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OK perhaps that’s a little far-fetched. But what is behind crypto’s crazy climb over the past 18 months, we hear you ask? We don’t mean to suggest that the pandemic hasn’t been involved, because we think it has, but not in the way that this chart criminal implies — not, in other words, because it’s some kind of safe haven that traders flock to when they are worried about Covid cases rising; the data don’t bear that idea out.

But while it’s based on sound, democratic principles, cryptocurrency remains a technological and practical work in progress. For the foreseeable future, nation-states’ near-monopoly on currency production and monetary policy appears secure.
Subscriber growth is harder to track than the other metrics. Only the current subscriber count is displayed for a particular subreddit, and historical data cannot be rebuilt retrospectively as subscribers do not have a visible historical imprint. A third-party website, RedditMetrics (http://redditmetrics.com/), has been retrieving and storing real-time subscriber counts; however their data on the particular subreddits of interest only reaches back to 2012 so the subscriber growth analysis can only start at this point. Fig 2 shows the three social media metric time series for each cryptocurrency; note that subscriber growth is the only metric that can have negative associated values, caused by more users unsubscribing than subscribing on a particular day.