├ field
The field is the market cap, mapped logarithmically onto the range the wire lives in. When the market cap falls the field falls and nothing happens, because a wall that has torn loose does not go back. The wire only answers a field higher than any field it has seen.
Ten thousand is the bottom of the range and a hundred million is the top. Every factor of ten is worth two units of field. The mapping was chosen once, before anything was running, and it is printed in full below so that any reading on this site can be checked against it by hand.
A logarithm was chosen because the alternative is worse. A linear mapping would spend the entire useful range of the wire in the first few thousand dollars and then sit pinned at the top forever. On a logarithmic scale every factor of ten costs the same, which means the wire keeps answering for as long as the market cap keeps multiplying.
The field only ever rises. The site keeps the highest field it has ever seen, and a poll that comes in lower is recorded and then ignored. The wire is never told about it. This is not a rule laid over the physics. It is the physics: along one branch of a hysteresis loop, magnetisation depends on the highest field so far and on nothing else.
The critical field for this model is about 1.435. Below it the wire is almost entirely held down, and the bursts that do happen are small and rare. Above it the wire has nowhere left to hide. On the mapping below, that field corresponds to a market cap in the high six figures, which is a fact about arithmetic and not a prediction about anything.
The two lines on the first figure exist because of the ignoring. The thin one is what the market said at every poll. The thick one is what the wire actually answered. Everything between them is a move that happened and left no trace, which over a long enough run will be most of what happened.
If the price source fails, the row reads no reading, the last good value stays in the status line, and the field does not move. A missing reading is never treated as a zero and never treated as a fall. A gap in the data is a gap, and the wire waits.
The mapping is fixed. It was decided once, it is printed below, and it will not be adjusted, because adjusting it after seeing the data is the one move that would make every number on this site meaningless.
| item | value |
|---|---|
| market cap | no reading |
| field H | no reading |
| highest field seen | -2.000 |
| state | pinned |
| market cap | field H |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | -2.00 |
| 50,000 | -0.60 |
| 250,000 | 0.80 |
| 1,000,000 | 2.00 |
| 5,000,000 | 3.40 |
| 25,000,000 | 4.80 |
| 100,000,000 | 6.00 |