BitcoinAverage.com - bitcoin price index

[BitcoinAverage]

Great site!

Any plans to add more (possibly all from site) currencies to API?

We have released API for global averages at https://api.bitcoinaverage.com/ticker/global/*. You now have all possible world currencies available in the API.
Also this explanation chart tells how all these global averages are calculated.

Alex at BitcoinAverage

Is there any way to get historical data going back more than 24 hours?  I found https://api.bitcoinaverage.com/history/USD/per_minute_24h_global_average_sliding_window.csv but am really looking for data going further back (daily would be fine).

ETA: Actually, I can't make sense of the URL above.... the "USD global average" column seems to be blank unless LibreOffice messed up the CSV import...

Thanks

roy

Hmm, I've checked that file, I see what you mean - headers are messed up, while the data itself is fine. I'll fix that soon.

Historical data - hmm, we're saving data daily, but it's not available online, only by request. I can get it for you if you need, just ask. It will be daily per-minute CSVs, but it's not going to long in the past, as we've started tracking global averages not so long ago.

Alex at BitcoinAverage

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[BitcoinAverage]

Have important update - we've made a decision on chinese exchanges suspected in faking trading volume figures.

fxbtc integration changed to calculate actual trades and now it shows a much lower and probably real volume.
okcoin does not provide trading history data, so we can't go that route. So okcoin has been removed, it's put to ignored exchanges list now.
btctrade - removed also, for same reasons.

As a result of this CNY market trading volume shrank by around ten times, and now has much lower influence on global average price.

If someone has any information relevant to the case - we're happy to listen. We will probably review this decision once this situation will remedy itself.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

[solex]

Have important update - we've made a decision on chinese exchanges suspected in faking trading volume figures.

fxbtc integration changed to calculate actual trades and now it shows a much lower and probably real volume.
okcoin does not provide trading history data, so we can't go that route. So okcoin has been removed, it's put to ignored exchanges list now.
btctrade - removed also, for same reasons.

As a result of this CNY market trading volume shrank by around ten times, and now has much lower influence on global average price.

If someone has any information relevant to the case - we're happy to listen. We will probably review this decision once this situation will remedy itself.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Great work Alex.

Unfortunately the job is not complete until mtgox is removed too.
When/if they get fiat transfers back to < 1 week only then can they be considered a valid price source.

[BitcoinAverage]

Have important update - we've made a decision on chinese exchanges suspected in faking trading volume figures.

fxbtc - integration changed to calculate actual trades and now it shows a much lower and probably real volume.
okcoin - does not provide trading history data, so we can't go that route. So okcoin has been removed, it's put to ignored exchanges list now.
btctrade - removed also, for same reasons.

As a result of this CNY market trading volume shrank by around ten times, and now has much lower influence on global average price.

If someone has any information relevant to the case - we're happy to listen. We will probably review this decision once this situation will remedy itself.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Great work Alex.

Unfortunately the job is not complete until mtgox is removed too.
When/if they get fiat transfers back to < 1 week only then can they be considered a valid price source.

We do not consider MtGox as "valid price source", as for me - none of the individual exchanges are. But as long as they are not faking their ticker figures and someone is still willing to trade there even considering fiat withdrawal problems - we should count it in as one of the market players.
Since MtGox volume is not decisive anymore even for USD market (not to mention global averages) - we don't see the need to exclude it. It exists and works, it is a part of the global landscape, whether we like it or not, and we have to include it.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

[Mike Hearn]

Hey Alex,

Thanks for including cross-rates! This will make local trading much easier in many countries.

Unfortunately it seems to have caused some crazy problems in CHF trading because there you provide both a cross-rate and data based on real trading, and the spreads are enormous. I wish we had fluid and efficient arbitrage in Bitcoin-world but it seems we don't yet For instance, CHF is listed as 0.745 on the site, which is the cross-rate, but some Android wallets are showing more like 0.816 which I guess is the old trade-based data.

I am not sure what to do about this, to be honest ....

[Roy Badami]

[We do not consider MtGox as "valid price source", as for me - none of the individual exchanges are. But as long as they are not faking their ticker figures and someone is still willing to trade there even considering fiat withdrawal problems - we should count it in as one of the market players.
Since MtGox volume is not decisive anymore even for USD market (not to mention global averages) - we don't see the need to exclude it. It exists and works, it is a part of the global landscape, whether we like it or not, and we have to include it.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Could I just check with you.... when computing Mt Gox's volume for a currency, do you make sure only to inlcude primary transactions as returned by the Mt Gox API?  If not, you will end up, the global average will end up double counting transactions that are cross-matched between, e.g. the EUR and USD orderbooks (which Mt. Gox.'s multi-currency ordermatching will do if it's still the best order on the orderbook, taking into account the Gox currency conversion fee).

roy

[Roy Badami]

Historical data - hmm, we're saving data daily, but it's not available online, only by request. I can get it for you if you need, just ask. It will be daily per-minute CSVs, but it's not going to long in the past, as we've started tracking global averages not so long ago.

Ah, that's way more detail than I want.  Ok, let me take a step back and explain what I'm really looking for...

I would like to see a daily indicative Bitcoin price for each calendar day (ideally both published on the web site and accessible by an API).  There is often a need to determine the market value of an asset for tax or accounting purposes.  For pragmatic reasons, in many circumstances it is adequate to calculate the market value using an indicative price for the asset on the day in question; for shares, published daily closing prices are often used for this purpose.

Currently the only published indicative daily prices for Bitcoin are Coindesk's published 'closing prices' for their Bitcoin Price Index.  I don't find their methodology ideal for a number of reasons, but that's a separate discussion.  For now, what I'd like to see is more providers publishing such pricing data.

I don't have a strong feeling how the daily price index should be calculated.  Volume-weighted average over the day?  Midprice at a particular time of day?  (Noon?  End-of-day? i.e. midnight.)  Nor do I have a strong feeling for what timezone is used to define 'day'.

It would be great to have more options for getting data like this than Coindesk's current data...

roy

[mmeijeri]

Volume weighted averages would be a very good addition.

[BitcoinAverage]

Hey Alex,

Thanks for including cross-rates! This will make local trading much easier in many countries.

Unfortunately it seems to have caused some crazy problems in CHF trading because there you provide both a cross-rate and data based on real trading, and the spreads are enormous. I wish we had fluid and efficient arbitrage in Bitcoin-world but it seems we don't yet For instance, CHF is listed as 0.745 on the site, which is the cross-rate, but some Android wallets are showing more like 0.816 which I guess is the old trade-based data.

I am not sure what to do about this, to be honest ....

Hi Mike

Hmm, this is exactly the MtGox problem. CHF is directly traded only by MtGox and LocalBitcoins, with gox having over 50% of volume, so direct trading figure is goxed and not really reflective.

We've discussed it with Andreas Schildbach recently and he is going to switch his Bitcoin Wallet to crossrated global averages asap, and mycelium wallet is already using global averages. So I think this issue will fix itself soon by switching two main wallets to crossrate.
Blockchain.info and coinbase are two other most popular wallets, and both are using their own exchange rates, not sure where those are coming from.

Too bad I didn't make it to the event in central London last week to meet in person. Probably some other time then.

Alex at BitcoinAverage

[BitcoinAverage]

[We do not consider MtGox as "valid price source", as for me - none of the individual exchanges are. But as long as they are not faking their ticker figures and someone is still willing to trade there even considering fiat withdrawal problems - we should count it in as one of the market players.
Since MtGox volume is not decisive anymore even for USD market (not to mention global averages) - we don't see the need to exclude it. It exists and works, it is a part of the global landscape, whether we like it or not, and we have to include it.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Could I just check with you.... when computing Mt Gox's volume for a currency, do you make sure only to inlcude primary transactions as returned by the Mt Gox API?  If not, you will end up, the global average will end up double counting transactions that are cross-matched between, e.g. the EUR and USD orderbooks (which Mt. Gox.'s multi-currency ordermatching will do if it's still the best order on the orderbook, taking into account the Gox currency conversion fee).

roy

Hmm, this is a good question actually. We're using their API tickers, which provide trading volumes separately for different currencies. I assume they do calculations right and not provide doubled volumes through their API, however I couldn't find this explicitly stated anywhere. I'll approach them directly and find out. Will update you when I'll know more.

Historical data - hmm, we're saving data daily, but it's not available online, only by request. I can get it for you if you need, just ask. It will be daily per-minute CSVs, but it's not going to long in the past, as we've started tracking global averages not so long ago.

Ah, that's way more detail than I want.  Ok, let me take a step back and explain what I'm really looking for...

I would like to see a daily indicative Bitcoin price for each calendar day (ideally both published on the web site and accessible by an API).  There is often a need to determine the market value of an asset for tax or accounting purposes.  For pragmatic reasons, in many circumstances it is adequate to calculate the market value using an indicative price for the asset on the day in question; for shares, published daily closing prices are often used for this purpose.

Currently the only published indicative daily prices for Bitcoin are Coindesk's published 'closing prices' for their Bitcoin Price Index.  I don't find their methodology ideal for a number of reasons, but that's a separate discussion.  For now, what I'd like to see is more providers publishing such pricing data.

I don't have a strong feeling how the daily price index should be calculated.  Volume-weighted average over the day?  Midprice at a particular time of day?  (Noon?  End-of-day? i.e. midnight.)  Nor do I have a strong feeling for what timezone is used to define 'day'.

It would be great to have more options for getting data like this than Coindesk's current data...

roy

Hmm, I see what you mean now.
I think "closing price" here would be not really fair, as any particular time you'll pick up for this calculation will be inevitably favoring some markets that fit their daytime trading activity nicely and neglect others.
A volume-weighted average over last 24h seems much better to me here. Because it will include activity on all global markets, which ranges and differs a lot during the day, and won't favor particular markets above the others, but will consider trading volume only, which is measurable and unbiased parameter. And it can be shot at any time during the day, particular time is not important in this case. Midnight by GMT would be handy reference point probably.

Alex at BitcoinAverage

[BitcoinAverage]

Volume weighted averages would be a very good addition.

This is exactly what we are doing since very beginning. Or did I misunderstand you?

Alex at BitcoinAverage

[mmeijeri]

This is exactly what we are doing since very beginning. Or did I misunderstand you?

You are volume weighting the prices of different exchanges at the same point in time, in addition it would be nice to have volume weighted averages of the same exchange (or group of exchanges) over the past 24 hours.

[Roy Badami]

Volume weighted averages would be a very good addition.

This is exactly what we are doing since very beginning. Or did I misunderstand you?

Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP) normally refers to the average price of some security or commodity based on trades over some period of time, calculated in the 'obvious' way (i.e. what we were talking about above).  I agree it seems slightly odd to refer this as 'volume weighted' but I suppose it means as opposed to the doing the completely insane thing of just calculateing the simply average of the 'price' column in your spreadsheet of trades without paying any attention to the quantity the trades were for.

ETA: I suppose it could be in contrast to a time-average...

roy

[Roy Badami]

Hmm, this is a good question actually. We're using their API tickers, which provide trading volumes separately for different currencies. I assume they do calculations right and not provide doubled volumes through their API, however I couldn't find this explicitly stated anywhere. I'll approach them directly and find out. Will update you when I'll know more.

I'd naturally expect that summing the currency volumes would double-count the cross-currency trades.  Will be interested to hear what you find out.

[CoinHeavy]

Excellent site!

I'm curious about two things:

• ETA on embeddable charts
• How do you plan to monetize your service?

Hmm, I'm not sure about ETA for embeddable charts, but we'll see what we can do here. What charts would be most interesting for you?

As for monetisation - I'm receiving plenty of tempting advertising propositions, though as for now I'm keeping site clean and clear of that stuff. Also our API is used by multiple various other services, including several commercial ones, so I see some potential in there also. Still, right now my goal is to reach the status of universal price reference service. Monetisation is not of priority right now.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

The primary charts in which I would be interested would be average price and trading volumes.  Thanks for the excellent service you're providing; I'll stay tuned.

[Roy Badami]

Hmm, I see what you mean now.
I think "closing price" here would be not really fair, as any particular time you'll pick up for this calculation will be inevitably favoring some markets that fit their daytime trading activity nicely and neglect others.
A volume-weighted average over last 24h seems much better to me here. Because it will include activity on all global markets, which ranges and differs a lot during the day, and won't favor particular markets above the others, but will consider trading volume only, which is measurable and unbiased parameter. And it can be shot at any time during the day, particular time is not important in this case. Midnight by GMT would be handy reference point probably.

Closing price is what Coindesk does, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense for a market that doesn't close.  It you had to pick a single time for a daily pricing 'fix' then noon would make more sense IMHO.  Personally I think a 24hr average, midnight-to-midnight, would make a lot of sense (and midnight GMT is as good a choice of midnight as any, although I don't care that much).

I'm not really wedded to details here; I'd just like to see more people publishing tables that say Bitcoin was worth this much on this particular date.  (If multiple such sources emerge I will probably just use a simple average of the published indices unless/until one emerges as the de facto standard.)

roy

[BGL]

While i understand ignoring mt gox for "withdrawals blocked" - it doesn't change that trades are occurring. Kind of need the data still. Thanks

[solex]

While i understand ignoring mt gox for "withdrawals blocked" - it doesn't change that trades are occurring. Kind of need the data still. Thanks

It's not data, it's noise.

[BGL]

Well ya know, give the users the option to decide that themselves IMO.

[GoldMath]

great tool