I frequently make use of the BTC and USD depth of markets to predict where prices will move and WHY.  Exchange rates almost always equal the Dollar depth over the BTC depth as can be seen on these graphs.




But I've noticed a bit of divergence in the numbers lately and began to wonder if the growth in other exchanges is perhaps having an effect on the accuracy of this calculation.  Were seeing a price divergence between Gox and all other exchanges, likely due to the ongoing difficult of getting USD out of Gox.  Should we perhaps look at the total dollars and total BTC on all exchanges?  Currently Bitstamp is the #2 exchange and holds a significant 24K BTC nearly a fifth of the 110-120K on Gox, but Bitstamp contain only a measly 1 million in USD depth compared to the 11-12 thats been the norm on Gox lately.

It seems clear the Bitstamp and other exchanges move whenever the price on Gox moves and that the dollars there would not alone support the price.  The Bitstamp BTC/USD figure would be only in the $40 range so it's clear that the dollar depth on Gox matter to the price on Bitstamp, it is just logical to assume the BTC depth on Bitstamp effects the price on Gox.

Currently the Gox USD/BTC figure for Gox sugjests a price of nearly $105, a full $10 higher then the actual Gox price and substantially above the other exchanges.  But when we add in the BitStamp coins and dollars the new becomes 13.5 million USD / 144K BTC and a predicted price of $95 exactly matches the current Gox price.

We have a lot of tools and sites that look at relative profitability of coins, and some that list things like 'market cap' but the metric I think is actually of value in determine which coins are on the top of the alt pile and to what degree they may be becoming rivals to BTC is to look at total hourly mining revenue.  This is simply coins per block * blocks per hour * exchange rate to BTC (or) exchange rate dollars.  For a relative comparison to BTC it's simpler to just use the exchange rate to BTC.

Now this analysis excludes the fact that a chain may be running faster then target (a common occurrence with people coin-jumping on profitability bubbles).  I've included as broad a range of coins as possible, the 'Other' group here includes MinCoin, IXCoin, DeVCoin and ByteCoin and they sum to a paltry 2/3rd of a BTC per hour.  For FRC I've summed the portion for miners and for foundation, the former is about 1/3rd of the total and the latter 2/3rds.



As you can see BTC is clearly dominant with right around 2/3rds of the total.  Most of the remainder is composed of Scyrpt coins with LTC being the largest.  The two flash in the pan coins FC and CNC (pump and dumps in my many other peoples opinions) combined come near to the revenue of LTC, the fact I've ignored these coins actual hash rates means they may be considerably higher, which simply goes to show how absurd their valuations are when they have no means to be spent outside of exchanges.

The remaining coins are SHA and are considered 'legit' by most folks having had some kind of technical improvement and are of similar size, PPC, TRC and FRC.  FRC is currently running at around x4 target rates btw it would be producing around 18 BTCs in revenue per hour if that was accounted for, it's likely temporary though.  Lastly we have NMC which is a merge-mined coin, its revenue is essentially in the BTC pie slice in a sense but not all BTC miners mine it.  The tiny Other consists of numerous dead or dying coins, again if their hash rates have them far below target might make them even smaller but you can clearly see what a dead coin looks like.