Bitcoin's dominance in transaction volume [hard facts]

[d5000]

Some altcoin supporters have argued in the past months that "people pay now in altcoins because of the high Bitcoin transaction fee".

I've researched a little bit - no academic quality, but enough for a meaningful forum post - and concluded that that is not the case. With respect to transaction volume, Bitcoin is still dominant - with the only exceptions of Ethereum and Ripple.

I took blockchain explorers from the top 10 cryptocurrencies and counted the transactions in a reasonable time interval before 9 PM UTC. The time interval selected depended on the block interval. In the case of Bitcoin, I took one hour, with Dash, 30 minutes, with LTC, Monero and Bytecoin, 20 minutes, with ETC, NEM and Stellar, 10 minutes. and in the case of Ripple, as I didn't find a blockchain explorer I used the 24 hour volume from https://xrpcharts.ripple.com. Ripple volume is taken from this source.

So I got the following list:

Code:

Currency       TX/hour TX/interval  Time interval   Blocks examined

Bitcoin          16725       16725          60min    467954-467962
Ethereum          7014        1169          10min    3761655-3761694
Ripple            1210/43569* 1210/43569*   1h       29989105-29990065
NEM                168          28          10min    1124011-1124019
LTC                732         244          20min    1210141-1210150
ETC               1512         252          10min    3785905-3785948
Dash               370         185          30min    675284-675294
Monero             312         104          20min    1317400-1317411
Stellar             54           9          10min    -
Bytecoin            54          18          20min    1272947-1272956

Take your own conclusions.

I perhaps will repeat this little experiment at some moment in the future.

*Ripple: The lower number are payment transactions, the higher number are all transactions (including offers created and canceled at the exchanges between Ripple's IOUs, trust set, account set (new accounts?), and "regular key" set.

Edited: Probably I have grossly understimated the Ripple volume according to Sukrim. According to that source there were 43569 transactions/hour in the observed interval. That would change the conclusion a bit. However I'm not updating the number still because I must figure out the difference between "payments" and "transactions" in Ripple - the "payments_count" value is close to my estimation (1210). (see my two edits here)

[pitham1]

Hmm... If you look at the Tx/hr, Bitcoin seems to account for half of the overall transactions.
This is in line with the market cap dominance.
Extending this, if the artificial cap on bitcoin transactions is removed, the market cap of Bitcoin would zoom.

[OROBTC]

...

d5000

I would be interested to see an approximation (likely the best that you could do with all the price volatilities) of DOLLAR volume.  If BTC trx volume is that dominant, I would guess that $-volume of BTC trx would be even higher than your figures.

I always enjoy seeing "from the ground up analysis" of cryptos.  Keep at it!

[MingLee]

...

d5000

I would be interested to see an approximation (likely the best that you could do with all the price volatilities) of DOLLAR volume.  If BTC trx volume is that dominant, I would guess that $-volume of BTC trx would be even higher than your figures.

I always enjoy seeing "from the ground up analysis" of cryptos.  Keep at it!

Coinmarketcap has a decently accurate volume counting the past 24hrs in $USD I believe, and Bitcoin is listed as moving around $1B every 24 hours, and the next up move at the highest $400M over the course of 24hr, most are less than that.
I don't have a good analysis but that's a little supplement while you wait for him to get back to you.
EDIT: looking now Bitcoin is moving ~$2B while ethereum moves around $600M. So double the numbers I have listed.

[Sukrim]

in the case of Ripple, as I didn't find a blockchain explorer I used the 24 hour volume from https://xrpcharts.ripple.com.

Which is wrong.
You can look up metrics here https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/metrics or view single blocks with a tool like https://ripple.com/build/ripple-info-tool/ to verify the amount of transactions.
It would be easier to use the API call https://ripple.com/build/data-api-v2/#get-stats (https://ripple.com/build/data-api-tool/#get-stats) to get them for a period of time (https://data.ripple.com/v2/stats/?start=2017-05-24T09:00:00Z&end=2017-05-24T09:59:59Z&interval=hour is what you wanted I think? --> 44058 transactions in total during that time frame). You can also go to https://wisepass.com/ for a non-Ripple-Inc page in case you mistrust them. You can also run your own node and query that, but it is not the easiest route...

[Amph]

how ar epeople payign in altcoin if no altcoin are accepted anywhere? they are lying obviously, altcoin are only used to have more bitcoin this is a fact

but it's also true thta the high fee of bitcoin is currently reducing the amount of transaction that are made, i mean if the fee was far lower we would have far more TX per day guaranteed

[Sukrim]

Most altcoins are accepted and used at exchanges like Poloniex etc., so traders sending money between exchanges and to/from their wallets might make a significant part of transaction volume in any cryptocurrency (including Bitcoin).

[Xester]

Some altcoin supporters have argued in the past months that "people pay now in altcoins because of the high Bitcoin transaction fee".

I've researched a little bit - no academic quality, but enough for a meaningful forum post - and concluded that that is not the case. With respect to transaction volume, Bitcoin is still dominant - with the only exception of Ethereum, but I doubt that it really capted "payment" volume (as most of the transactions may be simply smart contracts executing).

I took blockchain explorers from the top 10 cryptocurrencies and counted the transactions in a reasonable time interval before 9 PM UTC. The time interval selected depended on the block interval. In the case of Bitcoin, I took one hour, with Dash, 30 minutes, with LTC, Monero and Bytecoin, 20 minutes, with ETC, NEM and Stellar, 10 minutes, and in the case of Ripple, as I didn't find a blockchain explorer I used the 24 hour volume from https://xrpcharts.ripple.com.

So I got the following list:

Code:

Currency       TX/hour TX/interval  Time interval   Blocks examined

Bitcoin          16725       16725          60min    467954-467962
Ethereum          7014        1169          10min    3761655-3761694
Ripple            1062       25503          24h      -
NEM                168          28          10min    1124011-1124019
LTC                732         244          20min    1210141-1210150
ETC               1512         252          10min    3785905-3785948
Dash               370         185          30min    675284-675294
Monero             312         104          20min    1317400-1317411
Stellar             54           9          10min    -
Bytecoin            54          18          20min    1272947-1272956

Take your own conclusions.

I perhaps will repeat this little experiment at some moment in the future.

The difference between bitcoin and altcoin or alternative coins is very big. Bitcoins have already established itself and it has even a local exchangers all over the world on which the altcoins doesnt have.Thus this give bitcoins a huge advantage over altcoins and we call that accessibility and market. And with the market pumping the price of bitcoin the holders of altcoins are selling their coins to get hold of bitcoins.

[deisik]

Some altcoin supporters have argued in the past months that "people pay now in altcoins because of the high Bitcoin transaction fee"

I don't deny that Bitcoin is still the king both in the number of transactions and raw volume processed

But for all your efforts, your stats don't in the least disprove the claim that "people pay now in altcoins because of the high Bitcoin transaction fee". Obviously, the point you are trying to challenge comes down to the claim that people now started to use altcoins a lot wider than before because of hefty Bitcoin transaction fees. I guess this is the new reality, and to correctly evaluate it you should use the number of transactions then and today, i.e. evaluate the change in the number of transactions, not their absolute readings as of today. For example, I for one started to use Litecoin as a value transfer vehicle since the transaction fees of this coin are really low (on the order of a few cents and below), and I also think that Litecoin is heavily undervalued, so I'm not afraid of it crashing in the interim

[talkbitcoin]

I perhaps will repeat this little experiment at some moment in the future.

first of all let me tell you good job, i meant to do something like this but i was lazy, good to see someone else finally did it.

also i want to mention that all these numbers are a bit higher than their normal numbers because of the high price activity in all of these coins. the data is better gathered in different times for example from a random day each week for the past year and then be compared.

for example the number of bitcoin transactions will be lower by about 30% if you compare it with 6 months ago.

and all the altcoin transactions will be 60 to 90% lower if you compare it with the same time.

and as for etherum since it is the second rank, i believe majority of the transactions are because of the big increase in the number of ICOs that are being started on this platform and all of them need ether for investment.

[Idrisu]

Bitcoin still dominate crypto currencies world. It is like gold standard or Central Bank to others coins. You can't actually trade others coin without converts your fiat to bitcoin and use it as a reserve to others coins. The trading volume of bitcoin actually shown that it dominate the market and is not in competition with any other coin.

[Wintersoldier]

Bitcoin still dominate crypto currencies world. It is like gold standard or Central Bank to others coins. You can't actually trade others coin without converts your fiat to bitcoin and use it as a reserve to others coins. The trading volume of bitcoin actually shown that it dominate the market and is not in competition with any other coin.

Yes actually your are right. Setting and building the first ever named in the market is one of the reason of dominance stock of bitcoin compare on all the coins out there. Usually people chose to used the one who set and been used by most of people so bitcoin is the no. choice of people on daily transaction. Not just that bitcoin set a development on its security and transaction system. And the development of bitcoin is not stopping because the changes it inevitable meaning to say that no one knows what improvement will happen to bitcoin in the near future. So its better to take the risk and to used bitcoin because its dominant not just for now but for the future.

[d5000]

in the case of Ripple, as I didn't find a blockchain explorer I used the 24 hour volume from https://xrpcharts.ripple.com.

Which is wrong.

Thanks! That would mean that Ripple is really a Bitcoin contender (having even more volume) and its market cap maybe isn't inflated. Ripple, however, is a different system than Bitcoin and has a completely different trust model as other cryptocurrencies. I admit that I never really investigated it in depth and I still struggle to understand what all the "ledgers" are ... So for me the rational strategy is simply to believe your numbers.

We could then update the conclusion as "only Ripple and Ethereum are really used."

Do you know if the same problem applies to Stellar as well?

Edit - Important: I have still not updated the table because I looked at your source and there are two interesting numbers:

payment_count: 1210 (that's probably what I had counted because it's close to my estimation)
transaction_count: 43569

What is the difference here? What are "transactions" that are not payments?

Edit2: I think I figured it out: Transactions can be "payments", but also "created offers of an exchange", "canceled offers" (these two are the most common), "trust set", "account set" and "set regular key". The problem is if we wanted to compare them with Bitcoin, we would have to differentiate between "Bitcoin payment transactions" and "Bitcoin non-payment transactions" (e.g. OP_RETURN transactions like Counterparty or Factom txs). For now, what I'll do is to include both numbers in the table, but as in Bitcoin most transactions are definitively payments, then we can safely conclude that Bitcoin is used much more for payments than Ripple.

to correctly evaluate it you should use the number of transactions then and today, i.e. evaluate the change in the number of transactions, not their absolute readings as of today.

Yep, you're right, a historical comparation would be even more insightful. That's a second step I plan to do. Also to be more exact I would like to compare the daily transaction amount and not a small timeframe like I did here; for that I need charts (like the one Sukrim provided for Ripple). But for now my goal was to get a rough absolute number, to get the order of magnitude of the differences between BTC and alts.

I think a timeframe in mid-December (not too close to the holidays) would be a good point to compare to today because in these times the altcoin bubble started (with Dash and some others) and also Bitcoin blocks wern't as full as today then. Let's see. Maybe next week I'll have time for it.

@talkbitcoin: This seems also to be a good answer for you.

I would be interested to see an approximation (likely the best that you could do with all the price volatilities) of DOLLAR volume.  If BTC trx volume is that dominant, I would guess that $-volume of BTC trx would be even higher than your figures.

The stat  I was interested in is the "number of transactions", it's not the transaction volume measured in BTC currency units. This would be another interesting comparation, however. I'll look at it if I have time.

[deisik]

to correctly evaluate it you should use the number of transactions then and today, i.e. evaluate the change in the number of transactions, not their absolute readings as of today.

Yep, you're right, a historical comparation would be even more insightful. That's a second step I plan to do. Also to be more exact I would like to compare the daily transaction amount and not a small timeframe like I did here; for that I need charts (like the one Sukrim provided for Ripple). But for now my goal was to get a rough absolute number, to get the order of magnitude of the differences between BTC and alts.

I think a timeframe in mid-December (not too close to the holidays) would be a good point to compare to today because in these times the altcoin bubble started (with Dash and some others) and also Bitcoin blocks wern't as full as today then. Let's see. Maybe next week I'll have time for it

Apart from that, time intervals seem to be skewed

I don't know about other coins, but Litecoin has an average time span between blocks set to 2.5 minutes (if I'm not mistaken). So if you take 60 minutes for Bitcoin as a reference point (i.e. 6 blocks found on average), you should set time interval for Litecoin to 15 minutes (2.5×6=15). Thus the number of transactions per time interval should be lower for that coin. As to me, showing the number of transactions processed daily with reference to dates would be more informative overall than per hour stats (a chart would be even more illustrative)

[Sukrim]

Ripple is a decentralized exchange that also has a native asset (to pay fees in) called XRP.

This means transactions are often offers that are being created/updated/removed, like on any other exchange out there. This would not be possible to do on Bitcoin itself, since the blockchain there is too limited in capacity and throughput and also pecause of the PoW consensus model which allows miners to front-run.

Anyways: If you are looking at raw transaction amount, yes, systems like Ripple or Ethereum (which also has a native asset to pay for fees and lots of other ways to write transactions other than "send X to Y") it seems a bit weird to compare them to Bitcoin, which has only very limited non-payment functionalities.

With evaluating Ripple Tx volume in the "moved IOUs/XRP vs. just offered a trade" sense another difficulty is that I think xrpcharts only counts direct payments denominated in the same currency as "payment" (a simple case: Account A sends 100 XRP to account B which receives 100 XRP). There are more complex ways to also send money and users might not even see a difference directly (account A sells 90 XRP for 1 USD, sells the USD for 1 EUR, sells the EUR for 100 XRP and sends the 100 XRP to account B - all she sees is that it is cheaper that way for her to do it that way). There is also the "Exchanges" metric on https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/metrics which correspons to actual trades happening (so in the end also money changing owners, not just offers to buy/sell).

In the end it depends on what you want to measure:
Total capacity of a system? Total Tx it is, no matter how they are actually used.
Total amount of transactions that result in at least a very probably case of account 1 having less money and account 2 having more (not much closed to define, since you can send to yourself on a different address in most/all systems)? In Ripple you'd need to look at "Payments + Exchanges" data.
Total amount of "base case" transactions (A sends to B without touching any markets in between)? Payments it is.

I agree with your general sentiment that payments on Bitcoin are still dominating the ecosystem, even if in some cases others are handling more actual transactions currently. It would be interesting to research this kind of data for all systems in your table though, since it looks a bit weird to have so many exceptions and *** around Ripple just because they easily allow you to have more insight into differenciating transactions. They are not the only decentralized exchange system in your list... Edit: It also seems a bit weird considering the title of this thread is "transaction volume" not "payment volume". /edit

By the way: The Ripple blocks (called "ledgers") analyzed in my example are the 961 blocks from 29989105-29990065 (both inclusive)

[el kaka22]

Some more hard facts :
- Bitcoin dominance might be a reason we are still feeding greedy miners.
- Practically it will not be easier nor possible to switch over to some altcoin payments suddenly when we are into bitcoin payment based agreement.
- Probably some gamblers might have switched over to altcoin payments but I am sure they too might be finding difficulties in calculating risk/reward ratio with a new value denomination.
- Steller and bytecoins were having ~ 200% to 500% growth in recent times but not having at least 1% transactions of what bitcoin system has. How smartly devs try to fool traders.

[ivanpoldark]

If i understand correctly, one transaction in Bitcoin takes an hour in today`s reality. If we add to this significant system fee, it`s hard to believe that without much rebuilding bitcoin could sustain its dominant position on the future market.

[deisik]

Some more hard facts :
- Bitcoin dominance might be a reason we are still feeding greedy miners.
- Practically it will not be easier nor possible to switch over to some altcoin payments suddenly when we are into bitcoin payment based agreement.
- Probably some gamblers might have switched over to altcoin payments but I am sure they too might be finding difficulties in calculating risk/reward ratio with a new value denomination.
- Steller and bytecoins were having ~ 200% to 500% growth in recent times but not having at least 1% transactions of what bitcoin system has. How smartly devs try to fool traders.

Some of these points are debatable

First, it is not clear how Bitcoin dominance (which I agree with, just in case) could be the reason why we are "still feeding greedy miners". This is a vague statement in and of itself which requires further clarification and explanation. Next, I don't see any difficulty (let alone impossibility) for substituting Bitcoin with something else (another altcoin) for the very simple reason that both Bitcoin and altcoins are used primarily for trading (let's remain realists here). Strictly speaking, I don't quite understand what you mean by "bitcoin payment based agreement". Which agreement do you refer to specifically? And last but certainly not least, I myself invested some monies into Litecoin now (and am going to invest more if the price goes lower) since I consider that this coin exactly can and will likely eat away a mighty share of the Bitcoin pie in the nearest future, especially if quarrels and fights in the Bitcoin camp are set to continue (which seems to be the case)

[hatshepsut93]

I think the reason for such low transaction volume of altcoins is their volatility - it's a serious reason why many merchants don't want to accept Bitcoin, and volatility of altcoins is much higher, even top 10 altcoins can change their value by 20-30% in a day. If we imagine that all prices stopped moving, than people would quickly switch to alts, because Bitcoin transcations right now are slow and very expensive. But this switch might cause similar problems to alternative blockchains, because no one yet seen them under such load as Bitcoin is suffering right now.

[talkbitcoin]

Apart from that, time intervals seem to be skewed

I don't know about other coins, but Litecoin has an average time span between blocks set to 2.5 minutes (if I'm not mistaken). So if you take 60 minutes for Bitcoin as a reference point (i.e. 6 blocks found on average), you should set time interval for Litecoin to 15 minutes (2.5×6=15). Thus the number of transactions per time interval should be lower for that coin. As to me, showing the number of transactions processed daily with reference to dates would be more informative overall than per hour stats (a chart would be even more illustrative)

i don't know any altcoin that has full blocks so this factor shouldn't really matter. because whether the altcoin is generating a new block every 5 seconds or every 10 minutes there will still be the same number of transactions in total.

lets say there are 100 transactions per 5 minute.
if the blocks had 1 minute intervals there would be 5 blocks each with 20 tx in them.
and if it was 5 minute interval there would be 1 block with 100 transactions in them.

although if the method you are using to retrieve the number of transactions should exclude the coinbase transaction of these blocks. because for an altcoin with lots of blocks in 1 hour there is a large, considerable amount of coinbase transactions.