You don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.

vasilipupkin · on May 16, 2018

by that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database

mikeash · on May 16, 2018

It would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

vasilipupkin · on May 16, 2018

what do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.

mikeash · on May 17, 2018

From some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin.

I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.

vasilipupkin · on May 17, 2018

https://blockchain.info/stats

total USD transaction volume according to above about $1.3bln

trading volume, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ - 6.7 bln

most bitcoin volume is virtual, not generating actual transactions, by 5 to 1 margin. Not sure where you got your numbers

mikeash · on May 17, 2018

What is the difference between “Total Output Volume” and “Estimated Transaction Volume”? The former is pretty close to what I found.