Bitcoin distribution around the world
The crypto news site Cointelegraph recently published on X (formerly Twitter) an interesting map of the penetration of Bitcoin, meaning the share of people who own the leading cryptocurrency, across the five continents of our planet.
Unsurprisingly, North America leads with almost 11% of owners, followed by South America with over 6%, and, a long way behind, by Asia with 3.6%. And Europe? Well, judge for yourselves.. with 3.4% we’re ahead of Oceania (whose total population, however, is about the size of a couple of Shanghai suburbs) and Africa, bringing up the rear with 1.6%. Antarctica, unfortunately, isn’t included. Too bad, maybe we would have moved up a place.
The figure is consistent with the one published a few days ago for Italy by the Organismo Agenti e Mediatori (OAM, the Italian body that keeps the register of crypto service providers): 1.6 million, or 2.7% of Italians, newborns and centenarians included, and also with what we indicated a few weeks ago on this blog (a range of 1.5M-3.5M).
Europe always shines for its propensity to innovate, of course.. But, as usual, we’ve come up with a nice piece of regulation, MiCAR, which governs the issuance, public offering and provision of services relating to crypto-assets. In particular, it sets strict limits above all on stablecoins, which these days have come under fire from our Finance Minister.
The case of South America is interesting: there, Bitcoin is probably seen as a way to protect savings and a bulwark against the continent’s endemic monetary problems, from sky-high inflation to the overnight replacement of legal tender. As always, the lesson is that with crypto you need to think out of the box, outside our comfortable homes, warmer in winter than in summer and cooler in summer than in winter. There’s a world out there, with problems, ambitions and political conditions very different from ours.
And then North America. Here it’s interesting to reason, as people used to say, to the limit. If the whole Bitcoin & Co. affair turns out to be a soap bubble, it will probably only have caused a shift of wealth within the youngest and most dynamic part of the population: a few people richer, many more forced to give up dreams of easy money. At the other extreme, and more interestingly, Bitcoin might explode, keeping the aura of digital gold it has built up, perhaps combined with overcoming the well-known performance problems that prevent it from also becoming an everyday transactional currency (the kind I pay with at the café and the supermarket). In that case, there would be a transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to the United States (and Canada, if still independent..), which would once again find themselves in a position of monetary dominance. What’s more, at least initially, it would renew the centrality of the dollar, considering that Bitcoin is mostly traded in US dollars.