Slashdot Mirror
A Crypto Website Changes Its Data, and $100 Billion in Market Value Vanishes (wsj.com)
Paul Vigna, writing for WSJ: Prices for some of the most popular cryptocurrencies dropped sharply Monday. One apparent reason: an adjustment from a popular website on its digital-currency price quotes (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). A website called coinmarketcap.com on Monday removed data from some South Korean exchanges from its price quotes for a range of virtual currencies including bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple's XRP. The move followed a South Korean government crackdown on cryptocurrencies. The move by coinmarketcap caused some amount of chaos when prices across the board suddenly plunged. In mid-Monday trading, XRP had fallen 26% over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin Cash was down 18%, and litecoin was down 12%. Of the top 40 cryptocurrencies, 31 were down, including bitcoin and Ethereum. [...]
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
Fortunately my investment in Flooz hasn't lost any value due to this issue.
So I was in a math mood...
The most accurate looking Monopoly money template I could find in a quick Google image search has 12 bills per 8.5x11" page. Assuming you go all $500's, that's $6000 per page. $100B / $6000 = 16,666,666 pages. That's 33,333 reams of paper. Quick Amazon search shows $5.97/ream (it's an Add-on item, but I think we'll make the minimum order here). So that's about $199,000 worth of paper for $100B Monopoly money or an exchange rate of 0.00000199.
According to Stack, a ream is around 5lbs (which matches Amazon's shipping weight) and paper yields about 7000 BTU/lb or 35,000 BTUs per ream (which seems high, but second source). They're claiming that's "enough to heat the average US house for 15 weeks" which seems implausible to me? Maybe if you're assuming 100% conversion efficiency with no losses and not living somewhere the air hurts your face.
So that pile of Monopoly money yields around 1,166,655,000 BTUs or about 12,820 gallons of propane and weighs 166,665 lbs (83 tons).
If nothing else, I suspect it would hold value more consistently than most crypto coin.