Show HN: CoinMarketBook – CoinMarketCap, but with a different metric

One of the problems with this metric is it's easy to manipulate. Exchanges can easily lie about their book depth and/or people can put in lowball buy orders they have no intention of ever filling. To find out if those buy orders are real you would have to purchase them and all the orders above them, which would be very expensive and move the price a lot.

On the other hand, the instantaneous price of a coin is easy to verify. Everyone who buys or sells at the exchange can verify it, so exchanges can't easily lie about it.

Here's an interesting solution for ranking exchanges by their order book depth in a way that's more difficult to manipulate. Perhaps it could be adapted to rank coins. https://bitcoinity.org/markets/rank_explanation

Unfortunately as a metric this is far too easy to game and is heavily influenced by algorithmic order regimes. Maybe decent as signal in trading strategies but not useful for real fundamental analysis. Market makers create phantom interest all the time to try and scare the market through stop loss orders.

Also why not focus on the selling interest too? Any one sided metric is even less trustworthy.

There is $1.5T of outstanding buy orders for BTC right now? That seems inflated.

As someone who is not very financially orientated, I find this difficult. Firstly because I don't really have a feeling for what that % means - presumably the ratio of market cap to book depth gives an indication of how sensitive the market cap is to large orders. So it combines liquidity and total volume - but I don't know why you would combine them into one statistic? Either I want a single number which means something clear, which this fails on. Or I want more information, in which case isn't it just better to tell the market cap AND book depth?

Also whilst market cap is easy to measure, book depth seems more difficult. How far away from the touch do you count? A million dollar offer which values bitcoin at 3cents represents almost no information. Firstly because by the time the price drops there's no way that offer will still be good and secondly because even if that offer were still good that change in price would represent a total shift in the market.

Also, this seems to compare apples to oranges, because some coins will contain market makers who are likely to leave orders in the book and cancel in response to signals, thereby creating phantom liquidity whilst others won't have enough volume to attract market makers and so all the depth is real.

With CoinMarketBook, you can evaluate cryptocurrencies by a different metric: "buy support".

Buy support is the sum of buy orders in USD equivalent from top 20 exchanges (planning to include more in future). It shows the actual amount that people want to buy.

One might say that it's easy to place a large buy order at very low price & increase buy support artificially. However, because of low price, the increase will be negligible.

What do you think? Tell us in comments.

There aren't many fiat trading pairs for smaller coins. That means, if people are holding fiat, they most probably put it on low buy order for Bitcoin. I'd like to see exactly which markets are calculated in the results.

> Buy support is the sum of buy orders from top 20 exchanges. > This is the actual amount that people want to buy.

Curious how you have arrived at $1.5T of buy support for BTC?

Given an example, a $1 bid on 100 BTC equates to $100 of buy support. In this example, would you count this as 100 * current price?

For reference, my custom tool reports BTCUSD pairs across major exchanges and shows approx 40kBTC of liquidity 10% either side of the current price. This is approximately $0.25B.

I look at Daily Issuance (last column in https://onchainfx.com/v/SMT45r) as a measure of how well a (mineable) coin is doing, as this reflects the cost of energy spent on mining that coin every day.

This is one of the very few measures that is not easily faked...

- What does support/cap tell us? I see that it's a "gamble vs investment" metric but I don't understand the logic behind that statement.

- Is buy support at any level? As in, there's hug buy support for bitcoin, but is this counting people who have buy orders at the $6500 range all the way down to the $1 range?

Whatever that validity of the metric itself, it's an interesting idea that if a market is different "enough", standard market metrics fall short of their goal.

On the website design, a fixed-width font would be helpful for the numbers. Currently, ETH at $22,898,033,476 looks one digit larger than BTC at $113,768,712,510.

Just fixed an important bug in calculation: https://medium.com/@dengorbachev/coinmarketbook-bugfix-new-m...

Market cap isn't perfect by any means, but if there was a better metric that could be used to get a quick valuation of something then the stock markets would already use it.

How did you get the data from which exchanges?

What does the "Tell Friends" column mean in the table? Was it supposed to be a metric or just a placeholder?

Can the list not be sorted on other columns or are my mobile browsers failing me? (Firefox and Chrome on Android)

An alternative to the 24 hour price change would be a price change since a specific date.