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by tromp 1544 days ago
> What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is there a way to calculate the amount of USD put into a cryptocurrency across a timeframe?

For PoW coins there is. For every day in the coin's price history, multiply said price by the number of newly mined coins that day, and sum over all days.

Sadly, I don't know of any site that publishes such a metric, although the column "PoW Produced (24h)" of [1] shows the product of today's price and mined coins.

[1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins
1 comments
thinkmassive 1544 days ago
CoinMetrics has done research in this area, for example Realized Capitalization: https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/
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tromp 1544 days ago
That one seems to correspond less to "money put in" though. As they note, just having Satoshi move his one million bitcoin would increase Realized Capitalization enormously, even though no new money is put in.

Sum of daily price times daily emission on the other hand represents the total miner revenue; how much they would have made if they sold their mined coins as soon as possible (ignoring coinbase maturity for simplicity), which presumably upperbounds the total amount of money spent by miners on hardware and electricity.

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thinkmassive 1544 days ago
Good point, although your algorithm sounds more like it measures a lower bound on miner revenue, since it doesn’t account for miners who avoid selling their proceeds when they perceive the exchange rate to be too low. It also doesn’t account for future transactions of the same coins, so it doesn’t really address the entire market, only mining revenue.

Realized Cap isn’t perfect but it seems like one of the most useful attempts at measuring market cap so far. Of course “usefulness” depends on the question you’re trying to answer. Other factors can be taken into account, like the Free Float Supply: https://coinmetrics.io/introducing-free-float-supply/

Also keep in mind most of these calculations only consider on-chain transactions. Funds could be sitting unmoved on chain for years while being transacted many times per day on a second layer: Lightning Network, “wrapped” on another chain like Ethereum, or traded between participants on the same exchange.

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