Coin Dance is a community-driven platform offering statistics and services for Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Along with other prominent sites like Bitfire, a new wave of sites are challenging models not even strictly in the field of cryptocurrency. It appears that decentralization is sparing no area of business, not even statistics.

What is Coin Dance?

The platform tracks all sorts of metrics surrounding Bitcoin, from block mining to volume statistics, and even worldwide sentiment. The coin dance meaning actually comes from the word coincidence. As with many other interesting internet memes, the words became popular after smartphones started auto-correcting user typos.

The Vision

Coin Dance wants to open up the statistics space by freely providing access to information, particularly with regards to Bitcoin. The team believes how Bitcoin evolves as a protocol should be up to the community. In addition, anyone should have the right to contribute to information sharing regardless of their technical background, social standing, or the number of bitcoin they have in storage.

The Strategy

What makes Bitcoin special is it’s fairly transparent nature. By maximizing data sharing, Coin Dance gets the community to engage with each other and make key decisions based on this shared data model. According to Coin Dance,

Our mission is simple: to empower the community and grow the ecosystem.

Services

Volume Charts

Coin Dance provides volume charting primarily for peer-to-peer marketplaces. Community members update charts on a weekly basis so that useful trading insights move in tandem with the markets. The peer-to-peer marketplaces featured are Bisq, LocalBitcoins, and Paxful.

Developers recently updated the platform to add trading data in several different currencies worldwide. This update will save a lot of time for many users outside the US who often have to convert to their local currency first.

Vanity Service

The platform also offers a vanity naming service for those who want to add a bit of swag to their Bitcoin address. You can personalize your Bitcoin wallet instead of using the hex or QR code that comes with a standard address. Setting up your own personalized wallet is not that difficult, and there’s a useful Steemit tutorial link to get you started.

Politics & Opinion

The politics section keeps track of the decision-making process on the world’s largest cryptocurrency by governments around the globe. However, at the time of writing, no Bitcoin proposals were being voted on, but expect this to change as crypto continues to evolve. This political map provides a useful overview of how Bitcoin is doing on the global stage and allows users to keep track of the changes.

This section not only lists where Bitcoin is restricted but also how it’s classified. For example, in India, Bitcoin is currently considered property, but in China, it’s recognized as a commodity.

Statistics

The statistics area is no doubt the place where traders, coders, and Bitcoin auditors come to verify all things factual regarding Bitcoin. You can find your typical price statistics on Coin Dance.

However, it’s more interesting to browse through the blockchain data available, which you won’t typically find on other trading websites. Dig down into details about block sizes, mined blocks, Google Bitcoin searches, community demographics, and more. You can also find a cryptocurrency ticker based on market capitalization, similar to CoinMarketCap, towards the end of the page.

Bitcoin Node Summary

For the more technical amongst us, there’s the Bitcoin node summary. This comes chock full of information on the estimated 10,000 nodes worldwide that run the Bitcoin network. This section even keeps track of nodes upgrading to deal with the recent inflation vulnerability that was spotted on the network.

Have a look through our Bitcoin Full Nodes article to get a better understanding of nodes and how to set one up for yourself.

Blocks

The blocks section helps viewers verify the latest blocks mined and get a better overall picture of the mining health of the network. Mining centralization has become more of an issue in recent times. Because of this, various members of the Bitcoin community use the pool statistics to keep track of Bitmain‘s dominance in this area.

Resources

The resources section has many goodies for the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin beginner. There are a couple other of great resources out there, but this would be a good starting point if you’re a bit unsure about where to begin.

Poker

And finally, last but not least, what would crypto be without adding some pure fun into the mix? Blockchain poker is already a thing, and Coin Dance allows you to jump into a game without having to sign up. Add a few free Satoshis to your bankroll, and presto, you’re up and running.

Challenging Big Data Capture?

Big data is a term used to describe the increase in information arriving with greater variety and at greater speeds. This phenomenon continues to grow as more people come online and create their own content.

Companies like Google and Facebook can provide extensive free services because of the value they capture from the data we provide them.

That information is not available to the public, though, which presents two problems. Firstly, it creates privacy issues. Secondly, it cannot be used by the community that provides it if they want to build their own value-added services on top.

It appears that Coin Dance is directly challenging this model. By democratizing this process and opening up statistical sharing to the public, they are allowing members to have a direct stake in the development of the network. This is, of course, early days and we’ll have to wait a few more years to find out if this approach can thrive amongst established businesses who firewall collected data.

Conclusion

Community-based models have huge upside potential. The sharing economy is more of a buzzword in businesses like Airbnb and Uber since these companies do not share captured value with their users. It’s all about the move to an open world, where transparency and co-operation will probably be the tools of the future.

Coin Dance is providing a valuable statistical service to members of the Bitcoin community. It will be interesting to see how projects will be built based off of their services.