Novel bitcoin charts?

[jboss]

Hi guys,

I've taken up a small interest in charting using html5, I'm wondering if anyone wants to see the bitcoin data in way that isn't on bitcoincharts.com - like maybe historicals... I already pull data off mt.gox.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks.

[TomatoCaqe]

What does it look like?

[jboss]

I was actually asking for ideas!

[TomatoCaqe]

Bar graph or maybe a pic chart? I don't know how those would work.

[Stephen Gornick]

Since Forex sites don't add BTC, it would be good for there to be a chart resource that fills in the gap.

For instance, BTC/XAU (Gold) historic chart, BTC/XAG silver and BTC/OIL even.

I have some of that data here:
 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHJuUE1mUkFxa3A0eHBDQkxZLVVFZmc

The data is from Wikiposit
 - http://wikiposit.org

This is kind of what I'm thinking ... for BTC as the base currency:
 - http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=SOFTS&p=w1

[bitcoinBull]

I saw an example heatmap chart that I liked a while back.  The other day I ran into a site which plots it live.

https://ferroh.com/chart?t=24h

[jboss]

Good suggestions, I'll have to see where I can pull the forex data for.

Does plotting bitcoin against commodities really make sense though?

What about a place that shows demand for mining contracts (if I can figure out how to aggregate a source of that)?

That might be a good indicator...

[bitcoinBull]

What about a place that shows demand for mining contracts (if I can figure out how to aggregate a source of that)?

That might be a good indicator...

Better than "demand for mining contracts" is plain old Network Difficulty (http://bitcoin.sipa.be and http://blockexplorer.com/q or http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash).

And I agree with you that it is a good indicator.

[Stephen Gornick]

And I agree with you that it is a good indicator.

What exactly would that indicate (other than the level of hashing occurring)?

[jboss]

Stephen, where did you pull the precious metals from?

I like that spreadsheet!

How'd you get the google graph in there? is that an embeded html?

[Stephen Gornick]

Stephen, where did you pull the precious metals from?

I just changed so that it now comes from the spot futures daily data from Wikiposit (Front month data)
 - http://wikiposit.org/p?futures

I choose Crude Oil, Gold and SIlver and then download the results using the link for the CSV.

I then run it through a formatter script (python):
 - http://pastebin.com/ZX5XZGWM

And then from that script's output I can copy and paste the new data each month into the spreadsheet.

How'd you get the google graph in there? is that an embeded html?

Google Docs spreadsheets have an Insert Charts menu selection.

[bitcoinBull]

And I agree with you that it is a good indicator.

What exactly would that indicate (other than the level of hashing occurring)?

Demand.  1.6 million is only 200k off the 1.8 million all-time-high.

For me, yet another confirmation that price is going up.

[Stephen Gornick]

For me, yet another confirmation that price is going up.

Not sure why you would think that more hashing occurring might lead to the exchange rate rising.  That isn't an uncommon belief among miners, I just don't know the reason why.  The data points to mining activity only lagging the exchange rate moves.
 

[bitcoinBull]

For me, yet another confirmation that price is going up.

Not sure why you would think that more hashing occurring might lead to the exchange rate rising.  That isn't an uncommon belief among miners, I just don't know the reason why.  The data points to mining activity only lagging the exchange rate moves.
 

For the most part, price has been the main driver and the lead indicator.  But there were a couple of occasions when hash rate led the price.

The first was when difficulty was rising before bitcoin had a price, before there was an exchange.

The second was between March and April 2011.  Price topped at $1.10 and then fell to ~$0.60.  Hash rate fell and difficulty re-adjusted downwards for the first time after price topped.  But if you look closely, hash rate started rising before price bounced upwards from $0.60 (see charts in my sig).

Chicken-and-egg arguments can never be definitively settled. But even as a lagging indicator, difficulty should confirm the price trend.

Since the bottom at $2, and through the correction from $7.2, the rising difficulty is strongly confirming an upward trend.

[jboss]

Wouldn't hash rate be a lagging indicator?

Rising prices pushes more people to jump in thus a higher difficulty?

I would think that demand for contracts gives a better long term view. A lot of the mining contracts are for 3-12 months.
If the price is expected to go up, so would contract prices.

Hash rate is at best an instantaneous view I think.

Please discuss.

[Stephen Gornick]

Please discuss.

In pictoral form (the top chart):

Some people look at that and see blue causing red to move (though with a significant lag).  Others look at it and come to a different conclusion.

[bitcoinBull]

If difficulty is growing, speculators will hesitate to invest in mining equipment. He would prefer to buy if price seems cheap enough, because the payoff from buying cheap coins is much bigger than mining at high difficulty. So in theory, a high difficulty should support and drive price higher.

Let's look at the evidence. Price peaked at $30 in the first of week June, but difficulty lagged by about eight weeks, not turning downward until the first week of August.

The most recent price peak was at $7.2 in the second week of January, with downward/sideways price movement since then, going on 11 weeks now. But over those weeks difficulty has kept on growing, and at an increasing rate. Difficulty is leading the price; its close to the 1.8 million high, but the price is far behind.

If this time price turns upward (maybe setting a new high over $7.2) before difficulty turns downard, to me it will be strong evidence that rising difficulty can drive the price.

If difficulty turns downward soon, I'll eat my hat and concede that difficulty has little or no bearing on the price.

[Stephen Gornick]

If difficulty turns downward soon, I'll eat my hat and concede that difficulty has little or no bearing on the price.

How about if the difficulty continues rising but price drops .. say to $4?

[nimnul]

See our novel charts: http://bitcoin-analytics.com/

And yes, they are HTML5 and realtime. And if you want to see data in yet different way - let us know, we'll consider implementing charts in your way.

They are not free - a subscription is whooping 0.5 BTC a month, half-pizza a month in Ukrainian prices. We are obsessed by pizza and coke

It took 6 month to implement those charts and all background tasks - for example, we have a backup server on and replicate users' database to it so in case our current hosting fails, we can switch without long downtime.

Now we are working on more exchanges (EUR etc) and novel arbitrage tables.

Graphical design is not what we have invested in - we tried to work on reliability and tried to process the data to filter out noice so the charts are more useful in real trades than the usual unweighted trade volume charts you can see at all other places.

[Samor]

See our novel charts: http://bitcoin-analytics.com/

Wow, that looks very nice. How can I unlock more categories, for example mtgox only?