data warehouse, price chart plotters:

PLEASE someone start a movement which will hopefully spread through the whole cryptocoin-scene:

ENABLE y-axis SCALING!  PLEASE.

It drives me nuts, that so many charts are completely USELESS as soon as someone sells his coins for 1/100 times the current price - probably being stoned out of his head, and simply misinterpreting all those confusing digits.

Then for the following day, or week, or month, there is a spike in the data, which doesn't tell us anything about the currency (only about this one stoned user). And that spike destroys the usefulness of the chart, until it finally wanders off far enough into the past.

Another reason is the burst after a coin enters an exchange. It's suddenly traded for 10 times as much - for a few hours. Then in the following days weeks months, this unrealistic price is still dominating the y-axis range, and the charts are useless.

http://www.picamatic.com/show/2010/04/21/11/36/10211654_705x437.png

Similiar for the volume charts.
It is probably real volume, but often ranging over many orders of magnitude, because of a sudden burst in trading. Once I have understood that spike in volume, I want to cut it out, to clearly see all the other data.

http://www.picamatic.com/show/2010/04/21/11/36/10211651_888x309.png

A simple three-button (+/-/reset) for the y-axis maximum would be a good starting point

Please please please someone enable us to choose the y-axis range ourselves.

Many sites seem to use the same library for plotting charts, anyways. So if you find a way to extend that library (or to finally use it properly, perhaps the function is long possible, just not enabled?) ... you will help us all.

Thanks.

http://www.picamatic.com/show/2010/04/21/11/36/10211655_714x254.png
Figure 4: "stoned lunchtime trader"  8)

exactly what i was thinking about the last few weeks. but i dont want to implement y scaling but "hide peaks" functionality
i was thinking about
"hide 1 peak" just removes the datapoint with the highest/lowest price/volume
"hide 2 peaks" just removes the two datapoints with the highest/lowest price/volume
and so on. user is able to choose the number of peaks to hide with a slider maybe. then the y axis will scale automatically

I like it.

Yeah, this happens on most altcoin charts on coins-e.com. It's ridiculous. The BTC-e charts are only a little less crappy. I would except the time axis to be more dynamically adjustable and the price axis to be adjustable down to 0.

Makes me wonder... if the charting software is so bad it's almost worthless, how can one trust the code behind the trading engine?

MtGox had (comparatively) pretty good charts, btw.

yeah i have done it :) hiding spikes now live on cryptocoincharts!
try this chart and click on "+" to hide one spike
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/pair/myr/btc/poloniex/10-days

Yippieh, you did it!

Congrats. Kudos. And THANKS!

 :)

Now with your solution that spike data is completely gone.
In this case, it's not an untrue artifact, but rather a huge spike in volume, right?
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/pair/myr/btc/poloniex/10-days

The advantage of only scaling the y-axis would be that the bottom of the spike would still be visible.

But hey, that's a detail, a minor one.

It's really GREAT, with one function you have made so many previously broken charts useful again, thanks a lot.