Markets

Chart: How Bitcoin Reached Parity With Gold

Published

7 years ago

March 3, 2017

Jeff Desjardins

Chart: How Bitcoin Reached Parity With Gold

Charting the fast and volatile rise of bitcoin

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Would you rather have one bitcoin, or a single ounce of gold?

The answer used to be obvious. Even at the climax of the legendary 2013 rally, bitcoin was never able to reach unit-for-unit parity with gold.

However, since an off-year in 2014, the enigmatic cryptocurrency has steadily climbed in price to take the title of the best-performing currency in both 2015 and 2016. And today? After continuing its rally into 2017, the price of bitcoin has now passed this arbitrary, but psychologically important measure of parity with an ounce of gold.

How did we get here so fast?

Bitcoin: A Short History

Here are some of the most important events that have shaped the bitcoin market:

May 2010: The famous “Bitcoin Pizza” transaction takes place.
This is one of the first “real world” transactions, in which one man indirectly paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas. That works out to a pretty steep price of over $6 million per pizza using today’s prices, but we are sure they were delicious. Today, May 22 is still celebrated as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” throughout the Bitcoin community.

February 2011: Bitcoin hits “dollar parity”.

October 2012: Bitpay says 1,000 merchants accept bitcoin payments.
Early adopters of the cryptocurrency included WordPress.com, Reddit, OKCupid, and The Pirate Bay.

Mar 2013: Cyprus bank bail-in.
Generally speaking, the European Debt Crisis was a major boon for bitcoin. However, this specific event really put the potential downsides of the banking system and centralized fiat currencies in the limelight.

Oct 2013: Silk Road Bust
As prices were soaring at the end of 2013, the FBI seized 26,000 BTC from Silk Road and its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht.

Feb 2014: Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy protection
The world’s biggest exchange, which at one point controlled 70% of bitcoin transactions, was plagued with hacks and other problems. It finally went under in 2014.

Aug 2015: By this point, 160,000 merchants accept bitcoin payments

Dec 2016: Bitcoin is the world’s top performing currency for 2nd straight year
See our charts on this for 2015 and 2016.

Bitcoin’s Rise in Context

For enthusiasts and speculators that have followed the cryptocurrency since the beginning, the meteoric rise of bitcoin has been a wild ride.

However, despite the feat of reaching unit-for-unit parity with gold, it is important to take in some context.

Firstly, there are about 16.2 million BTC in circulation – and there are 5.6 billion oz of gold that have been mined throughout history. For that reason the value of the gold market is still more than 300x higher.

Next, while the value of the bitcoin market has soared exponentially since the early days, it is still only worth about $20 billion in total – this is about half of the value of the average company on the S&P 500 (~$40 billion). Compare the bitcoin market to an Apple or Google, and it seems even less extraordinary.

But for those people that follow the crypto markets closely, this above context actually represents the potential upside of the digital cryptocurrency. It means bitcoin still has lots of room to soar – and since bitcoin supply is limited and cannot be created out of thin air, there is nowhere for the price to go but up.

Related Topics:bitcoin gold cryptocurrency parity

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Markets

Ranked: The World’s 50 Top Countries by GDP, by Sector Breakdown

This graphic shows GDP by country, broken down into three main sectors: services, industry, and agriculture.

Creator Program

Published

7 hours ago

September 21, 2023

Dorothy Neufeld

Visualized: The Three Pillars of GDP, by Country

Over the last several decades, the service sector has fueled the economic activity of the world’s largest countries. Driving this trend has been changes in consumption, the easing of trade barriers, and rapid advancements in tech.

We can see this in the gross domestic product (GDP) breakdown of each country, which gets divided into three broad sectors: services, industry, and agriculture.

The above graphic from Pranav Gavali shows GDP by country, and how each sector contributes to an economy’s output, with data from the World Bank.

Drivers of GDP, by Country

As the most important and fastest growing component of GDP, services make up almost 60% of GDP in the world’s 50 largest countries. Following this is the industrial sector which includes the production of raw goods.

Below, we show how each sector contributes to GDP by country as of 2021:

Country	Services (% GDP)	Industry (% GDP)	Agriculture (% GDP)	Other (% GDP)	GDP (T)
🇺🇸 U.S.	77.6	17.9	1.0	3.6	$22.9
🇨🇳 China	53.5	39.3	7.2	0.0	$16.9
🇯🇵 Japan	69.9	28.8	1.0	0.4	$5.1
🇩🇪 Germany	62.9	26.7	0.9	9.5	$4.2
🇬🇧 UK	71.6	17.3	0.7	10.4	$3.1
🇫🇷 France	70.3	16.7	1.6	11.4	$2.9
🇮🇳 India	47.9	26.1	17.3	8.7	$2.9
🇮🇹 Italy	65.0	22.7	1.9	10.4	$2.1
🇨🇦 Canada*	67.7	24.1	1.7	6.6	$2.0
🇰🇷 South Korea	57.0	32.4	1.8	8.8	$1.8
🇧🇷 Brazil	57.8	20.2	7.5	14.6	$1.6
🇦🇺 Australia	65.7	25.5	2.3	6.5	$1.6
🇷🇺 Russia	54.1	31.8	3.9	10.3	$1.6
🇪🇸 Spain	67.4	20.4	2.6	9.6	$1.4
🇲🇽 Mexico	59.2	30.8	3.9	6.1	$1.3
🇮🇩 Indonesia	42.8	39.8	13.3	4.1	$1.2
🇮🇷 Iran	47.3	38.0	12.4	2.3	$1.1
🇳🇱 Netherlands	69.4	17.9	1.5	11.2	$1.0
🇨🇭 Switzerland	71.9	24.6	0.6	2.8	$0.8
🇹🇷 Turkiye	52.8	31.1	5.5	10.6	$0.8
🇹🇼 Taiwan	60.6	38.0	1.5	0.0	$0.8
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia	46.5	44.7	2.7	6.1	$0.8
🇵🇱 Poland	56.9	27.9	2.2	13.0	$0.7
🇧🇪 Belgium	68.8	19.6	0.7	10.9	$0.6
🇸🇪 Sweden	65.0	22.5	1.3	11.3	$0.6
🇮🇱 Israel	72.4	17.2	1.3	9.1	$0.5
🇦🇷 Argentina	52.5	23.6	7.1	16.8	$0.5
🇦🇹 Austria	62.4	25.8	1.2	10.5	$0.5
🇳🇬 Nigeria	43.8	31.4	23.4	1.4	$0.5
🇹🇭 Thailand	56.3	35.0	8.7	0.0	$0.5
🇮🇪 Ireland	55.4	37.8	1.0	5.8	$0.5
🇭🇰 Hong Kong	89.7	6.0	0.1	4.3	$0.4
🇩🇰 Denmark	66.7	19.3	0.9	13.1	$0.4
🇸🇬 Singapore	70.3	24.4	0.0	5.3	$0.4
🇿🇦 South Africa	63.0	24.5	2.5	10.0	$0.4
🇵🇭 Philippines	61.0	28.9	10.1	0.0	$0.4
🇪🇬 Egypt	52.5	31.2	11.4	4.9	$0.4
🇧🇩 Bangladesh	51.3	33.3	11.6	3.7	$0.4
🇳🇴 Norway	51.8	36.3	1.7	10.2	$0.4
🇻🇳 Vietnam	41.2	37.5	12.6	8.8	$0.4
🇲🇾 Malaysia	51.6	37.8	9.6	1.1	$0.4
🇦🇪 U.A.E.	51.6	47.5	0.9	0.0	$0.4
🇵🇰 Pakistan	52.1	18.8	22.7	6.4	$0.3
🇵🇹 Portugal	64.7	19.6	2.2	13.5	$0.3
🇫🇮 Finland	60.3	24.1	2.3	13.4	$0.3
🇨🇴 Colombia	58.0	24.9	7.6	9.5	$0.3
🇷🇴 Romania	59.1	26.7	4.5	9.6	$0.3
🇨🇿 Czechia	58.8	30.3	1.8	9.1	$0.3
🇨🇱 Chile	54.4	31.3	3.6	10.6	$0.3
🇳🇿 New Zealand*	65.6	20.4	5.7	8.4	$0.2

Industrial sector includes construction. Agriculture sector includes forestry and fishing. *Data as of 2019.

In the U.S., services make up nearly 78% of GDP. Apart from Hong Kong, it comprises the highest share of GDP across the world’s largest economies. Roughly 80% of American jobs in the private sector are in services, spanning from healthcare and entertainment to finance and logistics.

Like America, a growing share of China’s GDP is from services, contributing to almost 54% of total economic output, up from 44% in 2010. This can be attributed to rising incomes and higher productivity in the sector as the economy has grown and matured, among other factors.

In a departure from the top 10 biggest countries globally, agriculture continues to drive a large portion of India’s GDP. India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat and rice, with agriculture accounting for 44% of the country’s employment.

While the services sector has grown in India, it makes up a greater share in other emerging economies such as Brazil (58%), Mexico (59%), and the Philippines (61%).

Growth Dynamics

Services-led growth has risen faster than manufacturing across many developing nations, underpinned by productivity growth.

This structural shift is seen across economies. In many countries in Africa, for instance, jobs have increasingly moved from agriculture to services and trade, where it now accounts for 42% of jobs.

These growth patterns are supported by rising incomes in developing economies, while innovation in tech is lowering barriers to enabling service growth. As the industrial sector makes up a lower share of trade and economic activity, the service sector is projected to make up 77% of global GDP by 2035.