A Useful Infographic

When we last wrote more extensively about Bitcoin (see Parabolic Coin - evidently, it has become a lot more "parabolic" since then), we said we would soon return to the subject of Bitcoin and monetary theory in these pages. This long planned article was delayed for a number of reasons, one of which was that we realized that Keith Weiner's series on the topic would give us a good opportunity to address some of the objections to Bitcoin's fitness as a medium of exchange voiced by critics (we have kept the final three parts of Keith's discussion in abeyance as well, we intend to publish these concurrently).

BTC was easily the best investment asset of 2017 (we may have overlooked some other "alt coins", but in terms of market cap only the 6 - 10 largest cryptocurrencies look like serious contenders in this market). We should probably write more often about it, then you would e.g. have learned that we thought BCH (the post-fork younger brother of BTC) was likely to play catch-up at some point. We actually believe this particular valuation gap is likely to narrow further, and the same may well happen with DASH, another cryptocurrency with quite similar features (both BCH and DASH are lacking some of the legacy technical drawbacks of BTC). As an aside, we always had a certain minimum target for the coming gold bubble in mind which we never mentioned in public, because we felt it sounded silly. Usually we just recommend that people use their imagination, in the hope that their imagination is big enough. By now it probably sounds a lot less silly - we will revisit this topic once gold has overcome certain technical hurdles - click to enlarge.



As time has passed, more ideas have occurred to us, which should benefit the article when we finally manage to get it ready for posting. We have recently also received an inquiry by Brian Dowd of Focus Economics about our views on certain issues related to the cryptocurrency. In short, we will move ahead now, as it looks like an opportunity to kill several birds with one stone is here (someone should perhaps come up with a slightly less fatal-sounding variation of this saying).

In the meantime, a comprehensive infographic on Bitcoin and its brief but intense history was put together and sent to us by Josh Wardini, community manager at webmastersjury.org. It contains all sorts of information, mainly a number of quite interesting trivia. Some of these milestones are probably fairly well-known, but we certainly weren't aware of all of them. We think this information underpins something we said quite some time ago already: Bitcoin is here to stay. We decided to republish the infographic here to set the scene for our upcoming discussions of Bitcoin and related subjects.

This infographic was originally published at bitcoinplay.net. It is quite interesting which countries have declared bitcoin illegal - the Saudi theocracy (they probably thought it looked too much like fun), two democratic Latin American countries currently ruled by far left-leaning governments, one central Asian country that recently held what is widely deemed the first truly competitive election in the entire region (some people say Kyrgyzstan has been going downhill since defeating the Uyghur Khaganate in 840 AD, but the country's history since gaining independence from the Soviet Union is actually quite remarkable. In no other central Asian country were so many would-be megalomaniac dictators chased from office with comparable alacrity). Lastly there is Bangladesh, the first region of the Indian sub-continent conquered by the British East India company in 1757 (the company ruled over the territory for more than a century; in 1862 it became a British crown colony). Today Bangladesh is one of the few predominantly Muslim countries the government of which is regularly headed by a woman (incumbent prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her main competitor Khalida Zia are essentially taking turns in the role). We have no idea what these countries have against bitcoin, in fact, it is a rather odd and diverse collection. Of course such bans are essentially meaningless - we would guess their effectiveness is equivalent to Australia's ban of online poker. To see what we mean watch Australian Senator David Leyonhjelm (an opponent of the ban) dispense advice to his constituents on how to best handle the situation: "Screw the government; get yourself a VPN and an offshore account and just keep playing").

A Bengal cold coin (about 670 AD) from the reign of King Rajabhata of the Khadga dynasty

Chart by: cryptowatch

Pater Tenebrarum is the leading author on the Acting Man website where you can find comprehensive articles and authors with an Austrian School view on the world. Visit acting-man.com to see all of Tenebrarum's posts as soon as they are published. This blog originally appeared on November 25th, 2017.