Bitcoin’s famed deflationary power took a hammering last year. One way to measure this is to look at South African house prices – they increased 94% in bitcoin terms and 4.7% in rand terms in 2022, as shown in the graph below. We went back to the last crypto bear market in 2018 and assumed a starting house price of R1 million, inflated for average house price increases over the subsequent years to 2022. We end up with a house price that has appreciated about 15% over four years in rand terms.
25 bitcoin [Oct 2021] SA house prices measured in bitcoin increase for the first time in a decade [Apr 2022] The exercise is a bit of fun with little practical value, since there are relatively few people around who bought BTC at R700 back in 2011. Many of those who did couldn’t believe their luck when it hit R10 000 in 2016 and sold out at a handsome profit, only to watch it cruise past R1 million late 2020, before collapsing again to below R300 000 in 2022. Source: Moneyweb, Ycharts.