It's the total amount of money passing trough the network.
But since bitcoin transactions work by sending "change" back to yourself this value is not that relevant. In most cases 90% of the transaction amount is sent back as change.
You spend the results of previous transactions. Each transaction can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs, so when you make a purchase, you select enough payments that you have received to cover the cost as the inputs of the transaction, and make the purchase price (to the recipient) and whatever is leftover (back to yourself) as the outputs. (I imagine software would take care of all the complexity; and whatever is leftover, typically 0.01, is given to the miners to incentivise them to spend the processing power to authenticate the transaction.)
This means that the Bitcoins in somebodies wallet is conceptually the list of transactions that have been made to them (that haven't been spent yet). It also means that a nice big graph can be made of how money is (or isn't) flowing through the system.
Well done. I think that it would look cleaner if you removed the two decimal places. If it's estimated, then you probably shouldn't be showing them anyway.
A transaction can be made up of a different number of inputs, if the inputs don't exactly match the output (the amount you want to send), there is "change".
The change is sent to a new address (belonging to the sender). So blockchain.info and this site are guessing as to which of the outputs was the intended sending amount and which was the change.
Very nice rwinn!
But I have a question. With the fast rise of bitcoins, lets say that I now have $10m worth of coins(I don't btw).
How would I convert all to gbp/usd and would the governments tax you?. With anti-money laundering controls in place in the uk, such a windfall would cause huge problems!
You would trade them for gbp/usd on one of the exchanges. Mtgox.com is by far the biggest.
As for tax, this is probably taxed as any other profit you make on buying and selling stuff, at least in my country (Norway). If I buy an art painting and sell it with a profit, I am obliged to inform on this on my tax sheet. And the same goes for bying/selling other currencies as well, but bitcoins are harder to track for the government (but not impossible).
Well for starters, you can go crazy and start spending BTC ( bitcoins ) directly and buy stuff instead of encashing immediately.
Coming back to if withdrawn in as local currecny.
Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, any other currency or even barter; is included in gross income, and would be subject to income tax.
So practically bitcoins could be subject to self employment tax if BTC is considered a commodity like gold.
If considered as a currecny or a debt then the gained currency could be taxed based on market value at the end of each tax year. Also, IRS never conisders currency as long-term investement so if treated as another currency then it would be taxed as holding an account in any non-functional (foreign) currency.
All this is just assuming its your owned BTC via trading/exchanging and not via business which accepts BTC or via selling items online or via mining.
Edit : Forgot to answer your question "Where can I buy BTC?"
> All this is just assuming its your owned BTC via trading/exchanging and not via business which accepts BTC or via selling items online or via mining.
All of those would be taxable too. The only question is when: every year at their current market value, or when traded for (official) currency.
Why would BTC gains be subject to self-employment tax? Surely they would be treated like other forex gains?
Honestly if I had $10 million in BTC gains I'd get a tax professional and seek a private letter ruling from the IRS to clarify the situation. I imagine that misreporting $10 million of income would be an unpleasant experience.
As far as my understanding goes for the UK tax position - if you bought the Bitcoins then you purchased an asset and then sold it again thereby creating a capital gain on which CGT would be due when you do your tax return. You could try and avoid paying tax by simply not telling the Inland Revenue - but that would appear to be tax evasion.
Not sure what the tax situation would be if you mined them - perhaps they would count as income?
The only thing I'd be sure of is that if you did have $10m worth of coins in the UK then you'd be silly not to speak to an accountant who specialises in tax planning for individuals - excellent ones do exist!
Is there any way of estimating the 'real" bitcoin economy?IE, Use of bitcoin to buy & sell goods & services rather than exchanging bitcoin for cash & via versa?
I mean lot of investing/speculation is obviously going on, but is there growth in bitcoin based commerce? That's ultimately the problem I hope bitcoin will solve.
Google up "bitcoin days lost", that's quite a good indicator for the traffic/volume. Also, most of the volume indicators ignore BTC trade, as that's done using the exchanges' internal systems.
The metric you're thinking of is "Bitcoin Days Destroyed". A search for "Bitcoin Days Lost" brings up tales of woe from users who lost bitcoins. But I do agree that this is probably the best metric for measuring how dynamic the Bitcoin economy is. Incidentally, Bitcoin Days Destroyed has continued to rise, even in recent months. It has risen steadily almost since the inception of Bitcoin.
Yes, I realize I linked the wrong chart -- was in a hurry. I meant to link to the rate. If you see my other comments mentioning BDD, they reference the rate of BDD.
You can see that hoarding increased slightly during March (a day destroying more than about 11 million bitcoin days should roughly reflect the market loosening up, destroying less should reflect the market tightening). Early April is also among the fastest periods (over the entire history of bitcoin) of BD destruction.
Accepting Bitcoin doesn't mean you're getting the same value that you paid for it. Each person would have to / want to calculate what they paid for a Bitcoin before purchasing. From what I can see most sellers can earn more money offering Bitcoin as an option - and a much higher amount, and if they're able to spend the Bitcoin themselves before it drops, then they're able to profit even more.
You could attempt to replicate the analysis used in "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph" by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir. (http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf)
In 2012 they noted that:
“If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only receive and never send any BTC’s [bitcoins], we see that they contain 7,019,100 BTC’s, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC’s. Due to the way bitcoins can be repeatedly moved to fresh addresses, some of which can be very recent, we can not claim that all these bitcoins are out of circulation. However,76.5% of these 78% (i.e., 59.7% of all the coins in the system) are old coins", de ned as bitcoins received at some address more than three months before the cut off date (May 13th 2012), which were not followed by any outgoing transac-
tions from that address after they were received. One can also argue that very old dormant bitcoins were simply abandoned or lost by users who experimented with the system in its early days, when it was very dicult to buy anything or to exchange bitcoins into dollars. To be even more cautious with our estimation of dormant bitcoins, we decided to ignore all the transactions which took place prior to July 18th 2010, when Mt.Gox started its exchange and price quoting services. The sum of the balances of all the addresses which have not been
active since that date is 1,657,480 bitcoins. Clearly, by considering all these bitcoins as "lost" rather than "hoarded" we are underestimating the number of bitcoins which are kept dormant in "saving accounts". By ignoring these very old bitcoins and repeating the same calculation, we found that 73% of all the remaining BTC's were accumulated at addresses which only receive and never send bitcoins, and that 70% of these 73% (i.e., 51%) are dormant bitcoins in the sense that they were received more than three months before our cuto date but
after it became easy to exchange them. If instead of summing the transaction values we sum the nal balances of all the addresses that were active after July 18th 2010 but became inactive in the last three months, we get that 55% of all
coins in the system are dormant in this sense. This is strong evidence that the majority of bitcoins are not circulating in the system, and since it is based on the address rather than the entity graph, this conclusion is not a ected by possible
inaccuracies in the way we associate addresses with users.”
I do wonder what "Bitcoin Banks" like Flexcoin do to these statistics. I "feel" like no one really uses Flexcoin, but that would definitely skew the statistics by a lot.
Its a bit unfortunate that there is no real statistic that can stand on itself... But Ron and Shamir's work there is useful.
Hm. I hope that sites like this are not a new trend but fear otherwise.
Visiting this page with my screen reader (NVDA from http://nvda-project.org) shows all of a combo box with different currencies in it. There is precisely no other content.
At least before the worst things the blind had to worry about were unlabeled links that you could eventually possibly figure out through trial and error. This? Nothing.
I don't even see the clever little "Your browser sucks" message, as it's not my browser causing the issue. Just a complete lack of semantic markup of any kind that the screen reader could possibly interpret.
That's unfortunate. All text is rendered with SVG, so it should be technically possible for your screen reader to pick up on when new SVG text nodes are added. Perhaps i should add a "Your screen reader sucks message" :-P
All this hype and speculation gives me a bit of pause, and worries me about actually mining. However, I keep wondering, what opportunities are there left to "sell the shovels" ?
How do you get all that data? I am super interested in knowing how something like this is built. How do you connect to the bitcoin network and serve the stats via this app. I am butchering my question but I hope it makes atleast some sense.
Have you found anyone with a public JSONP API? That'd seem to enable a new level of in-browser apps... though perhaps Blockchain.info/MtGox aren't ready for the accompanying level of traffic.
For the other data (non-market transactions etc.) you can run the Bitcoin-qt client on virtually any hardware and then connect to its built in JSON API.
However, my (unauthenticated) test attempts against blockchain.info and bitcoincharts.com, with the "Origin:" header, didn't give the right "Access-Control-Allow-Origin:" header in response.
I agree, this is a simple site displaying information in a very simple way. It should be very easy to fallback onto other ways of displaying this info.
If this was a company website or something maybe I would agree with you, but seeing how the draw here is "Realtime" bitcoin, the OP obviously put in a lot of work in the realtime aspect. If you look at the source it looks like websockets + canvas.
Considering this, it seems OP would have needed to rewrite the whole service (he would have needed to write application layer + the alternate html) just to serve those without javascript, which would not be in realtime (and essentially a duplicate service of all the other bitcoin exchange boards).
Whats the tradeoff in terms of development time vs. supporting a small set of users?
I can see your interpretation, but I think the way he has it also makes sense. The buy price is what people are willing to buy it for (i.e. it's the bid). The sell price is what people are willing to sell it for (i.e. it's the ask).
Perhaps switching to bid/ask would be a good idea to clear up the confusion, but it's potentially more confusing to people unfamiliar with financial markets.
I have spent some time trying to understand the various hash rate estimates people come up with. Basically, I've determined that they're all 100% bogus. People like to work from the difficulty using bad/incorrect statistics since that's the most obvious way to get to something in the units of hashes/s, but I can never understand exactly what the process is. I'm genuinely curious to know what people do in practice, since I'm genuinely curious to know the "real" answer.
I'm aware of that. rwinn, can you tell me if this is what you're doing?
It's in your last sentence that you go wrong. There's a relationship between the number of expected hashes per new block and the difficulty. That tells you something about the hash rate, but not the rate itself. Actually, it tells you something about the number of unique hashes being tried per new block (in expectation). And for some applications, that may, in fact, be what you care about.
Specifically, the appearance of new blocks is, if you like, a random variable with an exponential distribution. You can, in principle, estimate the rate parameter for this distribution using the difficulty and the timestamps in the Bitcoin log, but it's not straightforward. The last time I got into it, I was halfway through building a Bayesian estimator for the rate parameter using the log before I had to give up and move on to real work. I'll do it soon.
I don't see how a hash (as a token of bitcoin work) would be anything other than unique (for the result to be useful to me it has to include my address in the input).
In what applications would the likely immediate hash rate be more useful than the historical average hash rate? I guess the obvious one is turning some bit of mining hardware on and off.
100% bogus? I'm not sure what bad/incorrect statistics you are referring to since it's relatively straight forward to find.
The current target hash is "0x000000000000022FBE0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
This means that to solve a block, you must find a SHA-256 hash of that block's transactions + nonce that hash to a value equal or below that target. Since the output of a SHA-256 hash is essentially random, the probability of finding a nonce that evaluates to hash at or below that target is roughly [target]/[possible sha256 outputs] or 3.51e60/2^256, or 3.034e-17. On average, that means it takes 1/3e-17 or 3.3e16 hashes per block. To calculate average hashes per second of the network, we look at number of blocks solved in the last x unit of time (if you want a 24 hour average, take the number of blocks in the past 24 hours). As of the time of this post, 170 blocks have been solved in those 24 hours. This implies an expected 24*3.3e16 or 8e17 hashes have been computed. Divide by 86400 (seconds in a day) and you get 9.26e12, or 9.26 TH/s. The site reports 6.5 TH/s, presumably because it uses a longer window than 24 hours (probably 7 days).
Just because it's a statistical average instead of the exact rate doesn't mean it's 100% bogus. If you want, you can use fairly standard statistical models to find an acceptable error margin.
It doesn't bother you that your method counts only unique hash values tested? Or that this value is being used on the site to talk about power expenditure (which is clearly related to total hashes per second, not unique hashes)?
You're right that you can compute the N-second average rate easily. But nobody reports the "network hash rate" as such. And since the denominator matters a lot in determining what the number means, pretty much all the numbers you find out in the world are (1) misreported and (2) bogus.
It does count only unique hash values, but why should that bother me? People don't randomly generate the same 256 bit number very often (in fact, the probability is so low that it has almost certainly never happened)
When I search for "bitcoin network hashrate" on google, the first link is http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, which does in fact report the N-second average rate. It reports the 7-days, 14-day, and 30-day average rate.
No, it's still not an issue. Check out the table for 256 bit numbers in the article you linked. To get a 0.1% probability of even a single collision, you need to generate 1.5e37 hashes. At 10 TH/s, that would take 3e17 years. 10 million times longer than the age of the universe.
The birthday paradox basically says that you can expect a collision when you've explored the square root of the problem space. For birthdays, you expect a collision in a group of sqrt(365) ~= 19 people.
For a 256-bit hash, you expec a collision in a group of 2^128 hashes. That is still huge. Absent a weakness in the hash being found, it's unlikely anyone will ever generate two colliding hashes.
You have errors. 170 blocks have been found so 170*3.3e16 = 5.6e18 hashes have been computed. Divided by 86400 = 64.9 Thash/s (and the site currently reports 65.2 Thash/s, not 6.5).
It could also be explained by increased organic non-speculatory demand as Bitcoin shows up in the media more frequently, and more people begin to use it - against a relatively fixed supply.
If more people are using Bitcoin, then there would be more transactions. Bitcoin transactions / day have grown from ~35,000 in August 2012 to ~55,000 in February 2012.
Between February 2012 and today, the number of Bitcoin transactions/day has not grown at all, while Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed by 1000%.
Note they also use the Ƀ (B with stroke) to represent Bitcoin. Kudos to ECOGEX for their discussion a few weeks ago that set this in motion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084).
I should point out I'm wearing a bitcoin t shirt printed months ago that has the Ƀ so this has clearly already had wide adoption before then... don't give anyone undue credit.
This is a moot point. I recognize that more people use ฿ than Ƀ. I was simply stating what was used on the site and congratulating the use of (what I consider) to be a more visually appealing symbol.
Congrats on using yourself as your own source. Don't beg the question and stop trolling.
151 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadBut since bitcoin transactions work by sending "change" back to yourself this value is not that relevant. In most cases 90% of the transaction amount is sent back as change.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change
If the ratio of 'money spent'/'total volume' is 1/5, does that mean that people are, on average, spending one fifth of their wallet?
Bitcoin wallets generally contain multiple addresses, and transactions will be created with inputs associated with only a subset of these addresses.
This means that the Bitcoins in somebodies wallet is conceptually the list of transactions that have been made to them (that haven't been spent yet). It also means that a nice big graph can be made of how money is (or isn't) flowing through the system.
Coins in circulation 10994200
that's 201798541 ɃTC
edit: ah, it's showing USD value but putting BTC as the currency
A transaction can be made up of a different number of inputs, if the inputs don't exactly match the output (the amount you want to send), there is "change".
The change is sent to a new address (belonging to the sender). So blockchain.info and this site are guessing as to which of the outputs was the intended sending amount and which was the change.
As for tax, this is probably taxed as any other profit you make on buying and selling stuff, at least in my country (Norway). If I buy an art painting and sell it with a profit, I am obliged to inform on this on my tax sheet. And the same goes for bying/selling other currencies as well, but bitcoins are harder to track for the government (but not impossible).
Coming back to if withdrawn in as local currecny.
Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, any other currency or even barter; is included in gross income, and would be subject to income tax.
So practically bitcoins could be subject to self employment tax if BTC is considered a commodity like gold.
If considered as a currecny or a debt then the gained currency could be taxed based on market value at the end of each tax year. Also, IRS never conisders currency as long-term investement so if treated as another currency then it would be taxed as holding an account in any non-functional (foreign) currency.
All this is just assuming its your owned BTC via trading/exchanging and not via business which accepts BTC or via selling items online or via mining.
Edit : Forgot to answer your question "Where can I buy BTC?"
Here are few reliable places
https://mtgox.com/
https://coinbase.com/
https://bitbargain.co.uk/
https://bitfloor.com/
https://www.bitcoin.de/
https://btc-e.com/
https://www.bitstamp.net/
https://blockchain.info/wallet/sms-phone-deposits ( Hybrid wallet + small exchange )
All of those would be taxable too. The only question is when: every year at their current market value, or when traded for (official) currency.
What I meant to say for businesses accepting BTC would have other and extra taxes apart from Income like Sales/Excise
For miners I assume it would be either considered as a owned commodity or intagible personal property.
I would assume just like any other commodity the current market value is considered if you have not traded in local currency.
Also if you have bought BTC and sold to make some profit by trading, there would be commodity tax.
Honestly if I had $10 million in BTC gains I'd get a tax professional and seek a private letter ruling from the IRS to clarify the situation. I imagine that misreporting $10 million of income would be an unpleasant experience.
I'd imagine (in the UK at least) that they would be subject to capital gains tax.
Not sure what the tax situation would be if you mined them - perhaps they would count as income?
The only thing I'd be sure of is that if you did have $10m worth of coins in the UK then you'd be silly not to speak to an accountant who specialises in tax planning for individuals - excellent ones do exist!
You can't. You couldn't convert even a small slice of this amount without collapsing the market. It's simply too illiquid.
> and would the governments tax you?
You betcha.
> Coins in circulation
> 10994200
> that's 224,516,226.80 kr
That's not right, $2,049,318,880.00 ~ 13,192,490,290.00 SEK
I mean lot of investing/speculation is obviously going on, but is there growth in bitcoin based commerce? That's ultimately the problem I hope bitcoin will solve.
http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulat...
The recent rate of BDD gives some fuzzy picture of current activity though:
http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespa...
You can see that hoarding increased slightly during March (a day destroying more than about 11 million bitcoin days should roughly reflect the market loosening up, destroying less should reflect the market tightening). Early April is also among the fastest periods (over the entire history of bitcoin) of BD destruction.
Many sites have started accepting BTC now. ( http://bitpay.com makes it possible )
Some sites which are quite popular and known
http://www.bitcoinin.com/
http://www.bitcoinblaster.com/
http://www.coinabul.com/
https://www.bitcoinstore.com/
( Not sure if updated , but here is a small list https://www.spendbitcoins.com/places/ )
Yes, sellers would earn more money but they too are taking that risk if you are one of those who think its a bubble and BTC would collapse badly.
Checkout how bitpay.com works. Its actually nice.
Spoiler: you can buy aquarium shrimp in Portland right now for .0164 BTC.
In 2012 they noted that:
“If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only receive and never send any BTC’s [bitcoins], we see that they contain 7,019,100 BTC’s, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC’s. Due to the way bitcoins can be repeatedly moved to fresh addresses, some of which can be very recent, we can not claim that all these bitcoins are out of circulation. However,76.5% of these 78% (i.e., 59.7% of all the coins in the system) are old coins", de ned as bitcoins received at some address more than three months before the cut off date (May 13th 2012), which were not followed by any outgoing transac- tions from that address after they were received. One can also argue that very old dormant bitcoins were simply abandoned or lost by users who experimented with the system in its early days, when it was very dicult to buy anything or to exchange bitcoins into dollars. To be even more cautious with our estimation of dormant bitcoins, we decided to ignore all the transactions which took place prior to July 18th 2010, when Mt.Gox started its exchange and price quoting services. The sum of the balances of all the addresses which have not been active since that date is 1,657,480 bitcoins. Clearly, by considering all these bitcoins as "lost" rather than "hoarded" we are underestimating the number of bitcoins which are kept dormant in "saving accounts". By ignoring these very old bitcoins and repeating the same calculation, we found that 73% of all the remaining BTC's were accumulated at addresses which only receive and never send bitcoins, and that 70% of these 73% (i.e., 51%) are dormant bitcoins in the sense that they were received more than three months before our cuto date but after it became easy to exchange them. If instead of summing the transaction values we sum the nal balances of all the addresses that were active after July 18th 2010 but became inactive in the last three months, we get that 55% of all coins in the system are dormant in this sense. This is strong evidence that the majority of bitcoins are not circulating in the system, and since it is based on the address rather than the entity graph, this conclusion is not a ected by possible inaccuracies in the way we associate addresses with users.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shamir
I do wonder what "Bitcoin Banks" like Flexcoin do to these statistics. I "feel" like no one really uses Flexcoin, but that would definitely skew the statistics by a lot.
Its a bit unfortunate that there is no real statistic that can stand on itself... But Ron and Shamir's work there is useful.
Chrome 26.0.1410.43, Linux
For price/trade data most (all?) exchange have APIs (e.x. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API)
For the other data (non-market transactions etc.) you can run the Bitcoin-qt client on virtually any hardware and then connect to its built in JSON API.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP
I suppose if the JSON endpoints support CORS that'd be as good...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing
However, my (unauthenticated) test attempts against blockchain.info and bitcoincharts.com, with the "Origin:" header, didn't give the right "Access-Control-Allow-Origin:" header in response.
https://mtgox.com/api
blank page or other such confusing non-function : bad
"your browser sucks" - page still doesn't work : poor
"please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page still doesn't work : fair
"please enable scripts or get a newer browser" - page works for non-js users but is somewhat crippled : good
page works perfectly without js : excellent (you could use headers to have it auto reload every few seconds?)
Considering this, it seems OP would have needed to rewrite the whole service (he would have needed to write application layer + the alternate html) just to serve those without javascript, which would not be in realtime (and essentially a duplicate service of all the other bitcoin exchange boards).
Whats the tradeoff in terms of development time vs. supporting a small set of users?
Perhaps switching to bid/ask would be a good idea to clear up the confusion, but it's potentially more confusing to people unfamiliar with financial markets.
I have spent some time trying to understand the various hash rate estimates people come up with. Basically, I've determined that they're all 100% bogus. People like to work from the difficulty using bad/incorrect statistics since that's the most obvious way to get to something in the units of hashes/s, but I can never understand exactly what the process is. I'm genuinely curious to know what people do in practice, since I'm genuinely curious to know the "real" answer.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
There is a linear relationship between the hash rate and the difficulty (there is further discussion at that link).
It's in your last sentence that you go wrong. There's a relationship between the number of expected hashes per new block and the difficulty. That tells you something about the hash rate, but not the rate itself. Actually, it tells you something about the number of unique hashes being tried per new block (in expectation). And for some applications, that may, in fact, be what you care about.
Specifically, the appearance of new blocks is, if you like, a random variable with an exponential distribution. You can, in principle, estimate the rate parameter for this distribution using the difficulty and the timestamps in the Bitcoin log, but it's not straightforward. The last time I got into it, I was halfway through building a Bayesian estimator for the rate parameter using the log before I had to give up and move on to real work. I'll do it soon.
In what applications would the likely immediate hash rate be more useful than the historical average hash rate? I guess the obvious one is turning some bit of mining hardware on and off.
The current target hash is "0x000000000000022FBE0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
This means that to solve a block, you must find a SHA-256 hash of that block's transactions + nonce that hash to a value equal or below that target. Since the output of a SHA-256 hash is essentially random, the probability of finding a nonce that evaluates to hash at or below that target is roughly [target]/[possible sha256 outputs] or 3.51e60/2^256, or 3.034e-17. On average, that means it takes 1/3e-17 or 3.3e16 hashes per block. To calculate average hashes per second of the network, we look at number of blocks solved in the last x unit of time (if you want a 24 hour average, take the number of blocks in the past 24 hours). As of the time of this post, 170 blocks have been solved in those 24 hours. This implies an expected 24*3.3e16 or 8e17 hashes have been computed. Divide by 86400 (seconds in a day) and you get 9.26e12, or 9.26 TH/s. The site reports 6.5 TH/s, presumably because it uses a longer window than 24 hours (probably 7 days).
Just because it's a statistical average instead of the exact rate doesn't mean it's 100% bogus. If you want, you can use fairly standard statistical models to find an acceptable error margin.
You're right that you can compute the N-second average rate easily. But nobody reports the "network hash rate" as such. And since the denominator matters a lot in determining what the number means, pretty much all the numbers you find out in the world are (1) misreported and (2) bogus.
When I search for "bitcoin network hashrate" on google, the first link is http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, which does in fact report the N-second average rate. It reports the 7-days, 14-day, and 30-day average rate.
The chance of two hashes being equal is small but the number of two hash pairs grows exponential to the number of hashes.
For a 256-bit hash, you expec a collision in a group of 2^128 hashes. That is still huge. Absent a weakness in the hash being found, it's unlikely anyone will ever generate two colliding hashes.
There are more bitcoin transactions... but not enough to qualify the 20x increase in value the last three months.
Between February 2012 and today, the number of Bitcoin transactions/day has not grown at all, while Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed by 1000%.
Note they also use the Ƀ (B with stroke) to represent Bitcoin. Kudos to ECOGEX for their discussion a few weeks ago that set this in motion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451084).
Bitcoin surprisingly doesn't have a standard in its logo and symbol usage. Everybody said BTC for bitcoin though.
No, I noted they used Ƀ and gave the previous article props for bringing that symbol more recognition. Did I say they invented it? No.
All of you need to stop trolling, comments like the ones in response to my OP are what ruins HackerNews.
Source: I've been studying and speaking on Bitcoin since 2010. (http://vimeo.com/27653912)
Congrats on using yourself as your own source. Don't beg the question and stop trolling.