Here’s the most wild, yet most believable conspiracy theory on what made Bitcoins explode in price.
Bitcoins showed up in 2009 … and had a run up in 2011 to about $35 dollars, then crashed to about $4 to $8. This was supposed to be the end of the story, but it wasn’t… after a year or so of hovering post crash dollars it started to explode around July of 2012. Now trading at at roughly $140
Those are the facts.
This is the most wild but compelling conspiracy theory that might have legs, all in a single chart.
In a nutshell, Bitcoins are backed by oil. Literally weeks after the European Union implemented sanctions against Iran, the price of Bitcoins started to explode.
Until that point, the Iranians were able to sell their oil to Europe as only the United States had the hard hitting sanctions. However you’ll notice almost immediately after those sanctions were implemented the price of Bitcoin went up.
The price started to rise within weeks of the Sanctions being implemented. It looks from that chart that they started requiring payment in bitcoins the second the sanctions started, and increased the program size and demanded more payment for oil in bitcoins as time progressed, finally flipping the big switch just this month.
As far as the Iranians are concerned, getting paid in bitcoin has two fold advantages
1- It provides “hard” currency that can be exchanged for any other currency.
2 - using Bitcoin as a transaction medium disrupts the US dollar which oil is traditionally settled in, this is a form of an economic counter-attack from the sanctions. Large multi-national state to state transactions are generally done in US dollars, this completely bypasses that established system and if it starts to catch on becomes a currency of reserve. Which is something that becomes a problem for Central Bankers and Sanctions.
There is no proof other than this article published last year on BusinessWeek which noted that Iranians were adopting bitcoin in large numbers. Well, if their citizens did, most likely their government took notice.