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Comment by ozmbie | Hacker News Reader

It’s worse when you want to store the coins yourself, so you withdraw from an exchange only to realise that the wallets available are either broken or have horrible UX.

I just don’t see how an altcoin without a functioning wallet can have billions of dollars of market cap.

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Easy: $1 invested does not equal $1 in market cap. Not sure where I read this, but there was a post where a guy wrote he invested $5,000 in a coin and it increased the market cap by $4m.

This is also true for stocks.

As a buy pulls the latest price up, all of the other shares are worth more, and the opposite is true: for every sale, the price might slip down a bit; in the event of a large sell-off, you end up reaching zero value a lot earlier than everything can be sold off.

Market cap is a bit of a fantasy metric, but has utility - just less so for crypto where you can't make any comparisons to tangible assets, liabilities or even market potential.

Market cap is a useless number in the crypto world that people quote because it sounds nice. It is simply current price * number of outstanding shares [1]. It has no reflection on the actual money being put into the market, which is what people would like to transform it into in their heads.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=market+capitalization+defini...

True for coin with low liquidity which is why chart ranking solely based on market cap is inaccurate, an alternative is https://www.coingecko.com/en

If the orderbook is thin and supply circulated is plenty, the market cap moves by the tradr

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