Transaction volume vs exchange volume

[johnyj]

Just looked at the new bitcoinx website, it shows:

Bitcoins sent 24hr: 784,899.31 BTC
MTGOX 30 DAY volume: 22,288.79 BTC

784,899x30/22,289=1056

So the exchange of BTC towards USD take only 0.1% of all the BTC transactions, it means if most of those BTC are going for sell, the price will fall like a knife

[niko]

Just looked at the new bitcoinx website, it shows:

Bitcoins sent 24hr: 784,899.31 BTC
MTGOX 30 DAY volume: 22,288.79 BTC

784,899x30/22,289=1056

So the exchange of BTC towards USD take only 0.1% of all the BTC transactions, it means if most of those BTC are going for sell, the price will fall like a knife

Does your transaction volume account for self-sent change in each transaction?

[BkkCoins]

Why would you compare 24 hr. trx voume with 30 day exch. volume.
Any comparison should reflect the same time interval.

Transaction volume with bitcoin is not like other economic measures because it's very hard to know what the numbers mean. They pretty much mean nothing. I can send coins to myself repeatedly all day and it will look like huge volume has occurred.

It may be meaningful to compare the exchange volume to the total bitcoins existing but even that is a little misleading as no one even knows how many have been destroyed or lost. There have been a few rough estimates on some threads here.

I could also see maybe adding up the balances for any addresses that have seen activity in some period to use as an indicator and compare that total to exchange volume. ie. active coins vs. exchange volume.

[FreeMoney]

I don't even know where to begin.

Change as mentioned is a huge factor. It would be like calling my buying gun with a twenty dollar bill 20 dollars worth of activity.

Also some large unknown amount of those transactions are from a person to themselves. It would be like counting me putting money in my wallet (and returning it to my safe later) as double the amount of money that I DIDN'T spend.

Some of those transactions are actually currency exchanges that you don't see because they happened in a local coffee shop.

In order for that many coins to be sold there would have to be an equal number of buyers and you can't tell what the price would do. Probably in order to get a tiny fraction of that many coins away from their owners (who have either recently acquired them or have declined selling them for a long time) you would need to offer some higher price than is currently on offer, who knows how high.

The fact that tons of coins are being used shows that people have plenty of stuff to do with them and aren't going to try to divest en mass.