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Is there a convenient data source and/or graph that gives the "market capitalization" over time for Bitcoin (i.e. the number of bitcoins issued to date times their current value on the big exchanges).

Note e.g. some publicity and attention to this issue due to the xkcd infographic on Money:

Note that the date indicated there for the peak so far (July 2011) is wrong, since that peak was on June 8 or 9. It would be fun to provide some more accurate and precise numbers, though of course there is no one canonical exchange rate and some sort of weighted price may be more useful than the very highest trade recorded. See some nearby data at: bitcoin charts 2011-06-08..11

Update: A closer look at the minute-by-minute data suggests that the peak was at 2011-06-08T17:10 when the mtgox USD price was $31.91. At that point the most recent block was http://blockexplorer.com/b/129412 at 2011-06-08 16:56:29 (assuming both services are using the same timezone? UTC?). That implies $206,476,846 I think: 31.91 $/BTC * 129412 blocks * 50 BTC/block

See also the nice new Bitcoin Pie site that compares market cap for various bitcoin-related currencies (and see Is there an easy way to check out the market cap of the alternative currencies? - Bitcoin - Stack Exchange).

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    +1 BTW, Bitcoin Pie is open source. If anyone would like to contribute code to show historical graphs, he's welcome to do it.
    – ripper234
    Nov 24, 2011 at 4:26

3 Answers 3

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http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap. 24 hour Weighted price from mt.gox and tradehill.

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  • Nice. BTW, the 2nd derivative of this chart looks positive to me.
    – ripper234
    Nov 24, 2011 at 13:22
  • Excellent! And for the raw data, see blockchain.info/charts/market-cap?format=json which indicates the peak was $188,000,645 (weighted over the day on June 8): { "x" : 1307630504, "y" : 1.8800064577163333E8} I wish the data point popups included the date as well as the data.
    – nealmcb
    Nov 24, 2011 at 14:45
  • Well, I assumed the day was June 8, but looks like the timestamp 1307630504 is for Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:55:45 UTC. In fact all the timestamps seem to be at 14:55:45 UTC - any idea why?
    – nealmcb
    Nov 24, 2011 at 15:01
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    It's worth mentioning that the chart assumes all Bitcoins produced are still spendable, which isn't the case - unlike stock on the stockmarket, Bitcoins can be lost by losing the only copy of a wallet, or by losing the password to the only copy of an encrypted wallet.
    – Highly Irregular
    Nov 24, 2011 at 21:36
  • For more background and info from piuk, the developer, see the discussions at the Bitcoin Forum: Blockchain.info - Bitcoin Block explorer & Currency Statistics
    – nealmcb
    Nov 30, 2011 at 16:47
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You could derive this from historical price data (available via the Bitcoin Charts API) and the blockchain's timestamps (extracted from the block database in your Bitcoin client's data folder). You just need to multiply the close price for each day by the number of coins generated on and before that day.

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  • Indeed. But that isn't so convenient for casual observers. I'm surprised to not yet have come across a graph of this over time, and still hope it is actually available from one of the many bitcoin data sites out there.
    – nealmcb
    Nov 23, 2011 at 21:51
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Isn't this what CoinMarketCap provides?

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  • Looks like, it, but to be most useful, answers here should actually say what it does provide, perhaps give an example, compare to the accepted answer, etc.
    – nealmcb
    Jan 21, 2018 at 15:20

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