Jonathan, with coinometrics you are visualizing amazing statistics about Bitcoin. What is the most interesting one right now?
Right now we are looking at ways of analysing the health of the network. Bitcoin started out as an experiment and has grown into a laboratory supporting lots of interesting financial innovations. Our selfish mining metric helps detect any foul play among the miners who can withhold a block from the network and try and extend a private chain that outpaces the main chain. This has been shown to raise expected revenue under certain conditions. We are working hard to ensure that people are aware of such threats. Luckily, we have no reason to suspect any wrongdoing at this time.
How is Bitcoin performing against Paypal and Visa Card? How will it be in 5 years?
In terms of network performance, Bitcoin has shown impressive growth however it has a long way to go before it challenges Paypal or Visa. There are many proposals that look at network scalability and I am sure we will see more experimentation over the next year. In 5 years it seems like the main hurdle will be adoption and fending off any rival crypto currencies.
Considering all your statistics: If there will be 1.200 people at our conference in September and most of them are into Bitcoins since 2-3 years. How many Bitcoins will be in the former german parliament?
Wealth concentration in Bitcoin has been a fascinating topic for us at Coinometrics. As you can see here. The number of big holders (not me) that show up will severely skew our numbers. I have never attended a Bitcoin conference with less than 500,000 bitcoins in the room, this should be no different!
About Jonathan Levin, CO-Founder Coinometrics.com
Jonathan Levin is a postgraduate economist at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on Virtual Currencies. He is the convenor of the Oxford Virtual Currencies Working Group, an interdisciplinary working group focussed on the economic and social implications of Virtual Currencies. Recently, he cofounded Coinometrics, a website dedicated to producing new methods of measuring activity on the Bitcoin network.