True market mean
what coins that actually trade cost their owners
The best single estimate of what people actually paid for the bitcoin that genuinely circulates, ignoring both coins that came straight from mining and coins that never move. Price above it means active holders are in profit; price below it has marked deep bottoms.
DefinitionInvestor cap / active supply, where investor cap = realized cap - thermocap and active supply = circulating supply x liveliness. From the ARK cointime paper, which also calls it the active-investor price.
LimitIt inherits the unresolved thermocap question: the two source papers disagree on whether thermocap is the block subsidy alone or the subsidy plus fees, and we use the full coinbase output. The gap between the two readings has recently been 1-15% of miner revenue. In euro this is the global market's cost basis expressed in euro, not what European holders paid; before 2013 the euro price is the dollar price converted at the ECB rate. Being corrected: this is built on active or vaulted supply, which the pipeline derived from the coinblocks liveliness while the published liveliness is coin-days. The gap averages 74,759 BTC of active supply, a median of 0.8%. The rebuild onto coin-days is under way and this caveat retires with it.