How Big is Silk Road

[nrd525]

What is the average total value of goods for sale on Silk Road?

I tried looking at it once, but the website was too slow to get a good idea (maybe I needed to open ports in my router).

I'm interested in figuring out how much Silk Road affects the demand for Bitcoins.

[1714787402]

1714787402

[1714787402]

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[legitnick]

Pretty fucking big, you don't need to open any ports to make it go faster tor is just inherently slow.

[adamstgBit]

i wonder how much demand spendbitcoins.com generates.

[nrd525]

When I looked at Silk Road, I remember only seeing 500-600 items.  Am I remembering right?

500 items at $50 each (estimate) is only $25,000 which isn't a lot of money compared to the current Bitcoin money supply.

[antoineph]

looks like there are about 2000 items up for sale right now, give or take. I'd say 20000BTC, at least. Rough guess.

I don't know anything about the daily volume.

[Kluge]

When I looked at Silk Road, I remember only seeing 500-600 items.  Am I remembering right?

500 items at $50 each (estimate) is only $25,000 which isn't a lot of money compared to the current Bitcoin money supply.

Those listings are used repeatedly, not just once.

If someone has 100g of Substance X and is selling 1g, he can do that sale 100 times, get re-supplied, do another 100 transactions, and still use the same one listing.

[trout]

SR has over 130000 registered members. Note that you have to register just to look in, so lots of these may have never been used.

It says it has 251 sellers. Seller accounts cost money, so people don't get them just for fun.

[Kluge]

SR has over 130000 registered members. Note that you have to register just to look in, so lots of these may have never been used.

It says it has 251 sellers. Seller accounts cost money, so people don't get them just for fun.

Unless it's changed in the past few months, it's totally free to sell on SR, as well as free to buy.

[trout]

Unless it's changed in the past few months, it's totally free to sell on SR, as well as free to buy.

it did change. a lot.

[antoineph]

SR has over 130000 registered members. Note that you have to register just to look in, so lots of these may have never been used.

It says it has 251 sellers. Seller accounts cost money, so people don't get them just for fun.

Do you anything about the daily volume?

[rebuilder]

Do you anything about the daily volume?

You mean: "Are you the person running Silk Road?"

[trout]

Do you anything about the daily volume?

You mean: "Are you the person running Silk Road?"

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

if you are interested you can collect more data, along with the average price, daily fluctuations, etc.,
but i can't be bothered.

[Seal]

Do you anything about the daily volume?

You mean: "Are you the person running Silk Road?"

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

if you are interested you can collect more data, along with the average price, daily fluctuations, etc.,
but i can't be bothered.

Are all the listings US based? If they are multiply the 20 purchases per hour for daytime hours only, assuming most people wont be up in the middle of the night. Also if its anything like ebay (disclaimer- i've never seen SR) then a small portion of buyers won't leave feedback. Assuming this happens, 22 purchases per hour multiplied by a conservative 10 hour day. 220ish purchases per day. Again very rough. Are all payments made via bitcoin on SR?

[finway]

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

Interesting data.

[nrd525]

20 per hour / 24 hours per day - round up to 500 purchases. 

At $50 each (rough guess - could be as much as $100, and expensive items will make the mean a lot more than the median) that is $25,000/day.   Or $9.1 million/year.

Now the Bitcoin money supply is currently worth roughly $53 million.

If the velocity of each BTC is 5, then you'd need $265 million/year of trading activity to sustain the economy.  Obviously some people are holding on to it for speculation (very low velocity: 0-1) and others are trading it for goods and services.

Does anyone know the current velocity of the US dollar?  I suspect the BTC velocity is a lot more as most people who use it to trade are converting it back into regular currency to avoid fluctuation risks.

I'd guess that Silk Road could run fine with a Bitcoin money supply of around $250,000-$1 million (gives people 10-40 days to convert into non-BTCs).  Or another way to think of this is that Silk Road is backing 0.5% to 2% of the BTC economy.

[FreeMoney]

Do you anything about the daily volume?

You mean: "Are you the person running Silk Road?"

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

if you are interested you can collect more data, along with the average price, daily fluctuations, etc.,
but i can't be bothered.

Is feedback given on every order? Is that when funds are released to the seller?

[Seal]

20 per hour / 24 hours per day - round up to 500 purchases. 

At $50 each (rough guess - could be as much as $100, and expensive items will make the mean a lot more than the median) that is $25,000/day.   Or $9.1 million/year.

Now the Bitcoin money supply is currently worth roughly $53 million.

If the velocity of each BTC is 5, then you'd need $265 million/year of trading activity to sustain the economy.  Obviously some people are holding on to it for speculation (very low velocity: 0-1) and others are trading it for goods and services.

Does anyone know the current velocity of the US dollar?  I suspect the BTC velocity is a lot more as most people who use it to trade are converting it back into regular currency to avoid fluctuation risks.

I'd guess that Silk Road could run fine with a Bitcoin money supply of around $250,000-$1 million (gives people 10-40 days to convert into non-BTCs).  Or another way to think of this is that Silk Road is backing 0.5% to 2% of the BTC economy.

Care to explain to everyone the significance of velocity in economic terms?

[buck92]

Care to explain to everyone the significance of velocity in economic terms?

It is the number of times an average unit of currency (in this case BTC or dollars) gets spent in a certain period of time. Basically how quickly a currency is spent, it can help infer how popular or how big an economy is.

Also this is just me thinking but I believe in terms of bitcoins, the velocity can infer how much speculation is going on at a given time since we all know speculation is currently the biggest market for BTC. Just thinking aloud someone please tell me if I am wrong.

[NothinG]

I've heard there are currently 250 sellers on there. I have no idea how to prove it, it was just a guess by a friend.

[buck92]

It did not seem like people were very interested in my posts so I deleted them, perhaps because I am a new user? While I don't partake in SR goodies I don't want to show up in Google associated with analysis' of SR so it is for the best.

I just have to say I am quite surprised by the lack of knowledge people have in an economics message board of all places, on the single biggest market entity outside of speculation, in the Bitcoin world. I understand not everyone is for illicit drug use, but what happened to the basic principles of Econ101?...Know your market...go download tor and do some market research people.