I still don't understand how Korea can be so completely out of whack with the rest of the market.
Korea has always topped our lists of places ripe for the first breakouts of hyper-bitcoinification.
SK is basically one giant ethnically homogeneous mega-city, so there is less friction when a new movement starts to spread.
SK is also the most high-IQ and bandwidth saturated society on earth, which further lowers the barriers to a full-scale crypto economy pivot.
South Korean have seen Japan suffer for decades from inflation and Abenomics, so they know central banking is a tool of the Western powers' petrodollar hegemony.
It's fascinating to watch the chaebol-driven Tiger Economy of SK adopt crypto from a position of strength and voluntary choice versus the desperation-driven adoption of chaotic low-IQ basket-case shitholes such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
'member this?
That reminds me, I nominate Korean to be next in line. Perfect demographic (save $, high tech, love new fads) for XMR.
I'd imagine the perfect demographic is a country with high GINI, very corrupt government/businesses, a lot of very rich people (possibly at the expense of even more poor people), high taxes, unstable government. You mean like Ukraine, Venezuela, and Argentina? They are more technophobic and less homogenous than Korea. The elites are a different ethnicity than the rabble and the culture is conservative. In such places Bitcoin and gold are better choices. XMR is much riskier and its appeal lies in the 'cool factor' far more appreciated by affluent SE Asian technophiles than peasant farmers, drug lords, and struggling middle classes.
People in chaotic situations don't have the risk capital for lottery tickets like Monero.
This will change as XMR beings to snowball, and in spectacular ways enable the defections which Bitcoin alone cannot.
Great points.