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Comment by flashmob | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to note that at the same time bitcoin's dominance in the cryptocurrency market is down to 55.5%, hugging historic lows. http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

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Market cap is a fairly easily manipulated statistic, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a comparison anyway.

For one thing, a lot of those tokens are either centralized or represent products that don't even exist.

For another, they are over-counted. Imagine the thought experiment: I create a new eth token and sell a bunch, pumping the market cap of my new asset to $100M. That eth that was paid for my asset was not sold - I'm still holding onto it.

Now I've just added $100M+ to the 'dominance' factor by doing nothing. People bought my token, and maybe even bought eth to buy my token, with no sell pressure being added anywhere in the eth ecosystem. This extra dominance was just sort of poofed out of nowhere.

So, 55% is not really as meaningful as some people ascribe.

I agree the market cap is pretty distorted, but the 24 hour volume is also close to 50% bitcoin.

True, no statistic tells to whole story and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I think this metric has a lot of psychological value as it's easy to grasp and has been generally accepted by the bitcoiners when it was 80%.

Do you think there could be any other metrics that can tell a better story? (serious question, just wondering what your thoughts are)

My understanding is that people use bitcoin to buy other cryptocurrencies because they can more easily exchange their conventional currencies for bitcoin. As a result, bitcoin demand is maintained at elevated levels.

We'll see what happens to the demand if the Winkelvoss ETF gets approved. It's under review right now, should hear on or before May 15. [1] There's an Etherium ETF under review as well. If institutional and retail flows start causing crypto purchases through ETF creation unit mechanics, it's going to blow sky high. There are similar efforts going on in other countries. Crypto as an asset class is going to be a theme. Japan also legalized Bitcoin as a payment method [2], so there's been lots of buying there. I'm sitting on some BTC (not nearly as much as I used to though, :'( ).

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/26/bitcoin-price-sec-winklevoss-... [2] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/bitcoin-price-rises-japan-rus...

ETF approval is a real long shot. The SEC already rejected it, with reasoning that makes it unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.

The pro-regulation Obama led SEC rejected it, the Trump anti-regulation one may not.

It's not clear to me how much Trump policies will be influencing this decision. So far the extent of Trump's influence over the SEC is his appointment of one of the three current commissioners, right? I don't see that causing a 180 on this decision in the near term. I'd be happy to be wrong.

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