Quote from: gentleman2019 on September 21, 2020, 11:24:09 PM

Its consistently higher that what the normal currency exchange rate would suggest in Asian countries.

For example if you multiply the USD rate of 1 BTC with the CNY rate, its 1 BTC = CNY 73,600, but exchanges there have it around CNY 75,500.

In other countries in Asia and South America also BTC is more expensive to buy in non-USD currencies than in USD.

Why is this the case?

Often this has to do with liquidity and demand. Now in china the difference is still very small when compared to the international aggregated price, however when you look at other Asian, south american, African the premiums can often be as high as 20% for purchases.

These differences are largely owing to a number of factors with most being linked to liquidity. For instance low liquidity in the that country or maybe just on that particular exchange. Also demand for crypto currencies would also be higher in certain countries that impose heavy capital controls and regulations on cross border transfers Iran for instance. While in some cases price differences could be due to weakness/ high inflation/volatility in the local currencies being used Venezuela here.

Further all these premiums are also heavily impacted by bull and bear trends. If i recall the Price of BTC in South Africa had reached nearly 30k USD at the height of the bull run in 2017.