How do we determine 'popular', though? According to http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/ there were 3.5M Bitcoins sent in the last 24 hours. MtGox has them at $6.50 each at the moment.
I wouldn't consider $22M worth of transactions in the last 24 hours 'unpopular'...
So, if i move my funds between bank accounts a few times a day i can create a popular multi million euro economy? I don't think 3,5m * $6,50 is the correct measurement of popularity.
I guess if you think that people are just moving Bitcoins around to bump up those numbers, then maybe it's not really measuring anything...
I honestly don't know the best way to measure popularity, but I'd love to hear a good way to do so. Until then, well, for me at least, that seems to be the best way to try and work it out. How else do you judge popularity of a currency other than by how much it's being used?
Popularity relates to total value so ~9million coins * 6$ a coin = 54 million in total value which is minuscule in therms of global finance. But, number of places you can spend it also counts and there is just not many places selling bit-coins. Even though it would seem like an easy way to launder drug money it's still just a toy.
I don't want to sound as though I'm arguing for arguments sake, and I really have no dog in this fight. But using the argument of 'size in terms of global finance' would surely render most currencies other than say USD, the Euro and a couple of Asian currencies as 'not popular', wouldn't it?
To be honest, I look at the total above of $54M and think "transactions over 24 hours worth $22M for a currency whose entire value is $54M... that seems liquid at least" (for my pathetic understanding of economics). To me, it seems as though there is a lot of activity within the currency itself, which to me says its popular in the circles that use it. Arguing that it's not popular because of its size, despite the activity, would probably mean that something like the New Zealand dollar would be unpopular. But again, I bet that most NZers would disagree.
So then it just comes full circle and again, I just don't know if I believe it's not popular... just maybe, it's 'nichey'?
Their M3 is also over 200 billion. I am not sure if that's in NZD or USD but 1 NZD = 0.7901 USD so the difference is not that important. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
Fair point. To be honest, I just picked the first smallish country I could think of with a stable economy.
Thanks for that data. I guess I still just see tens of millions of dollars movement everyday and think "hey, it's obviously popular somewhere". C'est la vie.
And it won't become popular, because it attracts the wrong kind of people - speculative investors and bitcoin miners dreaming of becoming rich. It does not attract real buyers or sellers...
