I was trying to see how the trading volume and market cap of Bitcoin are compared to each other. I quickly found https://coinmarketcap.com/ and similar sites which tell the same story:
Bitcoin has a market cap in the order of magnitude of 18.5M btc (currently about 500B USD) and a trading volume around 1.6M btc (50B USD).
I guess that the market cap (measured in btc) is pretty much spot on, as I am not aware of coins that stay invisible to the chain.
However, I am still curious to get some feeling for the actual volume of Bitcoin that changes hands. I suppose one could categorize this in 3 buckets:
- Transactions that hit the chain (presumably the volume of this is 1.6B)
- Coins transferred via well known places, perhaps exchanges
- Coins transferred via other methods, perhaps giving someone your wallet
Now my question: #What is the estimated trading volume of Bitcoin?
My first thoughts:
- If my above logic is correct, we could add up exchange volumes to the chain volumes
- Perhaps there is some insight in the proportion of the three categories, so we might even estimate the third bucket and thus the total
I am aware of this question, and believe it confirms my definition but does not answer the question about the actual volume: Bitcoin trade volume and trade transactions
Bonus: I imagine some of the transactions are simply from one entity to itself. I do not believe this can be identified, but if it is known to represent a certain estimated volume that would be interesting as well.
