By the way, I think we could get a better measure for a coin's "popularity" or "value" than "market cap" if we try to measure its transaction activity. Probably Bitcoin's "dominance" would be much higher.
Coinfairvalue tries something like that, but has some pretty strange valuations ...
Do you mean trading volume? It doesnt seem to be a bad idea. Thats usually done with stocks.
Sorry, just saw your answer.
Trading volume has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it provides a measure for "activity" on markets, and as you say, it's used in other asset classes.
But there are some important drawbacks. The first one is - how to really measure it reliably? Yes, one could compile a list of markets like Coinmarketcap does. But there are several problems with this approach:
1) You'll never be able to catch the "total" volume, as there will always exchanges you don't have on the radar,
2) OTC trading (Localbitcoins ...) and on-chain markets (BarterDEX ...) are usually ignored
3) Fake volume is difficult to detect.
Because of these reasons, trading volume can be only one indicator of a really well-designed "crypto ranking". I know that there are more "holistic" approaches like CoinGecko, but they often include indicators that are very difficult to measure, like "development activity".
Maybe a relative simple index based on the triad "
transaction volume in USD + market cap + trading volume" could give a relatively good impression of the importance of a coin. I guess Bitcoin dominance in this index would be much higher than at Coinmarketcap.
Yeah the best measurement we could hope to get would come from a combination of all three I think. The volumes are most often faked, as most people know, just to draw in more business. The transaction & trading volumes would hopefully be somewhat relative but it's hard to know for sure.
We can never really know how much money is going through P2P networks like localbitcoins, or even just real P2P. Governments could even be paying for each other's dirty work and we wouldn't ever know. Those transactions can have a major effect but would almost always go unnoticed.