As reported, Bitcoin is catching on as a store of value in Venezuela where the politics are fraught and the economy is evaporating. In any given week, Venezuela ranks second or third in the world in Bitcoin trading, and other cryptocurrencies like Dash are making inroads there too.

The dimensions of this movement are even more dramatic when we control for population size. Below are the world’s top 10 countries in trading volume per capita at LocalBitcoins.com, the Bitcoin trading exchange, in the week of March 2, 2019:

Venezuela’s Bitcoin activity per capita is the highest in the world by a wide margin — almost two and a half times the volume of the second-ranking country, Russia.

Gross weekly trading volume in Venezuela surpasses that of the United States most weeks now — even though the U.S. has ten times as many people as Venezuela:

Weekly Trading Volume in Bitcoins

Here are the gross volume leaders for the week of March 2:

Bitcoin has been heralded as a potential store of value since its founding, but one would be hard-pressed to find a previous use case like Venezuela’s. Hyperinflation alone would probably not be sufficient to explain this development. The Maduro regime has blocked citizens’ access to U.S. currency — or any other conventional currency — making its situation more desperate. This was eloquently recounted by economist Carlos Hernández in a recent New York Times opinion piece, Bitcoin Has Saved My family:

“I keep all of my money in Bitcoin. Keeping it in bolívars would be financial suicide: The last time I checked, the rate of daily inflation was around 3.5 percent. That’s daily inflation; the annual inflation rate for 2018 was almost 1.7 million percent. I don’t have a bank account abroad, and with Venezuela’s currency controls, there’s no easy way for me to use a conventional foreign currency like American dollars [emphasis added].”

The author describes how he scours the listings on LocalBitcoins.com, looking for offers to buy Bitcoins from people who use the same bank as him. That way the wire transfer can go through immediately. But he can’t change too many Bitcoins at once. Anything more than $50 will alert the government which will freeze his account until he can explain where the funds came from.

Can we generalize from the Venezuelan case?

Other nations, including Iran, Turkey, and Argentina, have experienced high inflation recently. Have they, too, experienced a flight to Bitcoin?

This writer looked at the 43 countries plus Hong Kong and Singapore that are tracked by Coin Dance and plotted their weekly LocalBitcoins.com trading volume against the International Monetary Fund’s country inflation data. (For graphical purposes we computed Venezuela’s inflation at 100% — it is actually more like 10 million percent, according to the IMF.) We found a moderate correlation between inflation and BTC trading volume (0.331) among the 45 countries tracked by Coin Dance for the week of March 2, 2019. This becomes a strong correlation if we adjust BTC activity for population size (correlation = 0.740).

Note: Bubble size is proportionate to a nation’s BTC activity per capita.

The regression line in Figure 3, which runs through Nigeria, trends upward, suggesting some correlation between Bitcoin activity and Inflation (0.331). It was even steeper when we looked at Bitcoin activity per capita (0.740).

When we removed Venezuela, a suspected outlier, from the mix, however, the data tell a different story:

Here the regression line is almost flat and the correlation is (-0.031) — suggesting virtually no association between a country’s Bitcoin trading activity and its annual inflation rate.

Venezuela, an influential outlier, is like a giant planet whose gravitational pull raises the right end of the regression line upward in Figure 3.

We can’t really say, then, that other countries with high inflation rates are more likely to embrace the cryptocurrency — not now, at least.

Still, others continue to draw positive lessons from Venezuela. “An emerging market for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has developed over the last few years in Venezuela, representing a profound case study of Bitcoin’s potential positive impact on the struggling Venezuelan people,” writes Yoav Vilner in Forbes.com. “As long as Venezuelans have an Internet connection, they can send Bitcoin across its network freely outside of the control of the oppressive Maduro regime.”

This is in line with a controversial tweet poll in which 57% of 10,000-plus Twitter respondents professed belief in Bitcoin as a “store of value without utility.” Time will tell.

Andrew W. Singer is an independent data journalist who lives in New York City.