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0 pointsjnbiche11y ago0 comments

Interest among businesses and institutions has increased and to an impressive extent. Interest among users seems to have stagnated.

If you can show any metrics pointing to an increasing rate of adoption among users, I would be greatly heartened.

Instead, we seem to be reaching a wall between the early adopters and early majority. This is a well-known chasms in the technology adoption cycle, and I'm a bit concerned about Bitcoin's ability to jump it, particularly given the current "hodl" mentality of most users of the coin.

On the other hand, if there's another big jump in price (not unlikely), then there will likely be increased interest among users. So I'm not saying Bitcoin will never gain majority adoption. I'm just saying that at this point, things don't look as promising as they did a year ago.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

waterlesscloud11y ago· 2 in thread

What's your indication that it's stagnated? Other than a guess?

JeremyBanks11y ago

I don't know if this is what jnbiche was referring to, but maybe the transaction volume isn't growing particularly fast. I don't know how useful/descriptive these numbers are, but from a quick look at blockchain.info's charts: the absolute number of transactions per day looks like it's only up by about 20% over the last year [1]. However, the USD value of transactions conducted is up by something like 200% [2]. I don't know how we could tell what fraction of these represent actual purchases, as opposed to individuals just moving their own coins around...

[1]: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=1year

[2]: https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

cgjaro11y ago

Actually the number of transactions grew +90% year-over-year, which is pretty fast growth! At +90% year-over-year, Bitcoin will reach 600k transfers/day in 3.5 years (what Western Union does today). Compare 2013Q2 with 2014Q2:

- 2013Q2: 3.0 million transactions

- 2013Q3: 3.8 million transactions

- 2013Q4: 4.8 million transactions

- 2014Q1: 5.7 million transactions

- 2014Q2: 5.7 million transactions

You can get these values from the graph at http://www.quandl.com/BCHAIN/NTRAN-Bitcoin-Number-of-Transac... (select QUARTERLY).

ghshephard11y ago

Ironically, a big jump in price is of of the negative things that can happen to Bitcoin. The best thing that could possibly happen to increase the utilization of Bitcoin as a medium for transaction, as has always been the case, is that Bitcoin gets pegged to normal a bucket of Fiat Currency, (USD, INR, EUR, GBP) and then flatlines.

And, I don't know how much you use Bitcoin to buy things, but Bitcoin is about 20x more useful this year than it was last year in terms of making purchases, particularly now that Apple lets you put a wallet on your iPhone. Purchasing from your smartphone is going to be the way 99%+ of people use bitcoins on a daily basis, so that change is huge.

The metrics that really need to be tracked are: What percentage of people have made a single, transaction from a wallet in the previous month, and, 2-5, 6-20, 21+ transactions a month. That will give us the best understanding of Bitcoins growth as a transaction medium.

And, of course, this all ignores other innovative uses of the Blockchain, upon which Bitcoin as a currency might have just been the Trojan horse in enabling.

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