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December 19, 2013, 02:39:42 PM |
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I think having good a good analysis of Bitcoin data, and good way of aggregation would be a valuable thing to have. I want to gather some very preliminary ideas here, to perhaps spark a discussion. Sources such as blockchain.info are a start, but integrating other data sources is valuable as well, to understand adoption and trends. By this I mean questions like: who is using bitcoin and why? How many people use it and for what? Where is Bitcoin banned and how does that effect Bitcoin there? Etc.
There are several potential conflicts here. I'm speaking here purely from a macro perspective (not what one individual is doing with BTC). We can look at aggregate data, such as the gathered by blockchain.info. Obviously the blockchain itself is a public source of aggregated information (or to some extent private information, based on leads).
Price is the obvious first indicator, but only of limited use. Transactionvolume in USD is not necessarily a good indicator of adoption either. If we look at addresses in use, this figure has grown from 21'000 in mid 2011 to 135'000 now. However, as addresses aggregate at service providers this is an imperfect measure, also.
The best thing to do would be to gather more data in a structure manner, from the blockchain, from the exchanges, from other sources, such as google trends. Perhaps google trends is one of the best measures in terms of how those who have not adopted bitcoin yet show interest and move to adoption, and how the interest is geographically distributed. Twitter could be another source.
Potential sources
* Blockchain
* exchanges
* bitcoin news services / websites
* Google trends
* Twitter
* Businesses accepting bitcoins
* Bitcoin ATMs, coins, localbitcoins
* old fashioned media
google trend Queries
bitcoin mining 100
bitcoin miner 55
bitcoin wallet 50
what is bitcoin 35
we use bitcoin 35
bitcoin exchange 25
guiminer 20
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