Topic: BitcoinAverage.com - bitcoin price index - page 15. (Read 69935 times)

Let's get the button to ignore mtshit back.

That's true, but my point is broader than that.  Even if you're in a currency zone with a relatively liquid XBT market (the EUR countries spring to mind) then it still doesn't make sense.  If trading on a USD exchange gives a better rate than an EUR exchange why would you not take advantage of that?

You can argue that other-currency markets are less relevent because they're more expensive to access - but I'm not convinced that 'same currency' is a good proxy for identifying which markets are cheaply accessible from a particular country.  And once you get into wire transfers, fees aren't necessarily that strongly correlated with whether or not there's a currency conversion involved...

roy

Thanks for adding CHF! But I agree with the poster above - for thinly traded currencies, it'd be better to calculate a cross-rate. I don't know how easy it is to obtain "regular" currency market conversion rates so they can be multiplied through, but it's really hard to use Bitcoin in a country when your local currency isn't listed. Simply providing cross-rates would be a big boost to Bitcoin commerce throughout the world as then they would start showing up in wallet apps that are switching to bitcoinaverage.com

Good work, I have to say that the global index is the way to go.  I really question the usefulness of currency-specific indices, at least for freely-convertable currencies.

I'm in the UK.  If I want to buy XBT, I would probably buy on Bitstamp.  Even though this is an EU-based exchange, they run their market in USD.  They accept SEPA transfers (the internal EU bank transfer mechanism) which are much cheaper than wire transfers, but only available denominated in EUR.

So what would happen is that I would instruct my bank to send funds from my GBP denominated bank account by SEPA to Bitstamp.  My bank will convert my GBP to EUR and make the transfer.  Bitstamp, on receiving the transfer, will convert the EUR into USD and deposit it in my account, and finally I would trade that for XBT.

In the past when I used Gox, I might have made a similar transfer to Gox's European account.  Again my bank would have converted my GBP to EUR and sent them to Gox, who would have deposited the EUR to my account.  I would then place a buy order on Gox.  But the way Gox's multi-currency orderbook works, my EUR buy order might well (for a small fee) get matched against a USD sell order, with Gox doing the currency conversion.  So again, multiple currency conversions.

The fact of the matter is, it makes no difference to me whether the exchange is denominated in GBP or EUR or USD or JPY - these are all freely convertible expressions of fiat, and it's often the norm that the fiat will be converted between currencies multiple times. It's just a units change (albeit one that incurs a small fee).  So the idea that anyone might care about what currency the exchange's orderbook is actually denominated in has always seemed bizarre to me.

What I care about is exchanging fiat for coins (and vice versa) and I'll use whatever exchange is best for me in terms of costs, convenience, reliability, etc.  I care not one jot what units the fiat quantities on their orderbook are quoted in.  This is one thing that Gox has understood for a long time - their multicurrency orderbook essentially regards fiat as a single market.  You can pull currency-specific datafeeds off Gox if you really want (and people like you and Bitcoincharts do).  But it's not really that meaningful because Gox will happily match buy and sell orders that are denominated in different currencies.

So I encourage you to continue to shift the emphasis away from indices that select a subset of exchanges based on the fiat currency their orderbook happens to be quoted in to global, or at least regional indices.  What we need are global (and possibly regional indices).  But what fiat currency we choose to express the index in should have no impact on how the index is calculated.

It does make sense to construct regional indices based on access to exchanges; e.g. BTC China's rate is not of much relevance to me because I have no access to that exchange.  Even though CNY is somewhat convertible these days, BTC China is only open to people with Chinese bank accounts.

But mainly - global is the way to go.... I'd put much less focus on currency-specific markets.  Oh, and any chance of history for the global index? :-)

Access to historical data is going to become an increasingly common requirement in order to provide valuations for accounting or tax purposes....  Currently we have the Coindesk BPI, but the more indices to choose from, the better.

roy

Millibit is live!
All rates on live site are now calculated for m฿ as default base. There is a button to switch back to full ฿ if needed.

Another important change - we have decided to remove the famous "No MtGox" button. Since the time this button was introduced global situation has changed, we've seen China rising, and global weights moving east, so now MtGox has about 8% of total global trading volume, not 30-50% it used to have, so it's effect on the global average price is not worth a special button anymore. So the button is gone.
/no-mtgox API is still present, for those who are still using it. We encourage everybody using it now to switch to global average instead, we will monitor it's usage and will switch it off eventually.

As of other changes - bitcoin-central.net integration added.

Regards,
Alex at BitcoinAverage.

It would be nice if the Bitcoinium widget also could use the global average converted to NOK instead of the NOK markets average 

Just an update to say Bitcoinium support is now done, so you can have a BTCAVG ticker on your android homescreens!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.veken0m.cavirtex

Big thanks to mike for getting this done as we're a little overrun at the moment

Regards
Shaun at BitcoinAverage

Update released. Changes:

- bitcoin.de added back, now with proper direct integration.
- page title switched to show global average for each currency
- twitter bot updated to tweet global average, not local USD market price
- bitcash integration suspended (their website is hacked, bitcoins stolen)
- bidextreme integration removed (their website is legally shut down)
- CHF (Swiss Franc) added (MtGox and localbitcoins)
- itbit.com integration implemented, but is offline now, API period problem, support request sent.

We're still thinking about millibits and about other more massive updates, probably will release something about this soon also.


Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Thank you! Looking forward to this 

Thanx BitcoinAverage for the fantastic site and awesome support.

BitCoin Average is fantastic and my #1 source for BTC price.  Thanks all involved!

just make a toggle. best of both worlds.

Oh, just noticed that I was posting from my personal account, rather than website's one. Good though I'm signing all my posts.
All posts from user @alexykot are legitimate answers from BitcoinAverage, that's me.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Hi Mike

Hmm, right now we're presenting only currencies that have a direct exchanges available. But in fact MtGox provides CHF/BTC exchange, and localbitcoins also have some volume in it, so I think we can implement CHF directly, and also global average in CHF, which would be much more reliable to refer to.
I'll release it this week.

Hmm, probably we should redesign global average area and implement full range of possible world currencies for it, while keeping actual local averages only for currencies directly traded for BTC.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

I vote m฿! ฿ was the past. Soon it'll be hard to get satoshi!

Don't think we are that influential yet the proposition is compelling. Hmm, not sure though, it's a rather controversial issue. I'll need to think a little more about this and possible side effects, I see reasons for both ฿ and m฿.
Are there any noticeable public discussions or polls on this matter I could review?

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Hmm, interesting idea. Probably we could do that, yet I'm not sure if it's viable for us to pay 0.0001 (current tx fee) for each timestamp. Assuming we will do it once a day - in a year we will spend ฿0.365 on it, which becomes a noticeable amount. I think we'll wait until version 0.9 for it, when transaction prices will be able adjust to hugely increased exchange rates.

I've added a note at github on it, will get back to it later on.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

I've added integration, but cannot release it right now - it's returning volume data for wrong time period (60 min instead of 24h as per documentation).
Queried their support on this, we'll see if they will fix it.

Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Hi Kupsi

Hmm, I see what you mean. Probably it would make sense to show global price in page title for each currency, not only low volume ones like NOK.
Implemented, will release this week.

Regards
Alex at BitcoinAverage.

Thank you for a great service. I have one suggestion for you.

I'm Norwegian, and it should be possible to get the global average price in NOK in the HTML title instead of the Norwegian markets average price. The volume in Norway is so low, so the global average price makes much more sense. Is this possible?