[yamaneko]

One of his advices is:

> 2. Beware vanity metrics

Can we tell if BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies has any vanity metrics? If so, what would that be?

My uneducated guess would be how valuable the currency is in Dollars. The currency seems virtually inflated as we don't know how much of that would translate to real purchasing power. It doesn't seem that it would be possible to many people to sell it all out. Thus, who invested in it would be supposed to keep using within the coin's network, and given that a transaction takes awhile and there are not many shops accepting it, it would be hard to get some return.

In addition, BitCoin has fluctuated a lot since 2012 and there were several issues in its way, like the lead maintainer stepping out, capacity limit being reached because of block chain monopoly, Mt Gox bankruptcy etc.

[throwaway41597]

Current vanity metrics seem to include "market capitalization" and amount raised during ICO. It is true that those have become signal in the current noise but it speaks about how frothy things are.

Crytocurrencies simply are hard to value because you don't know how many users they've got.

[wmf]

I've seen number of transactions used as a vanity metric. This leads some people to "spend and rebuy" BTC to juice that.

Number of full nodes also looks like a vanity metric.

[thisisit]

It can also be the number of threads about bitcoin (or cryptocurrency) on Hacker news being upvoted to the top 10/20?

I was there when the last time bitcoin reached record highs. Surely the USD conversion rates play a large part when suddenly people get interested in block chain or bitcoin at all.

Other metrics can be the glut of "altcoins" with very high "genesis block" or ICO rates.