This one takes everything that changed hands today and reports how old it was on average, counted in years instead of days. Which way it drifts settles a question the rest of the dashboard keeps orbiting: is the supply doing the trading seasoned or fresh?

Years are the right unit because the movements worth noticing are measured in years. A multi-cycle holder waking up is immediately visible on that scale and lost on one where an ordinary reading runs to hundreds of days.

What it actually measures

Every coin that moves carries the time since it last changed hands. This view takes those ages across a day of spending and reports the mean, leaning towards the coins that moved in size. Because the result is read in years, a shift of a few months registers as a visible step rather than disappearing into the noise of a longer unit.

A long upward drift has been the mark of distribution, with owners who waited years deciding to act. The same drift shows up at the point of surrender, when people who sat through an entire collapse finally quit, so which of the two is on screen cannot be settled from direction alone.

Price does most of that work. Ageing into strength and ageing into weakness are the two configurations worth separating, and this line on its own cannot separate them.

A rising line is a change in mix, not proof of selling

The age rises whenever the composition of what moved skews older. One large transfer between custodians does that on its own, without a single coin changing beneficial owner and without anything being sold.

What is worth acting on is a persistent drift, never a single figure. Set it beside Revived Supply, which reports how much coin each cohort actually released. A climb backed up over there is a wholly different animal from one that is not.

Spent Age Spectrum: an average can look ordinary while the tail is not

For each day, the coin that moved is sorted by how long it had been sitting still, and every band is shown together as a map. Colour carries the share, so a day dominated by young coin and a day with a meaningful old-coin contribution look completely different.

A mean can sit exactly where it usually sits while the distribution behind it carries a fat tail of ancient supply. The old coin is small enough not to shift the average and significant enough to matter, and any view that reports one number will miss it.

This is the view that catches that case. Read the top of the map rather than the middle, because the middle is where ordinary turnover lives and the top is where the rare events are.

Who is Spending: the most common way to misread this

Recent coins account for nearly all of an ordinary session, and that is the baseline. What makes any real showing from the older bands stand out is precisely how rarely it happens.

A firm reorganising its storage shifts thoroughly ancient coin while ownership stays exactly where it was. Here that is impossible to tell apart from patient holders queuing for the door, and it throws up an identical, identically alarming, jump.

Corroboration is the whole discipline here. A spike that other views support is an event; one that nothing else confirms was most likely somebody’s plumbing, and treating the two the same has generated a lot of confident nonsense.

What it does not tell you

It says nothing about how much moved. A day of enormous volume in young coins and a quiet day dominated by one old wallet can produce readings that point opposite ways while the market did the opposite of what the line suggests.

It is also a mean, so one extreme observation can carry it in a way a median cannot. The dashboard carries whale-resistant companions for exactly this reason, and a move here that they do not confirm was probably one event.

How to read it

Ageing spend. What is changing hands keeps getting older, so the seasoned supply has joined in.

Steady spend. The vintage of what changes hands is going nowhere in particular.

Youngening spend. Fresh money is doing the trading and the seasoned coins are staying put.

The average age of coins spent is one of the views on the Dormancy dashboard, along with Average Age of All Coins, Revived Supply and Dormancy.

Common questions

Why are the units years rather than days?

Because anything worth noticing here happens on the scale of years. An owner from several cycles back stirring leaps off the page in those units and vanishes in shorter ones.

Does a rising age mean old coins are selling?

Not by itself. The figure lifts whenever the blend tilts seasoned, and a single large shuffle between custodians is quite enough to tilt it.

What separates this from Average Age of All Coins?

That one takes in the entire supply, stirring or not. This one takes in only what changed hands today, and ordinarily sits a long way beneath it.

Is a wide gap between the two a problem?

Quite the reverse. Fresh coins trading while a seasoned hoard sits untouched is what a normal day looks like, which makes the gap the reassuring case.

What confirms a move here?

Revived Supply, which reports how much coin each cohort actually released. A climb here with nothing backing it over there was most likely one transfer.

What does a full spread give that an average cannot?

Form. An average can read as entirely unremarkable while the spread underneath it carries a heavy tail of ancient coin, and that tail is exactly what laying the cohorts out reveals.

Does it show how much moved?

No. It shows composition only, so a striking day can still be small in absolute terms.

Why should the vintage of a moving coin matter?

Because coin left alone for years sits with somebody who has repeatedly refused opportunities to part with it. Their eventual decision carries weight a coin on its third trip this month can never have.

Does an old coin mean an old owner?

Not necessarily. Age describes the coin, so a long-standing holder who reshuffled a wallet last week appears among the youngest, and a newcomer buying an old coin inherits its whole history.