On CoinMarketCap, and for all I know probably on many or most similar aggregation sites, changing which currency you want them to display the data in does not in reality actually work.
I have been suspecting that the root cause might be that in reality they do not actually
have or
collect or
retain the underlying data for currencies other than their default one, which in the case of CoinMarketCap might be USD but even if not USD is very likely some other fiat.
For example if you ask them to show you the tables for (in) BTC rather that for or in USD, you can see that those red and green colours are incorrect; coins that you can easily verify have actually been going down in bitcoin price will display as green rather than red
if they have been going up in [site's base/default currency] price and conversely, coins you can easily verify to have been going up in bitcoin price will show as red rather than green
if they have been going down in [price as denominated in the site's base/default currency].
Because almost all such sites (as far as I am aware) use some species of fiat as their base currency, they are probably almost all basically lying to you almost all the time.
It is important to remember that fiat itself, all fiat that I know of anyway, is almost always going
down, the coarser the granularity of time you look at the less of the grains of time will show them going upward.
If you compare them to more-stable things - usually commodities such as gold but also even perishable commodities such as bread and milk and eggs, the larger span of time (aka courser granularity) the more likely you will find fiat has gone down in value as priced in such commodities.
To me the upshot of this is that a site of that kind but using as its base/default currency bitcoin would be much more useful, although more useful still would be one that actually retained the data for each of the currencies it claims to be able to show you the data in instead of storing the data as based on one of them yet pretending to be able to show the data in terms of the others.
The tables the
Galactic Milieu periodically updates at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html purporting to show values as expressed in various of the assets "get away with" converting the values from the
Latest Rates include-file precisely because that file's actual purpose is precisely to enable such conversions; the values in the file are results of convergence, re-calculating the values over and over and over again until a "diff" between the results and the previous iteration's result find no difference between them.
That is of course also to say that they are synthetic results, based not on the vagaries of "spot markets" but rather on a sort of "fundamental or intrinsic value" possibly somewhat akin to the way someone in the liquidation / company-breakup business (like the penny-stocks folk who noticed the non-penny stock market had plenty of juicy breakup targets due to basing valuations on earnings rather than on actual real-estate and such held so snapped up such targets and broke them up from their real-estate holdings so the aspect valued by valuators who valued based on earnings versus price got the part they liked but that part became a leaser of the real-estate, which was moved to presumably entities that in the process maybe ended up in the penny-stock folks hands? I don't really know the nitty gritty of that story but that is the gist I got of it) might value stuff: what does it have in its pocketses...
(Obviously of course BTC, LTC and NMC, also shown in that table but lacking "official treasuries" aka "what is in their pocketsessss", have to have their value according some aggregator such as Coin Market Cap plugged in at the start of the iterations and not changed during the iterations that potentially could, and are intended to, change the values of each of the others until an iteration results in no change.)
(Also obvious of course is that it helps to know what they all have in their pocketses,
the game knows this because it needs to in order to calculate this "simulation of efficient markets" and would probably be a better simulation of inefficient markets if it didn't iterate all the way to convergence and maybe even picked at random, or based on some "transparency of each asset's operations" probability, which assets to assume to be aware of which other assets' nitty gritty details on any given iteration or some other fuzziness factor. Going all the way to convergence is however prevented from being a simulation of "too ridiculously efficient markets" by actually only knowing what is in the pocket known as "official treasury", nothing at all about "slush funds", and not taking into account any planets, military units, magic swords, magic shields, player accounts, character accounts, characters, what the characters have in
their pockets and so on and so on and so on, in short "game items", including all non-"reserve" assets which means assets not eligible for inclusion in "official treasuries".)
-MarkM-