Observation Deck / Blockwatch

About the Metrics

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Plain-English explanations for everything on the dashboard — what each number measures, where it comes from, and why it matters.

Market

Price (USD) CoinGecko

The latest USD spot price of one bitcoin, averaged across the major exchanges CoinGecko tracks. The 24-hour change underneath shows how price has moved since this time yesterday.

Why it matters: the headline number — though arguably the least informative one on this page once you understand the others.
Market Cap CoinGecko

Price × circulating supply. With ~19.8M BTC in circulation, market cap is roughly 19.8M × current price. The "Rank" tag shows where Bitcoin sits among all crypto assets by market cap (it has held #1 since inception).

Why it matters: it's the standard comparison metric across crypto and is often used to compare BTC's "size" to publicly traded companies, gold, or M2 money supply.
24h Volume CoinGecko

Total USD-equivalent volume traded across exchanges over the last 24 hours.

Why it matters: volume tells you how active the market is. Rising price on rising volume is a stronger signal than the same price move on thin volume.
All-Time High CoinGecko

The highest price BTC has ever traded at. The percentage shows how far the current price is from that peak (negative means below).

Why it matters: a quick gauge of whether the market is in price discovery (near or above ATH) or in a drawdown.

Bitcoin vs. Gold

Gold Price CoinGecko · pax-gold

Spot price of gold per troy ounce, sourced via PAX Gold (PAXG) — a 1:1 physically-backed gold token that tracks spot gold within a few basis points. Standard keyless way to pull a gold price client-side without an API key. The 24-hour change shows how the metal has moved since this time yesterday.

Why it matters: the data anchor of the section. Every other number on these four cards is derived from this one.
Gold Market Cap Computed

Gold price × ~6.835 billion troy ounces of above-ground gold. The supply estimate comes from the World Gold Council (~212,582 tonnes × 32,150.7 troy oz/tonne) and updates slowly enough that a fixed constant works fine. As of 2026, this number is in the $25–30 trillion range.

Why it matters: gold is the historical "monetary asset" benchmark. Its market cap is the standard measuring stick for any new contender — including Bitcoin.
BTC at Gold Parity Computed

The BTC price required for Bitcoin's market cap to match gold's, holding both supplies constant. Calculated as `gold market cap ÷ circulating BTC supply`.

Why it matters: the Bitcoin-as-digital-gold thesis, expressed as a single price target. Whether you find the thesis compelling or not, this is the number that thesis implies.
Multiple of Current Price Computed

How many times higher BTC's current price would need to be to match gold's market cap. Computed as `parity price ÷ current BTC price`. Mirrors the same metric in the debt section, just anchored to gold's market cap instead of US debt.

Why it matters: single-number summary of the BTC-vs-gold gap. The number shrinks every BTC bull run and grows every drawdown — track it month-over-month to see whether digital gold is catching up to physical gold.

Bitcoin vs. US Debt

$1T Pace TreasuryDirect

How many days, on average, the US currently takes to add another trillion dollars of debt. Computed by querying TreasuryDirect for today's debt total and the debt total ~365 days ago, then extrapolating the daily growth rate. The subtitle shows the implied annual pace in trillions per year. As of 2026, the US adds roughly $1T every 110–130 days.

Why it matters: debt as velocity, not just a static number. The total figure is shocking; the pace is what tells you whether things are accelerating or stabilizing. Watching this card move month-over-month is more informative than watching the headline total tick up.
US National Debt TreasuryDirect

The total US public debt outstanding, sourced from the Treasury Department's official "Debt to the Penny" feed. Updated each business day. As of 2026, this number sits near $40 trillion and grows by roughly $1 trillion every ~120 days.

Why it matters: the denominator of every macro question about fiat purchasing power. Whether you think Bitcoin is "digital gold" or just a speculative asset, the trajectory of this number is the backdrop against which the case is argued.
Required BTC Price Computed

Total US debt ÷ circulating Bitcoin supply. Answers a thought experiment: if every existing bitcoin had to absorb the entire US debt, how much would each one be worth? Pure arithmetic — no claim that this will happen, just a way to express debt scale in BTC terms.

Why it matters: reframes "is BTC overvalued?" against a tangible macro denominator. Even with debt at $36T and ~19.8M BTC outstanding, the per-coin number lands well above current price — context for the long-running "monetary asset" thesis.
Multiple of Current Price Computed

How many times higher BTC's current price would need to be for one bitcoin to equal `debt ÷ supply`. Live ratio — falls when BTC rallies, rises when debt grows or BTC drops.

Why it matters: a single number that tracks how the "BTC vs. debt" gap is closing or widening over time. Compare this to the same metric six months ago to see whether BTC is gaining or losing ground against the macro backdrop.
Debt per US Household / per US Person Computed

Total debt divided by roughly 133 million US households, and again by roughly 342 million people. Both population figures are fixed constants that drift about 1% a year — far slower than the debt they divide into — so they're treated the same way as the above-ground gold estimate.

Why it matters: trillions are a number most people cannot picture. A per-household figure is one you can compare against a mortgage. It's the same quantity as the headline total, rescaled to something a human can actually hold in mind.

Bitcoin vs. Money & Markets

These two comparisons complete a trio this page has named since the first version. The Market Cap entry above notes that market cap is “often used to compare BTC's size to publicly traded companies, gold, or M2 money supply” — gold has its own section, and these are the other two.
US Broad Money (M2) World Bank

The total stock of US dollars in circulation on the broad measure: physical cash, checking and savings deposits, and money-market balances. Roughly $30 trillion.

The figure is annual, not daily. FRED publishes M2 monthly and far more promptly, but it sends no CORS header, so a browser can't read it without a server in between — which this dashboard deliberately doesn't have. The World Bank's series is the best keyless alternative.

Why it matters: the most direct answer to “how big is Bitcoin compared to money?” Gold is the monetary-asset benchmark and the debt is the fiscal backdrop, but M2 is the actual money supply Bitcoin proposes an alternative to.
US Equities Market Cap World Bank

The combined market capitalisation of all listed domestic US companies — roughly $69 trillion. Also annual, from the same source.

Why it matters: the “publicly traded companies” leg of the comparison. It's the largest denominator on this dashboard, and the one that puts Bitcoin's size in the most sobering perspective: it is a small fraction of the equity market, let alone a replacement for it.
Parity prices, multiples, and % shares Computed

Each denominator gets the same three treatments already used for gold and the debt: the BTC price at which Bitcoin's market cap would equal it, how many times the current price that represents, and Bitcoin's current size as a percentage of it.

Why it matters: the percentages are the quickest read of the three. A single-digit share of M2 and a low-single-digit share of equities says more about where Bitcoin actually sits than any price target does.
One caveat: because the denominators update annually, short-term movement in these multiples is almost entirely Bitcoin's own price moving, not the money supply or the stock market changing. Read the 30-day chips on these two cards accordingly — they are closer to a price chart than a genuine ratio change.

Security & Issuance

Miner Revenue (24h) mempool.space

Everything paid to miners across the last 144 blocks (about a day) — the block subsidy plus all transaction fees — shown in BTC and converted at the current price.

Why it matters: this is what actually pays for Bitcoin's security. Hash rate is what the money buys; this is the money. An attacker has to out-spend it.
Fee Share of Revenue mempool.space

What percentage of miner revenue came from transaction fees rather than the block subsidy. Today it typically runs well under 5%; the remainder is newly issued bitcoin.

Why it matters: arguably the most important long-term number on this dashboard. The subsidy halves every four years and eventually reaches zero, at which point fees are the entire security budget. For Bitcoin to remain as secure as it is today, this number has to rise substantially over the coming decades. Watching whether it trends up is watching the central open question of Bitcoin's economic design.
Next Halving / Daily Issuance Computed

Every 210,000 blocks — roughly four years — the reward for mining a block is cut in half. These cards show how many blocks remain, the approximate date at ten minutes per block, and the current issuance rate. No API is involved: this is arithmetic on the block height, fixed by consensus rules since 2009.

Why it matters: the halving is the mechanism behind the scarcity argument. It's the reason the supply curve is knowable decades ahead, and it's the event that forces the fee-share question above. The ETA drifts slightly because blocks don't arrive at exactly ten minutes.
Mining Concentration mempool.space

The share of the last week's blocks found by the three largest mining pools, and which pool leads. Coloured green below 40%, amber to 50%, red above.

Why it matters: Bitcoin's security rests on no single party controlling block production. When a handful of pools coordinate a majority of hash rate, censorship and reorganisation stop being purely theoretical. Note the nuance: pools are coalitions of individual miners who can redirect their hardware elsewhere, so pool share overstates true control — but it's the number worth watching.
Satoshis per Person Computed

Circulating supply, expressed in satoshis, divided by roughly 8.25 billion people. One bitcoin is 100 million satoshis, so the total that will ever exist is about 2.1 quadrillion.

Why it matters: the flip side of the scarcity argument. There is not, and never will be, a whole bitcoin for everyone alive — the number works out to a few hundred thousand satoshis each. It reframes “the price is too high” as a question about which unit you're thinking in.

On-Chain Activity

Active Addresses / Transactions CoinMetrics

The count of distinct addresses that sent or received value, and the number of confirmed transactions, for the most recent complete UTC day. The current day is deliberately skipped, because a day still in progress always reports artificially low counts.

Why it matters: most of this dashboard measures price or plumbing. These two are ledger-derived economic activity — the closest available answer to “is anyone actually using this?” Treat address counts as a rough proxy rather than a user count: one person may control thousands of addresses, and an exchange may serve millions of customers from very few.
Lightning Capacity / Channels mempool.space

Bitcoin committed to public Lightning Network channels, the number of those channels, and how many nodes they connect. Lightning is a second layer that settles payments off-chain and only touches the main chain when a channel opens or closes.

Why it matters: if the argument is that Bitcoin can function as money, the base chain's five-or-so transactions per second is an obvious objection, and Lightning is the standard answer to it. Capacity as a share of total supply is small, which is itself informative. Note this counts only public channels — private ones are invisible by design, so the true figure is higher by an unknown margin.

Network

Block Height mempool.space

The number of blocks that have been mined since the Bitcoin network started in January 2009. Each block is a batch of transactions added to the chain roughly every 10 minutes. Height 1,000,000 is expected around the year 2034.

Why it matters: it's the canonical clock of the Bitcoin network. The "X min ago" timestamp underneath shows how long since the last block — >30 minutes between blocks is unusual and often correlates with hash rate drops.
Mempool Size mempool.space

The mempool ("memory pool") is the global queue of transactions that have been broadcast but haven't been included in a block yet. The two numbers measure it differently:

Why it matters: a large, growing mempool means demand for blockspace is exceeding supply — fees rise. An empty mempool means cheap transactions but also signals reduced network activity.
Recommended Fee mempool.space

Fees are paid in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB). A typical transaction is ~140 vB, so a 10 sat/vB fee means roughly 1,400 sats (~$1 at $70k BTC) for that transaction.

Why it matters: if you're sending BTC, this tells you what to pay. If you're observing the network, fee levels are a real-time demand gauge — fees spike during ordinal/runes minting events, ETF inflows, or panic moves.
Difficulty Adjustment mempool.space

Bitcoin auto-tunes how hard it is to mine a block every 2,016 blocks (~2 weeks). If blocks have been coming faster than 10 minutes, difficulty goes up. Slower, it goes down. This metric shows the projected change at the next adjustment and the ETA.

Why it matters: a positive adjustment means more miners are coming online — bullish for security and often correlated with miner confidence in price. Big negative adjustments (rare) usually signal miner capitulation.
Hash Rate mempool.space

The total computational power miners are pointing at the Bitcoin network, measured in EH/s — exahashes per second. One exahash = 1018 hashes. This is mempool.space's current estimate rather than a fixed-window average, so expect it to wobble slightly between refreshes. As of 2026, the network runs ~900+ EH/s.

Why it matters: hash rate is Bitcoin's security budget. More hash rate = more expensive to attack the network. Sustained hash rate growth signals miner profitability and long-term confidence; a sharp drop usually means miners shut off (price crash, energy event, regulation).
Circulating Supply CoinGecko

How many BTC have been mined to date, out of the hard-capped 21 million. Approximately 450 new BTC enter circulation per day (post the April 2024 halving), and that rate halves every ~4 years.

Why it matters: Bitcoin's fixed supply schedule is the foundation of its scarcity argument. The "% of 21M cap" number ticks up slowly — the last fraction of a bitcoin won't be mined until ~2140.

Sentiment

Fear & Greed Index alternative.me

A composite 0–100 score blending volatility, market momentum, social sentiment, dominance, and Google Trends.

Why it matters: a contrarian indicator. Warren Buffett's "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful" rule, expressed as a single number. The chart beside the gauge shows the last 90 days by default (switch to 180 for a longer view) with a 30-day moving average, so the trend is visible beneath the day-to-day noise. The tinted bands behind the line mark the five sentiment zones, and the row underneath gives the range average, low and high, and where today sits against the moving average.

History

Price history CoinGecko

Daily BTC closing price. Shows 90 days by default, with 30-day, 180-day and one-year ranges. The full year is fetched once an hour and sliced locally, so switching range costs no extra requests. The 30-day sparkline in the header at the top of the dashboard comes from the same series.

Why it matters: context for the headline price — is the current number a breakout, a pullback, or chop?
Mempool Fee Histogram mempool.space

Distribution of pending transactions across fee buckets, measured in vMB (virtual megabytes). Tall bars in the high-fee buckets mean lots of users are willing to pay up — congestion.

Why it matters: shows the shape of demand for blockspace, not just the total. If most volume is in the 1–5 sat/vB bucket, eco transactions will confirm soon. If it's clustered at 50+ sat/vB, expect sustained high fees.

History & the Journal

The “vs. 30 days” chips Stored in your browser

Several cards carry a small chip showing how the number has moved over the last month — ▲ 4.2% · 30d and so on. Hover it to see the exact date and value being compared against.

On the two “multiple of current price” cards the colours are deliberately inverted: a falling multiple shows green, because it means Bitcoin is closing the gap on gold or on the debt rather than widening it.

Why it matters: the explanations on this page repeatedly suggest tracking these figures month over month. Until recently the dashboard gave you no way to do that — every macro card was a single instantaneous number with no past. These chips are what make that advice actionable.
Where is my history stored? Does it get uploaded anywhere?

It stays in your browser's local storage, on your own device, and is never transmitted anywhere. There is no account, no server, and no sync. That's a deliberate choice: a server-side history would have meant collecting data about you, which would undercut the whole point of a keyless, backend-free dashboard.

The practical trade-off is that your history is per-browser and per-device. Clearing site data erases it. Use Export history to save a JSON copy, and Import to restore it or carry it to another machine.

How can it show a 30-day change the first time I visit?

On first load the dashboard reconstructs about a year of history from public archives: daily Bitcoin prices and market caps from CoinGecko (supply is derived as market cap ÷ price), gold prices via PAX Gold, and the daily debt figures from TreasuryDirect. From those it recomputes what the gold and debt multiples would have been on each past day.

Metrics with no public daily archive — fee share, Lightning capacity, active addresses — can't be reconstructed, so those accumulate from the day you first load the page. If the backfill fails (usually a rate limit), it retries on your next visit, or you can trigger it with Rebuild from APIs.

FAQ

How often does this dashboard refresh?

Every 60 seconds automatically, plus you can hit the Refresh button anytime. The "Updated" timestamp shows the last successful pull. The price and Fear & Greed charts are exceptions: they're daily data, so they're cached for an hour rather than refetched every minute. Auto-refresh also pauses while the tab is hidden and catches up the moment you come back, and the ring on the Refresh button shows how long until the next pull. Pressing R refreshes too.

What does “N of 9 sources degraded” mean?

The dashboard pulls from nine independent feeds. When one is briefly unavailable, the rest carry on, so the status chip turns amber and says how many are affected rather than declaring the whole page down. Red is reserved for the case where there's genuinely nothing to show.

In practice this is almost always CoinGecko. Its free tier allows only a couple of requests before rate-limiting everyone sharing your network address, and the throttled response comes back without the headers a browser needs — so the browser reports a network failure rather than a clean “too many requests”. It recovers on its own within a minute or two.

Why does the price sometimes say “via mempool.space”?

That's the fallback. If CoinGecko is unavailable, the price is fetched from mempool.space instead so the headline number is never blank, and the card says where it came from.

CoinGecko can't be dropped entirely — it's the source for market cap and the all-time high, which mempool.space doesn't publish. Circulating supply, though, doesn't need any of them: it's the sum of every block subsidy paid so far, so it can be computed exactly from the block height. During a fallback the dashboard does just that, which lands within about 0.01% of the reported figure. The gap is coinbase rewards that miners under-claimed or never claimed at all.

The upshot is that a CoinGecko outage costs you the gold section, the price chart, market cap and the ATH. Everything else — including all the parity and multiple cards — keeps working.

Why are some boxes blank or showing errors?

The dashboard pulls from four independent public APIs. If one rate-limits or has a momentary outage, that section will show a dash or stale value while the others keep working. The status bar at the top tells you how many sources reported successfully.

Are any of these numbers predictive?

Not really. The Fear & Greed index has shown some contrarian signal historically. Hash rate trends are more useful for long-term security/miner-health analysis than short-term price calls. None of this is financial advice.

What's a satoshi (sat)?

The smallest unit of bitcoin — one hundred-millionth of a BTC. 100,000,000 sats = 1 BTC. Fees are quoted in sats because most transactions cost a fraction of a cent's worth of BTC.

What's the difference between vBytes and bytes?

Bitcoin's SegWit upgrade lets transactions discount their witness data. Virtual bytes (vB) is the discounted size used for fee calculation; raw bytes is the literal byte count. Miners pack blocks up to 4 million weight units, which works out to ~1 MB of vsize.

How is hash rate measured?

It isn't measured — it's estimated. There's no way to count how many hashes miners around the world are attempting, so the figure is inferred from how quickly recent blocks were found relative to the current difficulty. Because block intervals are random (anywhere from seconds to over an hour), any estimate carries noise, and the number will wobble between refreshes even when nothing has actually changed. Treat it as a trend indicator, not a precise reading.

Where does this data come from?

All endpoints are keyless and public. Nothing about you or your activity is sent anywhere — the dashboard is pure client-side JavaScript talking to public APIs, and your saved history never leaves your browser.

Educational use only. Nothing on this dashboard is financial advice.