Traffic as a proxy for interest

I dug up this blog's awstats. Here's the country list for this year :

Strikingly, but by no means surprisinglyⁱ, China has been catching up something fierce - it was barely in the top 10 at the beginning of the year, most of that traffic happened in the past few months.ⁱⁱ. Considering that this blog is written in English, the situation is pretty interesting : depending whom you believe the English speaking population in China is somewhere between 10 and 300 millionⁱⁱⁱ. If a middle of the road figure of ~150mn Chinese English speakers is factual, then the relative penetration of Trilema in China and the US is the same^iv.

Added up, Europe accounts for about 800k pages, so a sort of half China, with mainland Russia lagging way, way, way behind (even behind the smaller Ukraine!). I wonder if this translates poor Bitcoin literacy in Russia generally or simply the fact that MPEx has no Russian FAQ.^v

Within Europe, France leads the UK (but not if you include Canada, which is how it worked for at least 200 years), Poland leads Sweden (which I suppose is historical revanche) and India leads Italy^vi. Romania seems to be way ahead of everyone, but it's actually in freefall. You see, four years ago it was doing in excess of 1.5mn pages a month. I switched to English just about a year ago, and since then I've shed about 90%^vii of the Romanian traffic. The moral being that if you want to sink a blog, change the language, that'll do it - unless you're me, in which case it won't.^viii For what it's worth, the second-most read article still is the famous "Cum se suge pula - ghid pentru juma’ de sex oral"^ix, which turns out to be the most popular piece I've ever written.^x

So there you have it, at some point in the history of Bitcoin the US / China / EU stood in this peculiar 4:2:1 relationship. Like everything else, I'm sure it'll pass.

1. The overtaking of US interest by China everyone's agitating about currently has actually been a topic of an April article - The future of Bitcoin regulation, which includes the immortal

   Nobody will care that the original paper may have been written by an American and the original discussion on the long forgotten original Bitcoin forum was carried in English. I can deal just as well with Russian investors, I can deal just as well with Chinese investors, Bitcoin is completely neutral from a cultural perspective. This neutrality means that cultures will have to compete. So far the US is losing this competition at this level. If things don’t get fixed soon the only thing that we’ll be able to say for sure about Bitcoin regulation will be that it won’t be written in English, and it won’t consider US interests or sensibilities.

   This is possibly the last chance to take those piles of fundamentally worthless US dollars and use them for something with any sort of future value.

   Guess who disobeyed Trilema to their detriment. [↩]

2. It also bears the number of the beast for some reason. I wonder if they know about 666 in China. [↩]
3. Apparently 300 million people are learning Chinese. I think awstats reports Hong Kong as cn, so that'd be another 10 or so mn speakers. [↩]
4. Counting the US for about 300mn English speakers, and don't tell me the population is larger than that : most of Obama's voters don't speak English anyway. [↩]
5. Seeing how the Ukraine is actually above the curve, it's probably not the FAQ. [↩]
6. This dovetails into a Romanian in-joke. You see, Gypsies come from India the legend goes, and after a mostly failed campaign by the Italian authorities to try and paint Romanians as Gypsies a few years back, so as to cover up their appallingly corrupt incompetence, it came out much to their embarrassment that as far as Europe is concerned it's the Italians that are the lazy, unreliable, property-rights-challenged, dark skinned folk. Apparently this is news in Italy, somehow. [↩]
7. This is probably overstated, as the domain at the time also included Romania's top aggregator (a sort of better Digg thing) as well as a chan and other stuff. [↩]
8. Sort-of how marriages work, too, I guess : if you want to kill your sex life ditch your wife, that'll do it. Unless, of course... [↩]
9. How to suck cock - a guide for half of the oral sex. [↩]
10. I don't think it's the best, really, it just fits best into the needs of the audience I suppose. [↩]