Bitcoin vs Inflation

thingiverse

Jared Bergan 22 November 2021 George Mason University Math 401: Mathematics Through 3D Printing This week’s project was based around the idea of data visualization. Mathematica has access to countless amounts of data whether its weather data, financial, geographic, and more, and we can use this to create interesting printable objects that give a lot of information. Using this feature, I obtained the price of bitcoin over the past four years and manually entered the rates of inflation over the past four years to create plot of the two and learn more how the two work together. Traditionally, the idea of a currency that is prone to inflation is one that has an increase in supply and is not backed by gold. Gold is considered the ultimate store of value due to its scarcity so there is no way to inject more gold into the financial system. Bitcoin was designed to mimic this so that it has a stable inflation rate and to be a less risky was to store money. Since there is a finite amount of bitcoin to be mined and we will see less and less found until there is none left, we can expect bitcoin’s rate of inflation to eventually reach zero, the same as gold. For this object, the rate of inflation by monthly period was multiplied by a static scalar so that the 3D graph could be more easily understood. A zero slope between the price of bitcoin and inflation at the time represents bitcoin’s value staying the same with respect to USD. A negative slope, with the price of bitcoin high and inflation low, represents when bitcoin “beat” inflation and gained value over USD. Finally, the bad case, is when the slope was positive, where the inflation rate was greater than the price of bitcoin, and hence bitcoin lost value with respect to USD. As you can see, most of the time, especially in the last year, bitcoin performs well against inflation. When converted to an STL, the data is shown in its true dimensions which does not look like anything meaningful, so I changed the dimensions to be 60x60x50mm in the slicer and got as shown. The data on inflation for this project was retrieved from the following website: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ For more information, feel free to visit the following website that I used for this project: https://www.ndtv.com/business/how-does-a-rise-in-inflation-impact-bitcoin-prices-2584343