Welcome to the statistical ambiguity of crypto surveys. Here we find out how many Australians actually own crypto and why there are so many different claims.

When Tony Richards, director of payments at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), didn’t believe that nearly a fifth of Australians owned crypto, the latest poll from Finder’s Crypto Report found.

However, the results have been widely publicized and have had a big impact for weeks. They even submitted their method to the Australian Senate Committee as the Center for Technology and Finance’s final report in October.

the opinion poll The August Finder report claims that 17% of Australians own at least one cryptocurrency – 9% own Bitcoin, 8% own Ether, and 5% own Dogecoin.

Is this number appropriate?

Richards thinks these numbers are problematic in the article specified with the Australian Corporate Treasury Association on Nov. 18, saying the numbers were “a little hard to believe”.

“I can’t help but think that the online surveys they run may not be representative of the entire population.”

CoinzProfit does tweeted:

“Reserve Bank of Australia’s Payments Policy Leader Tony Richards said cryptocurrency growth in 2021 will definitely be driven by influencers and celebrity tweets.”

Richards mentions that “major populations” are older people who live in areas without reliable internet access and says that the online survey “does not cover all classes”.

Dr. Chittaranjan Andrade in report 2020 for the Indian Journal of Medical Psychology, where he notes that online survey forms are often unrepresentative regardless of the topic. Online surveys are only completed by people who are sufficiently interested in the topic.

But Graham Cooke, Director of Consumer Research at Finder, defended this methodology:

“Respondents were selected based on age, gender and location to create a sample that would adequately reflect the results of a nationwide survey. We are confident that this will result in a reliable, representative sample of the population. “

The 15-page survey summary report ends with just a few lines explaining the methodology.

“The Finder Consumer Sentiment Tracker is an ongoing nationally representative survey of 1,000 Australians every month, to which more than 27,400 respondents responded between May 2019 and July 2021.”

The survey was carried out by Qualtrics, a company for systems and product applications in data processing (SAP). Qualtrics boasts, “In just ten weeks, Finder increased brand awareness by 23%,” but no additional information about the survey methodology or other insights is available.

A spokesperson for Finder confirmed the following:

“Qualtrics gathers respondents from different panels and can provide incentives in different ways. Some receive a small fee for their participation, some are charitable donations, for example. “

Survey results show differences in the number of participants

This is not particularly important for a finder investigation: there seems to be a new survey every day, the results of which are often contradicting one another.

The YouGov survey commissioned by the Australian exchange Swyftx shows that the number of Australians who own cryptocurrencies is almost 25%. The July survey gathered responses from 2,768 Australian adults and the numbers were weighted using estimates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This poll was found to be compliant with the Australian Polling Boards Code.

Australia’s annual crypto survey | Source: Swyftx

However, neither poll could be accurate. Australia’s population is 25.69 million. This means that 17% of Finder’s Australian population equals approximately 4.37 million people. Meanwhile, 25% of Swyftx are around 6.42 million people.

The difference between the two surveys is more than two million people, more than the entire population of South Australia.

The numbers don’t seem to be reflected in the local stock exchanges either. Exchange Binance Australia claims to have 700,000 users, Easy Crypto Australia has around 15,000 users, and Swyftx has 470,000 users (many from overseas). The BTC market has over 330,000 users in Australia and the Independent Reserve website claims 200,000 users.

Digital Surge, eToro, Coinspot and Coinmama did not respond to user numbers.

Of course, not all Australians use a local exchange for trading cryptocurrencies, but on the other hand, a significant percentage of users are registered with multiple local exchanges. There seems to be a difference of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, between survey results and exchange accounts.

Kraken CEO Jonathon Miller said Kraken presented similar metrics to finders in YouGov market research back in May.

The sample in this survey included 1,027 Australians aged 18 and over. The data were calculated by age, gender and region to reflect the latest estimates from the Census Bureau.

It found that one in five (19%) Australians owned or currently owns crypto and 14% (2.78 million) now own a crypto portfolio.

Pay the survey fee

One problem that can affect the results of crypto-related surveys is that participants in some of these surveys are actually paid fees in crypto.

On November 18, a Premise Data survey of 11,000 respondents in 76 countries found that 41% of people around the world trust Bitcoin versus local currencies.

A separate survey of Premise “contributors” two months earlier found that 23% of its contributors were paid in BTC, and since 2016 the data collection company has paid over $ 1 million in Bitcoin through Coinbase to survey participants in 137 countries around the world .

Nicole Watson, Fellow of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, says:

“If you pay someone bitcoin to fill out a crypto survey, the results will be skewed. People who know what Bitcoin is and want a few sats are more likely to participate. “

In short, the reflectivity is not accurate.

What makes a survey trustworthy?

According to Watson, online surveys are not representative of the general population.

“Online surveys tend to target people who spend more time online, visit certain websites, or use certain apps, depending on where the invitations are placed and who can see them.”

Watson explains that a person’s participation in a survey can be influenced by the survey audience, content, timing, and incentives offered (if any) – both of which can skew results.

For research done in Australia, a great way to verify that the results are reliable is whether or not they have received the Australian Polls Board High Quality Mark. In the UK, you can see if the survey company is a member of the British Polls Council (BPC) and in the US, the National Council of Polls.

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