Does there exist a chart documenting the number of bitcoin merchants over time, and if not, would it be possible to create one from any available data source? (I'm thinking mostly of https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade for source material)
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Should be easy enough to create a script that scans the history and charts this.– ripper234Sep 23, 2011 at 18:12
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2 Answers
I went through the last 500 revisions of the wiki page, pulled the byte count into excel and graphed it. Line count would probably be a better metric but I didn't have a readily available data source for that. If someone wants to write a script that wget's each revision and counts the number of
tags that might be more accurate, but here's 500 revisions worth of data as a chart:
500 revisions goes back to Jul 8, 2011.
Also of interest, the earliest revision (Feb 10, 2011) of the Trade page has a scant 117 <li> tags while the current page has a whopping 785! I haven't taken the time to count all the revisions inbetween but that's quite a lot of growth - 668 new entries in 225 days for an average of almost 3 entries per day or about 1,084 per year! While some of these are bound to be non-merchant list items, that's still an impressive rate of growth.
answered Sep 23, 2011 at 18:47
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1thanks, as a result of this i went and looked quickly at the byte size over time - i didn't realise it had only been around since February - and the increase looks more gradual and steady than i had expected. is there any info on trade before 2011?– JaySep 23, 2011 at 19:29
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1Perhaps over on the forums, but that data is likely to be widely dispersed and very difficult to scrape. Sep 23, 2011 at 19:53
I have not seen a chart. The only way I think it would be to go through the history of the wiki page and count the merchants at certain dates to get the data.
