Photo by pina messina on Unsplash
Like everyone else I’ve been watching the meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I’ve become interested in the blockchain technology that powers the cryptocurrencies and the craze that surrounds it.
Last Saturday Dave Craige sent this tweet tagging me:
Dave was referring to the chart in this tweet by Trace Mayer:
I didn’t know of any websites where that chart existed, but how hard could it be to make?
I’d just built and launched How Much is a Bitcoin Worth? so I knew how to get the price of cryptocurrencies and also ranked cryptocurrencies on 500coins.
My first question was how to do you value the amount of money in a country that would be compared to cryptocurrencies? Turns out this is tracked by economists, and has been for some time. Called “Narrow Money”, it is the total of a country’s physical currency plus demand deposits and other liquid assets held by the central bank.
The World Fact Book compiled by the CIA provides estimated Narrow Money numbers for nearly 200 countries.
The World Factbook - Central Intelligence Agency
_These challenges are international in scope and are priorities for the Central Intelligence Agency. If you have…_www.cia.gov
The handy download link mean’t I was able to use these numbers and build a comparison pretty quickly.
I used the CoinMarketCap API to get the valuation of the cryptocurrencies and then merged it with the values from the World Fact Book. Building a live list from there was straightforward.
I could have published that page, and called it a day, but this comparison with non-digital currencies, got me thinking about the valuation of cryptocurrencies with other financial assets.
There has been a lot of talk recently about buying Bitcoin being the digital equivalent of investing in Gold, so could be build a comparison with the value of Gold?
While there are estimates, nobody know for sure just how much gold exists in the world. If the price of gold continued to rise, would people start digging in places that hadn’t been explored before.
Back in August Fool published a great piece that discussed the value of the then $4K Bitcoin compared to hold:
How Does Bitcoin's Market Cap Stack Up Next to Gold, the S&P 500, and U.S. Dollar?
_Get your gloves on, because you're going to need them. Digital currency bitcoin is absolutely on fire after hitting an…_www.fool.com
The numbers are based on estimates made in 2013, needless to say Bitcoin has a very, very long way to go to catchup to the market cap of gold.
Since the valuation of Gold is not a very recent one, and based on a lot of speculation I decide it didn’t make sense to publish this.
Although Bitcoin was originally developed as way for people to carry out transactions, exchange digital currency for goods and services, it seems increasingly that it is being used as for investment. So how does it compare to other things people invest in … stocks of companies available on public exchanges.
I was able to find and download from the Nasdaq website a list of large cap companies and their market cap. The website provided lists for both the Nasdaq and NYSE listed companies. Which companies (household names) would Bitcoin be worth more than?
Again once I had identified what valuations to compare with the cryptocurrencies, building a list was pretty simple and followed the format for the country currencies list.
A little bit of design magic, and the website was done.
Cap Compare: http://capcompare.com/
I decided on the name of Cap Compare. Since the site compares the market cap value of cryptocurrencies to other things, seems like a good fit, and the .com was available! When does that happen?
I decided to host the site on Heroku, as it would be free unless it started to get a lot of traffic. 🤞 If the traffic did go up, scaling would be pretty easy too.
Cap Compare: Crypto Currency Market Cap Comparisons
_Compare the value of Cryto Currencies to other financial assets_capcompare.com
Go ahead and explore, what Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies are worth. See how the value of the top 100 cryptocurrencies compares to countries narrow money, and companies traded on the NYSE & Nasdaq exchanges.
If you have any suggestions of other things to compare against, drop a comment below!
