The metrics we’ve introduced represent the most commonly used examples. They are freely available for anyone with the know-how to harvest from Bitcoin’s blockchain, or any other open blockchain for that matter, but are just the tip of iceberg in terms of potential measures of Bitcoin’s health.
For those that really want to explore data further you can run a node and tap into the source of data, slicing and dicing it as you see fit, also known as on-chain analysis. You can also make the most of the wealth of information circulating on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and other internet sources, and even analyse sentiment with dedicated tools.
The important take-away is that the true test of cryptocurrency is not the how cool or clever a website, app or ICO looks, the level of fanaticism among its supports, or celebrity status of infuncers promoting it, but objective measures of their ability to solve a real world problem – in Bitcoin’s case a scarce and secure digital money – and users who are actually putting it to the test.
The desire to measure Bitcoin usage and understand what user behaviour might tell us about its future price, have spawned an entire field of analysis of the supply, distribution and incentives within crypto, called tokenomics, which we’ll look at in the next lesson, expanding on what we’ve learned here about measuring Bitcoin usage.
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