esoteriic.com

It is interesting to have a look at the total dollar value of the major cryptocurrencies to get an indication of liquidity in a particular currency and hence an indication of how well adopted it is. It is well known that the greatest amount of money tends to be in the fewest hands, this is true of dollars and is also true of bitcoins. Almost as well known is the capital distribution of companies in any given stock market, the trend is similar. The biggest companies tend to have the greatest value and the distribution is exponential. It is perhaps no surprise that looking across all cryptocurrencies we see the same pattern.

When I first looked at this data (yesterday, 29 November 2013, at time of writing) the market cap for all cryptocurrencies was $14,315,112,390 for the top 23 as listed on on coinmarketcap.com. These 23 currencies were the ones above $1million market cap. Bitcoin was the largest with ~90% of the total value while litecoin was ~7%. The remaining (sub) 3% was everything else.

Now at the time of writing the market cap is $15,192,679,671. That's 6% overnight. Interestingly bitcoin's share of market value barely moved, which indicates where the majority of the new money went. The total dollar value of bitcoin rose by roughly the same 6% and now stands at $13,760,198,139. The more interesting fact is that the total number of currencies about $1m market cap is now 27, and their share of the total market increased from 2% to 3%.