Post
Topic
Board Economics
Bitcoin's Transaction Volume in USD Increasing
by
Surprise
on 20/10/2014, 21:53:44 UTC
I'm interested in studying Bitcoin's real economic activity. This is one of my favorite metrics for doing so. Unfortunately, the transaction volume per day changes greatly, resulting in graphs that are difficult to gain insight from. In order to overcome this limitation, I took the data from the daily graph and used it to create weekly instead of daily averages. I also averaged out one outlier day that I believe was adding more noise than insight. I find these graphs uniquely informative and thought others would like to see them too.

Weekly Transaction Volume

Below is the same graph with the week's average price included on a secondary Y axis.

Weekly Transaction Volume With Average Price

I've also included a version with the weekly sum of major western Bitcoin exchanges on the secondary Y axis, instead of average price.

Weekly Transaction Volume With Exchange Volume

Sources:

Daily Transaction Volume USD
Price Data
Volume Data
Notes:

-Bitcoin Average did not collect price or exchange volume data for June 26th, 2014. I averaged data between June 25th, 2014 and June 27th, 2014 to produce an estimation of June 26th, 2014.

-The graph with the weekly exchange volume does not include data from Chinese exchanges, which I believe to be mostly useless when studying the real economic activity of Bitcoin.

-On May 25th, 2014 the daily transaction volume was $179,516,928. I took the average of every other day in Week 5, $54,934,653, and used that to remove the outlier.

-On June 11th - June 13th, 2014, the daily transaction volume was exceptionally high, distorting that week's average greatly. I could not think of a reasonable way to remove these outliers, and therefore left them in.