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.

Comments

Flooz

[110010001000]

Fortunately my investment in Flooz hasn't lost any value due to this issue.

Re:Flooz

[Zaelath]

I put everything into zombo.com, I really wish they'd update to HTML5 though.

LIke 100B in monopoly money

[jwhyche]

An nothing of real value was lost. At least if a 100B in monopoly money went up in flames it would keep your warm for a bit.

Re:LIke 100B in monopoly money

[Oswald McWeany]

An nothing of real value was lost. At least if a 100B in monopoly money went up in flames it would keep your warm for a bit.

Mining 100B of bitcoin will keep you warm even longer; that's a lot of heat given off mining that much.

Re:LIke 100B in monopoly money

[Aaden42]

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.

Re:LIke 100B in monopoly money

[DontBeAMoran]

Try your precious (country) dollar bill and try spending it in (another country) store. You will get out of the store empty-handed.

Re:How much

[DontBeAMoran]

All I know is that you can trust Dogecoin to hold its value of 1 Doge = 1 Doge.

The price is now more correct

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

It has nothing to do with the nth crackdown. Prices have been significantly higher in South Korea compared to the rest of the world for many coins, if you take the South Korean Won (KRW) trading pair and then convert that price to its US Dollar (or Euro, or whatever) equivalent. However you should see the crypto/KRW exchange rates as a closed system, as it is not an easily traded coin internationally, which make arbitrage (almost) impossible.

It is correct for CoinMarketCap to filter out the crypto/KRW pairs to arrive at an average price, as you were never actually able to trade your coins for the KRW listed (unless you're Korean, of course), and they had a very significant effect on the price if many coins.

Of course, real traders care only about the specific prices of the exchanges they can actually exchange at.

Re:What about the market cap of gold?

[tlhIngan]

Cryptocurrency valuations are criticized for the simple math of point price times total supply. What about more traditional commodities such as gold or crude oil? Surely the price of gold will plummet if someone starts selling huge amounts?

It depends.

You see, the price you see quoted on a market is not average price or anything. It's "last traded price". As in, the last time someone bought (and thus, someone sold) that commodity, that was the price they agreed to. There is no "current price" of say, gold, or crude oil or anything. Instead, those are sold on markets. Buyers will place bids to buy X quantity of the commodity, and sellers will place asks to sell Y quantity of the same commodity. If a bidder's bid price is equal to or higher than the lowest ask price, the trade happens - either X or Y quantity is traded depending on who has a lower quantity. (If you're buying 10 bars of gold, and the seller is selling 7 bars, you will buy 7 bars of gold, and then your bid will be revised for the remaining 3 bars at the price you bid).

The bid-ask spread (the difference between the asks and bids) is how liquid the commodity is. Very liquid commodities will have very small spreads, while very illiquid commodities will have large bid-ask spreads. This makes sense intuitively - commodities trade more because bids are closer to asks so trades are more likely to happen

Thus, saying Bitcoin is at $19,000 is somewhat meaningless. It's more important to say that people want to buy bitcoin at $18,500, but people are wanting to sell bitcoin at $19,500, say.