This is the same for every stock traded on any stock exchange in the world. The "singular price" is, in most cases, just the mean of the closest bid and offer listed on the exchange and is thus a "made-up number"
On top of this, it obviously doesn't take into account everything from transaction costs to the fact that attempts to purchase substantial volume at this price would not be possible.
While we do live in an age where stocks seem increasingly untethered from reality, that's still not remotely true.
Stocks are, in theory, based on the value of the company. Which is something you can calculate based on its assets and revenue.
Granted the math doesn't add up for a lot of companies right now, but that's an indication we're in a bubble not an invalidation of the concept of stocks.
Really? All your cash is worthless? Well that sucks but tell you what, I'll help hedge your losses by swapping it all for a big mac meal (which I assume I'll have to barter for, but I'll do that for you).
And things like gold or oil barrels also have multiple exchanges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilever#Legal_structure
Unilever plc and Unilever N.V. ...operate as nearly as practicable as a single economic entity, whilst remaining separate legal entities with different shareholders and separate stock exchange listings
Also worth noting that for both stocks and cryptocurrencies, the price that is shown is almost always the last traded price not a quote for a price you could trade at anyway.
[1] in the US, for example: https://www.sec.gov/foia/docs/atslist.htm
The NYSE sees on the order of a billion trades per day. The high over the past year is about 1.9, the low about 0.46. The dollar trade was $16 - $107 billion/day.
I'm not finding transactional volume for bitcoin, but the dollar vollume has peaked at $2.5 billion, and until September, 2017, was under $500 million.
Before that date, roughly, more money moves through one stock exchange in a single day than all of Bitcoin in a year.
Which gets to an interesting question of just what it is price is, and represents. If you can control and regulate the supply of a good then price is something of a fiction: it's the amount demanded, relative to the supply. But for a fixed asset, the more you can restrict that supply, the higher the price goes.
There's an analogy with electric circuits that I was kicking around with Gerard some months back. Just as R = V/I, the higher the demand (V), and the lower the supply (I), the greater the price. (This ... doesn't entirely hold up, but it's an interesting parallel.)
http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition....
https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume?timespan=1year&d...
Most active NYSE stock last Friday was Bank of America, trading about $3.1 billion (http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-activnyse-actives....).
I don't understand why you'd compare a single security's trading volume to an entire stock exchange's volume. It is not a meaningful comparison.
Visa International handles 300 million transactions/day, and $3 trillion/year.
Or you could look at total US GDP or GWP (gross world product), which are in very rough numbers, $17 trillion and $70 trillion respectively.
Bitcoin at a $5 billion daily trade is 1/8 the US financial transactions market, and roughly 1/40th that of total global trade.
Honestly, that's higher than I'd have expected, but it's also in vastly greater trade blocks than most daily purchases.
In theory you subtract the former from the total transaction volume ($4.6B over last 24 hours according to https://blockchain.info/stats). Unfortunately that gives me a negative number ($4.6B - $5.4B = negative), which at first suggests the methodology is wrong, but then I remember that not all currency-exchange transactions happen on-chain. Send BTC to GDAX, then buy/sell/buy/sell/buy/sell, then receive $$$... all that could be as little as a single blockchain transaction.
I'm sure someone has tried to determine how much of BTC traffic is closed-loop within the BTC ecosystem. I doubt it's much. Anyway, I'm ratholing.
Calling the NYSE "just" one stock exchange isn't exactly a fair comparison. The NYSE is somewhere in the region of 20% of the total stock exchanges by market cap. It's twice the size of the next-largest stock exchange (NASDAQ), which is itself about twice as large as a "normal" large stock exchange (e.g., London or Tokyo).