Quote from: Pursuer on April 03, 2017, 06:10:57 AM

Quote from: d5000 on April 02, 2017, 02:02:34 PM

Quote from: gentlemand on March 31, 2017, 04:09:25 PM

I think it's a genuinely pathetic and shit metric, but it's hard to know what might replace it for simple reference. Perhaps some balance of trading volume vs supply but that still wouldn't be soundbitey enough for most people.

That's the problem. Market cap is a very oversimplified metric, but it's the best that is easy to calculate and understand. But with trade volume, we would have the same problem - a high value here can also indicate that a particular good/cryptocurrency is just used for speculation but nothing more.

A more complete evaluation of the potential of different cryptocurrencies is what the people at Coingecko tried, but it has its flaws, too; because for example the different coins have different development strategies. So the Coingecko value can be distorted by some minor metrics. It's still a very good complement to market cap if you want to evaluate a particular coin.

An alternative approach I would like to see realized would be the trading volume to goods and services instead of the trading volume to fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. For example, one could try to aggregate the information of Bitpay-like payment processors (with CoinPayments in the case of altcoins), OpenBazaar-like decentralized markets and centralized e-commerce sites. That would indicate if a cryptocurrency is really used. And here, I think, Bitcoin would beat all competitors by a very high margin (I wouldn't be surprised if it's over 90 percent).

all of these factors, when considered individually, are bad and will even give the wrong idea in some cases. but when you have them all in your analysis then you can come up with a better conclusion.
- market cap
- trade volume and its change over time, for example is it temporary rise or has been up all year.
- price
- transaction number and volume
- services, merchants,...

Hi guys, Bobby here from CoinGecko. Interesting discussions here that you guys are having. I strongly agree that market cap is not the sole way to measure altcoins. There needs to be many other ways to look at these cryptocurrencies and that's what we attempted to do. Always looking for ways to improve things so yea do let us know if you have any. At the moment we take into account market cap, trading volume, development, community and public interest in evaluating cryptocurrencies and although it's not perfect, it does create a sort of alternative rank for consideration when trading any altcoins.