Topic: Can someone please explain how altcoin ratios work? They'r not aligned to price? (Read 427 times)

Your looking at 2 different things.  First and foremost, the Market cap for any coin is FALSE.   

For the Market cap of a particular coin, they are just taking a time slice of how many coins are currently available and what the trading price was at that current time, and multiply it to get the cap.  People can easily manipulate the price of a coin, especially a smaller, lesser traded coin, and prices can fluctuate wildly.  I will give you 2 examples.

if I took a coin with 1 billion coins, and the price to make it easy was $0.001 the market cap would be $1 million.  If I went to the exchange and noticed I could easily buy up the coins to take that minute's price on the exchange up to $0.0013 with for $50.  The Market cap for the coin would show up as $1.3 million, with only $50 added.  Also if someone did actually try to sell a large fraction of the coins all at once, the price of the coin would fall badly

Another example, is actually something that happened in 2013.  There was a coin called MarineCoin.  They pre-mined about 100 Billion coins, then had a reward in the 10 coins/block range.  The few coins that did sell, were selling at about the $0.10 range.  So they maintained that the market cap of the coin was around $10 Billion, which was larger than BTC at the time.  They believed that since they had such a huge market cap, that they were going to purchase an island in the Atlantic, and form their own Cryptocurrency based Nation.  They were quite deluded and they fell fairly quickly.  But just shows how you can never trust the Market cap.

Bravo! Great explanation. I always get annoyed when the pump that market cap when there isn't 20% real money in there (in most Alts).

Your second screenshot shows ANT at 0.0121 ETH, so your 700 is approx 8.47ETH. There's your profit.

However, there's no guarantee that's the rate you'll actually get on any particular exchange. If you want a direct ANT-ETH swap, you'll have to make do with whatever rate you can find available since it's not a massively popular pairing.

On the other hand if you want a better reflection of the full value change, you can switch to BTC as an intermediate currency first, but you'll end up paying more in fees/charges.

ETH-ANT is not a popular pair, that's it. If no one wants to buy ANT with ETH, there will be no buy orders there. These are tiny markets, someone setting a buy order of 0.000001 ANT at a price of 100 ETH per ANT and someone else filling it can have extreme impact on the way the price is calculated on site like coinmarketcap.

Especially for the less traded pairs, you have to look at the exchanges, not at coinmarketcap. Even  BTC has a spread of a few 100 Dollars, depending on where you sell them.

Got it?

Ok, this is what I mean. I hope this clarifies:

Here's a screenshot of Eth price last 24 hours from CryptoMarketCap. Price has remained relatively the same:
https://ibb.co/c6OAA5

Here's a screenshot of ANT price last 24 hours from CryptoMarketCap. Price has increased 30%:
https://ibb.co/dr8MHk

Therefore, you would expect ETH-ANT price to swing in ANT's favour right? Well here is the ETH-ANT price on Bittrex last 24 hours:
https://ibb.co/d0dcq5

That's how market trading typically works (ie the FOREX), so I'm not sure what's going on here.

So if purchasing Aragon (ANT) has nothing to do with it's market value according to CryptoMarketCap, how does CryptoMarketCap determine market value then? What's driving the 30% increase in ANT's market value according to CruptoMarketCap? It's certainly not people buying it then, which is how every other form of currency works.

For example, if the USD was in high demand, it would appreciate against all other currencies, unless that currency is also appreciating at the same rate. So, if Aragon's value has grown 30% in the last 24 hours, there is clearly demand for it right? Greater demand vs supply. But it hasn't appreciated at all against ETH which has had demand = supply (stayed neutral).

So then you might say, well perhaps noone is buying ANT with ETH... highly unlikely considering ANT's market value went up a whopping 30%. But let's consider that. The only real other alternative is that people are using Bitcoin to purchase ANT. So let's see that over the last 24 hours:
https://ibb.co/kSpdxk

Nope... no massive appreciation there either.

WTF?

What exchange are you looking? You just need to look at the BUY or SELL when you scroll down, this can swing 50% with just one transaction in the entire day if it's low volume high spread. Look at what happened on the exchange that will tell you.

where did you take 27% from? i can't seem to find any rise in ANT price in the past 24 hours.

24 hours ago from your topic's time stamp ANT was 0.00127BTC and 0.0093 ETH
now it is worth 0.0013BTC and 0.0094 ETH

there is no 27% rise! (maybe i am looking at it wrong, so please elaborate and if possible post a chart)

You only look at the trading pair at the exchange. Dont look at coinmarketcap they use fiat. For example:

Tesla TES/ Bitcoin BTC

0.001/002 is the spread in BTC

so this is a big spread and price can go 100% just buy buying or selling so huge swing. But on coinmarket cap they might show instead of 100% just 27% since theyuse other logic.

24 hours ago I traded 6.65 ETH for 700 ANT (Aragon) at 0.0095 price.

Now, compared to 24 hours ago, ETH price is the same.
Now, compared to 24 hours ago, ANT price has gone up 27%.

I would assume the ETH-ANT ratio would be highly in ANTs favour and I could take a profit from ANT (27% profit?). I would assume the current price should be roughly 0.012 (27% increase).

However, the current ETH-ANT ratio is at 0.0091... WTF? That means my ANT is worth less than what it was 24 hours ago compared to ETH and if I sold now, instead of making a 27% profit I would make a 4.3% LOSS???

Why don't altcoin ratios move in line with general prices?

Can anyone explain? So confused...  Huh