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When I look at the following site it says (at the time of writing) that the total market capitalization of Bitcoin is $125,927,574,809 AUD.
Now I think you could do this by running through the entire history of transactions on the blockchain, adding them all up, and multiplying by the current price. But there is probably a better way.
My question is: What is the method to determine the total market capitalization of the Bitcoin market?
1Great answer. Where do I get the number of coins in circulation? – hawkeye – 2017-10-22T11:31:27.983
I use this site for that kind of stuff: https://coinmarketcap.com/
– croraf – 2017-10-22T11:35:01.980Ok - I was looking for an implementation method – hawkeye – 2017-10-22T11:42:37.683
What do you mean by the implementation method? – croraf – 2017-10-22T11:50:52.717
I mean in terms of the BTC protocol and how the a software client and that site use it. – hawkeye – 2017-10-22T11:57:33.663
You can sum all the mined blocks from first one ever mined and multiply each one with the reward it gave. These are all the bitcoins that ever entered the circulation – croraf – 2017-10-22T12:01:24.997
Alternatively, and surprisingly, this is equal to the value of all unspent outputs currently on the blockchain. Because all unspent outputs show all the bitcoins in the circulation. – croraf – 2017-10-22T12:02:35.650
The sum of all unspent outputs will give you the actual amount of Bitcoin in circulation. This will be slightly less than what you calculate from mining because there are some coins that are irrevocably lost. – Andrew Chow – 2017-10-23T00:44:16.220
How can they be lost? (If keys are lost they are still on the chain as UTXOs ?) – croraf – 2017-10-23T06:35:36.897
Ok - can you please update your answer to include that? – hawkeye – 2017-10-23T08:56:57.697