Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: The Cyprus/Bitcoin connection is totally fake
by
screamingservers
on 02/04/2013, 14:31:40 UTC
From what I have read, it looks like a good portion of the Cyprus bank deposits are from account holders abroad, specifically Russia, so maybe include Russia and other eastern block countries in your stats.

The other thing is here in the US we have a bunch of conspiracy anti government nuts who buy gold bouillon to have currency to trade after government takes over. Cyprus reinforced their beliefs that they must have an alternate currency and the Cyprus-Bitcoin connection on the mainstream news gave them Ideas as to what that currency should be if not gold (BTC). I have been selling on Craigslist and bitcoinlocal to these types more than speculators. My problem is that I cannot get the money to gox before the price goes up and I don't have a ton of money to fill up my gox account ahead of time, so I can only sell a few BTC at a time.

Here are the download figures from other countries since March 16:

6100 in Spain
2735 in Italy
1234 in Greece
937 in Portugal

This all includes mutliple downloads by same person and perhaps previous users who're just downloading on another device. So maximum of 10,000 across impacted European countries over half a month is nothing to write home about. Sure there are other clients and other ways to 'use' Bitcoin, ignore this very important data at your own peril.

Just for comparison's sake - there's been 15,556 downloads in China over same time frame who're known to love to speculate and gamble in their investments. It's clear that speculators far outweigh people concerned over any type of financial confiscation.