With China’s population being more than 4 times that of the US, I would find you guilty as charged, on the basis of not considering the possibility :)

I think it is surprising. The US has a larger nominal GDP (which is what matter for this calculation), and USD is also rather unique as the global reserve currency. 60% of USD are held outside the US.

These stats would seem to indicate that either CNY moves much more slowly than USD (which would also surprise me) or that there are also colossal reserves of CNY outside of China (which I believe the Chinese government is actively working to prevent with capital controls?).

Population isn’t that big a factor. India has 36x as many people as Canada, but INR and CAD have about the same total cap.

I think the site is reporting M2 for each of the currencies, which includes much more than just the bills + coins. E.g. the value of all USD coins + bills is "only" $2.1 trillion [1] vs. an M2 that's 10x larger. The 60% of all USD are held overseas statistic only applies to coins + bills and not M2 [2].

An explanation could be that people in Chinese save more and keep more of their savings in banks, compared to Americans?

[1] "Currency in circulation" in https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/20210506/ [2] https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/jp-koning/how-much-u-s-cur...

Yes these stats don't make sense, I don't believe them. US Nominal GDP is way higher than China plus USD is still the world's reserve currency ie has massive usage outside the US.

According to the Federal Reserve, China's money supply is larger than the US. GDP levels don't directly map into money supply.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MYAGM2CNM189N

The more interesting theoretical question here is whether BTC should be compared to M1 or M2 (or another metric entirely).

IMF recently reported that China's economy has already surpassed USA by annual GDP when measured in purchasing power parity (PPP) - as opposed to market exchange rates (MER). [0]

I don't pretend to understand this much further so I welcome comments from anyone who does.

[0] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-now-world%E2%80%9...

PPP is totally irrelevant for this discussion.

China's monetary expansion policy has been way more aggressive than the US's.

It would be more interesting to see this indexed against each country's respective population