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As Lira collapses, Turks are piling into Cryptocurrency. Every fiat currency has ended in devaluation and eventual collapse, right from the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD to modern times.

https://i.imgur.com/k3WdeKu.jpg

I honestly believe that the whole Turkish citizens are converting their savings to crypto currencies story to be hyped up just to draw attention. Sure, some of them might actually have bought themselves into crypto, but it's negligible in the grand scheme of things.

It brings us back to how people were speculating that back in 2013 the pump from $30 to $250 was caused by people in Cyprus massively converting to Bitcoin, which obviously wasn't the case. Back then speculation had at least some right to develop since there was a pretty decent pump going on, while right now the market hasn't even been dented by Turkish "demand".

The volume on the exchanges there has increased marginally, which just points out there isn't really much action going on.

Look at the chart we see the number of users is also less. It can be done in the concentrated population of each country. Developed countries have more conditions to develop. Accordingly, human beings are quick to reach the goals of humanity.

So i am one of the few belgiums with coins NICE

18%, or over 15 million people, of the Turkish population owning BTC is fucking laughable.

https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/TRY/BTC

Turkey's entire BTC volume on Localbitcoins hasn't managed to get above 30 BTC per week this year. Get real.

The figure everywhere will be less than we expect and more than we know about.

statistics like these are always going to be unreliable specially when done online. doing a research like this is not something easy that you just ask a question and get answers! it is a complicated scientific process of selecting your groups, dividing them up, asking the right question, and a lot of other things.
for instance if you ask a group of people in a bar if they drink alcohol, you can't use the result to say 99% of people are alcoholics!

using trading volume of exchanges such as localbitcoins is better but that is still false results because it is again too focused. Turks may not even use localbitcoins for all we know. they may use other channels to trade bitcoin P2P. for example where i live people don't even know about LBC! they use Telegram, forums,... to find each other and trade. so their volume is not recorded anywhere and it is high.

Using 1000 respondents only to get the estimated percentage of those who own crypto currency in a country sounds B.S to me and that is a very unreliable data with a lot of bias. I am pretty sure this was something conducted on the Internet and the demographics within each location is even unknown which is quite important considering some of the indicators that could affect people converting their funds into crypto as well. I just feel this is an extremely incomplete data.

the sample size is very small, representing only about 1000 individuals from each country. and how did they randomly selected those people? that kind of statistics is not a good basis for study purposes. but thanks for the effort for giving us idea what stage we are now in crypto

I agree with you, but I haven't found better one. Maybe someone will post here some better stats) Crypto is evolving more and more thru the world!

I am pretty sure most people in those countries with crazy hyperinflation almost never buy Bitcoin to curb inflation, most of them just sell it for the US dollar and buy goods and services with that.

Basically with most hyberinflation or during communism in certain countries, that was how the middle class/rich paid for things; in US currency.

Its more stable than Bitcoin and less volatile.

Only people who bought BTC instead of USD are the ones who are in danger of getting it repossed or stolen. Hence the BTC was a safer choice.

People in Turkey are better off buying USD than crypto during this bear market, but then again, their "pride" will prevent most of them from doing it. Then it's also heavily frowned upon to dump your Liras within the community.

I'm not at all convinced that there is any serious (regardless of how little) interest from people there to buy crypto, or at least not more than was the case before everything started to go backwards for their currency.

I feel sorry for those in Turkey who just want to have a normal life, but it's nearly impossible with the hostile overall sentiment there. If you buy into EUR or USD you're an enemy of the state and you'll experience the consequences of that.

18% of People in Turkey Own Crypto Compared to 8% in the US. Some of Turkey’s residents have claimed they are losing faith in fiat currencies as a whole. And some users have reported using cryptocurrencies because of the Turkish lira’s weaknesses, and because of political and financial turmoil the country has been enduring over the past few years.

Anyone else who thinks "8% of Americans have Crypto" seems extremely high?

This means eg you have a family-party with 12 people - one of them has crypto (well, you)
Family-Party with 24 people - two of them have crypto.

I do not understand how you can possibly believe this.

Look at Localbitcoins volume.

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/btcturk/

That is the biggest Turkish exchange.

You're telling me over 15 million people running for the exit into BTC will generate just over 2 million dollars of Bitcoin volume?

It's one piece of shit survey probably of a couple of thousand people.

Yeah, there’s no way it’ll be as high as 8%. You’re probably looking at the true % being less than 1%. Lots of people (average joe’s) are NOW aware of bitcoin but I almost guarantee less than 1% will own any.

The main problem with these is that, when you do a research on politics to get info on who will vote for who it makes a bit sense, you can ask 1000 random people on different places and see who will vote who, however if the questions is regarding something as specific as owning cryptocurrency, asking 1000 people in a country doesn't really reflect the end result as well.

You can ask 1000 people but there is like 80 million people living in turkey, hence its impossible to really even be close to it.
Also where have you asked, have you asked just modern cities or have you also asked people from more eastern middle east borderline cities where people are not even using internet that commonly ? I doubt so.

Basically this is all a wrong guess from the part of the people who made this and probably not even remotely close to the real results. Considering the lira dropped in august and this was done in June, OP is also quite wrong.

Exactly, people in Turkey are doing the same thing than the folks in Venezuela, they simply use Bitcoin ,or any other online payments system that supports the US dollar, to sell it in the black market for fiat currency. The buyers are probably people from the upper class or companies who need foreign currencies to import goods.

The whole "Bitcoin is saving people in X or Y country" is a fallacy, the US dollar is saving people in countries with hyperinflation.

For such magnitude of research, it cannot state exactly the right data on consumers using cryptocurrency in those regions. Coupled with the fact that this is an online research which is subject to a lot of bias anyway. A larger audience when considering the population of each country itself will suffice, but for this, I do not expect anyone to just simply use that to judge the condition of ownership of cryptocurrency in this region or even state this as a reference at all.

Nice picture. Not sure if all those numbers are real.
I always thought that China is a big empire in crypto, and all the holders are from that Asian part. Because of the fact that they have the biggest exchange in crypto, Binance, their citizens should be benefited about depositing and withdrawing money from and to their banks.
Interestingly, the US is not in top 3.

Romanian adoption of BTC has surpassed the United States by 50%? Somehow, I doubt it! :D

This "survey" definitely feels fishy, and it's obviously intended to fit a narrative about economic crisis as a trigger for BTC adoption. I'm pretty skeptical towards that narrative.


Not only is the sample tiny, but I never trust these little online/mobile surveys. I don't think respondents are representative of their countries at large, and I also don't think respondents always answer truthfully (because it's just a throwaway survey).

That data could not be used as a pattern to assess how many people are owning cryptocurrencies since the sample size does not represent even the third part of a country but it can be used as a reference to tell that cryptocurrencies are getting more popular and those numbers could go higher as the time flies, cryptocurrencies are really a threat for the fiats.

These are certainly interesting statistics.

I don't know if the figures are accurate. If yes, then it certainly shows how bitcoin and some other major cryptos are already being used for the purpose of storing value in times where fiat may not hold its value at all. This is obviously reflected in the high adoption rates in Turkey. I'm not sure whether Venezuela was neglected in this, but I certainly would have expected them to show up as a high adoption nation as well.

These are all tangible benefits bitcoin brings as a decentralized alternative to fiat, and it can be easily seen in times of economic crisis.

However, I really doubt that just because of the Turkish inflation crisis, bitcoin will get pumped or bought heavily as a result. Even if adoption is increasing, the volume is simply not there to influence the market that much.

Thank you for trying to set the records straight. Ever since the issue of Turkey challenges with their currency has surfaced, its has been one conjecture over the other and I won't be surprised of someone is going to write an article very soon (if it had not been written) linking the current upturn in the price of bitcoin to the economic woes being faced by the Lira in that part of the world.

Countries have their challenges with the value of their currencies at every point in time. It is when the now universal, that it becomes a global issue. Greece has had its own and that didn't lead to surge in crypto. Zimbabwe has witnessed theirs that didn't make the value of bitcoin reach the moon. Nigeria went through its own sometimes last year but crypto price didn't touch $50,000 now Turkey and people are trying real hard to make everything about them. The question we need to ask is how much is the percentage of citizens of Turkey investment in crypto?

Actually these days people remain anonymous on their asset holding, because this was a confidential matter and considering it involves a lot of money. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has it own secrecy depending on how you understand the true purpose of it. Mostly the strong and dedicated holders doesn't have it opened to public or even the closest friends they had. For my own understanding on this the actual numbers cannot be determined, because some are using offline wallets; so the numbers are infinite.

While I believe it's delusional to think "most people" are exchanging their local fiat for bitcoin, it's also a mistake to use localbitcoins for accurate measurements anymore. Honestly the site sucks, there are way too many honeypots. I would be scared to use the damn thing at this point, unfortunately at least in my case, the fear of being victim of a honeypot has given me yet another reason to not even sell small amounts to help paying some bills in there, so I just hold.

If I was in Turkey I would try to find some local ads elsewhere or in forums, look for people selling, or if using localbitcoins then be super sure that it's not some cop getting paid to wreck people's life that are just trying to save their wealth from disappearing.

Ideally the end goal is that they realize going back into fiat will cost them more than holding. It is then when some may start working under the radar in exchange of BTC, selling goods for BTC and so on, instead of going through the hassle of going BTC to fiat back and forth.

For now, of course many people are still afraid to invest on cryptocurrency since many negative news/fake news about this market. But I also believe that in the future, cryptocurrency will run this market. Its good to see that many countries are slowly adopting cryptocurrency, and for the record a lot of people are interested to use cryptocurreny, if this market becomes more stable, expect investors to come again.

It is not even about finding a better one, it is just simply on how reliable the existing one is and if it is not reliable, then there is no point even considering it in the first place. Based on what a lot of people have mentioned, without having to reiterate, this is an unreliable data, when considering a lot of factors such as the number of respondents that was used to finalize the whole thing and come into a conclusion.

There is no correct polls. Because there is no end to the outcome of the polls: How were people chosen to participate? How was the poll conducted? Who paid for it? Who answered questions? How many people responded to the poll? And so on. The survey shows only preliminary data, but the number of people can be very different from the survey.

This data does not reflect anything. For instance the population of Turkey presently is about 79.5million. Kindly take just 1000 respondents out of this equation and see what you have. This is just unreliable and cannot be used for any form of reference in whatever way.

I am not sure how the data is even collected or in what area of part of a specific demographic is used, but the fact that the total number of respondents used is not realistic when compared to the main population simply invalidates that statistics.

People are not afraid to invest but they did not want to take risk since cryptocurrency prices are based on demand and supply, that is the reason why people cannot fully trust bitcoins right now.

Dunno if there are any data bias within this data set or not. There is just insufficient proof either way.

I definitely find it fishy that Turkey would have such high adoption rates compared to some other developing countries, with nearly one fifth of the citizens owning BTC. Even when assuming that this data is legit and not biased (which it probably is, as people could be picked and chosen for the survey to create false conclusions), most of these people are likely still only using bitcoin to cash out to another fiat currency like the USD, because of lack of general merchant acceptance of the coin.

Is it necessarily a bad thing though, that adoption could be not as high as what this chart shows in certain countries? Absolutely not. It means that BTC adoption is still low overall across the globe, and demand is still quite low right now. It means that there are much more undiscovered demand and potential that has yet to be realised within BTC right now, which from an investment point of view, makes bitcoin a great long term asset to hold.

The survey was paid by ING, the full result can be found [Survey] Have you ever heard of cryptocurrency? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4548634.msg40965245#msg40965245) (with more details) We were talking about it in the Economic section.
It was conducted by OpinionWay if I remember correctly (or IPSOS) and ~15,000 persons answered to the survey

Could be interesting but does not mean it is useless. If we are to look at it in a generalized way, a lot of people for example in turkey will still want to believe in more traditional assets which could be a safe haven than the crypto space that is extremely volatile. That is not even the major case here now!
My main bone of contention is the huge prejudice in the data as on a normal day, I cannot expect just 1000 people to speak for me in my country where we are populated in millions.

Turks are doing great choosing cryptocurrency as an investment because it is a good asset. however,  japanese people are cool because if you see their economic growth, crypto has a big factor, and checking also zimbabwe, even thou you don't have fiat in the mall you can use atm or any e-currency,  cashless in other words.

crypto is increasingly popular, the more they feel the benefits of their own fiat currencies and this is very important to balance everything. The government might be able to better control the circulation of crypto currencies so that it does not really kill fiat currencies that are indeed the country's characteristic.

The downfall of USA's usage of cryptocurrency is due to the rejection of their ETF's it is quite interesting that Turkey paves the way on it. It will be very significant in the future that turkey is the leading user and consumer of crypto but USA and China are the leading source of crypto, especially erc-20 tokens. This is notable that China is the most dominant producer of crypto, while Turkey is the number one and the leading consumer.

Well, cryptocurrency is doing great today because many countries are using it. Even though it has a low percent but still its great to know that it increasingly became popular in many countries. Nowadays that technology become popular and its innovation are spreading, even though all of us have a bitcoin in our account but still we need to verify it in our head

I think not even remotely close to what it can be, I believe bitcoin and crypto can be really getting at the hands of the people with some sort of more global and easy to use debit card and if you could use that debit card everywhere and if you could create it a lot cheaper than banks debit cards than you can make the consumers use bitcoin and crypto a lot easier however right now we are talking about how banks are greedy and they are making huge amounts of profits from their credit cards and all that however their debit cards are free yet bitcoin debit cards are incredibly expensive and they charge you insanely high amounts no matter where and how you spend it.

On this situation right now this showed a progressive approach to the world, and i think the people now were very much transparent on what cryptocurrency brought to each and everyone's financial capabilities. Banks and local transactions money transfers litterally accepted those middleman sectors whom assist the management of funds transfer from fiat to digital currency, vice versa can be able to performed as well. Right now the numbers of consumers is increasing and the basic of how they use their funds was for trading purposes as main investment.