Kenneth Rogoff and a pair of World Bank economists found that 3.3 million Bitcoin transactions were used to make fiat payments over four years.
“We find that, as a conservative lower bound, over 7% of the 45 million trades on the exchange we explore represent crypto vehicle transactions in which Bitcoin is used to make payment in fiat currency.”
That was the intended purpose of Satoshi Nakamoto’s peer-to-peer digital currency.
While noting that their “work cannot be used to put a price on cryptocurrencies,” they added:
“It provides the first systematic quantitative evidence that the transactional use of cryptocurrencies constitutes a fundamental component of their value, at least under the current regulatory regime.”
That said, in a footnote at the end of the paper, Rogoff, Reinhart, and von Luckner said:
“Although our analysis suggests that crypto prices are not a pure speculative bubble, analyzing just one exchange does not allow us to infer anything about the level of Bitcoin prices, which at a bare minimum would require applying our algorithm to a much broader set of crypto markets.”
‘Not a Pure Speculative Bubble’
That said, in a footnote at the end of the paper, Rogoff, Reinhart, and von Luckner noted:
“Although our analysis suggests that crypto prices are not a pure speculative bubble, analyzing just one exchange does not allow us to infer anything about the level of Bitcoin prices, which at a bare minimum would require applying our algorithm to a much broader set of crypto markets.”