Bitcoin Forum

Right now, it seems like bitcoin is moving slowly. Winklevoss ETF is in regulatory hell. GBTC sits there (not trading) with <100 BTC in bids. Still few places in your average city where you can use bitcoin. Remittances are not really catching on as fast as we thought.

But in reality, bitcoin in 2013 was 100% amateur bullshit. Alpaca socks, Mark Karpeles, friedcat, and DPR.

It's really hard for me to decide whether we're moving fast or slow.

It's too new too judge, only geeks and VC entrepeneurs see the potential, just like at the begining only a few saw the potential for the internet. I would say it's moving a similar pace. It took years for the internet to become usable for the average pleb, just like every other new technology out there. Give it more time.

The internet, or more specifically TCP/IP protocols, which would become the modern internet was invented in in 1983. Bitcoin is the internet before the TCP/IP protocols. Now think about that and how long it to for YOU to get the hang of the internet. When you think about the long run it doesn't matter from year to year.

The price has definately something to do with it. The hype surrounding Bitcoin was at it's peak when the price reached $1000 and every Tom, Dick and Harry jumped in to make easy money.

Most people joined too late to get into the action of solo mining and they jumped onto cloud mining as a alternative... Now most cloud mining turned out to be fancy Ponzi schemes and people turned their back on Bitcoin, because they were losing money.

It's the same thing, when people discover new gold deposits in a area... You have a crazy "Gold Rush" and exitement going around... and then once everyone staked their claim, things tend to settle down. The people who were late to the party, then create secondary businesses {Eg. selling shovels and wood} ..... In Bitcoin, that compares to the 3rd party services and all the VC investors coming in now.

Before you know it, a city is born and a thriving economy is created around these gold deposits... We are at the stage, where most claims are staked and shovels are in demand  ;D

I think we might stick in this $200-$300 range for a while and perhaps never see $500 again.

Bitcoin is opening doors and will continue to open doors for digital currencies. However, within the next 5 years, I think a few of the top altcoins will step up and probably surpass the original bitcoin in terms of popularity and market capitalization.

Which altcoins do you think have the potential for that?  I think the majority are simply clones of the original bitcoin source code with a few variable changes.

Yes, I think in retrospect we will think that it expanded crazily quickly.
5 years from the very first block to be used all around the world and having a billions of USD value is a fast expansion.

Ok there have been some free services, such as facebook and twitter that expanded faster, but there is very little trust or ability to lose money with those, so the comparison isn't very fair.

I can imagine people saying, "it was worth over $1000 after 4 years of existance, it just took off straight away!"

The 2013 rise was built on sand. Ever since then it's been pretty miserable for price watchers but it's also been a lesson in going about things in the 'right' way. That is what's being put together now. Things'll be dead for a while yet but They're not going to come until It is built.

First of all the Winklevoss ETF is waiting on the NY Bitlicense final revision.  If you can't wait until next month, I don't know what to tell you:

http://www.coindesk.com/lawsky-bitlicense-will-be-finalized-by-end-of-may/

GBTC or Bitcoin Investment Trust is about to trade any day now.  Patience young Padawan!  Soon we'll also have Gemini and Noble Markets as well.  These things all take time...

It feels slow because it is slow... for now.

http://images.angelpub.com/2011/07/7421/exponential-curve.png

Yes. I am shocked at how quickly this is all happening. The growth I have seen in the past 5 years I thought would take 10-15 years.

I don't know what to say but gut feeling tells me that if it really takes off, it will go up extremely fast. But right now even though there is growth, it could be less noticeable no thanks to the slump in price and a bunch of scam exchangers and ponzi schemes riding on the popularity of bitcoin and took opportunity of it. Just relax, the ETF is in the pipeline for sometime now and last I heard it needs to sort out with the regulatory issue. It will be there.

not really, 6 years... ism't that fast, and still there is a long way to go before bitcoin will see its fully potential, we are like at 10% max(not talking about price here)

Compared to other popular digital goods it's growing very slow, but bitcoin is innovating money as a whole and when it comes down to that it has to compete and deal with strong corrupt companies, governments, banks, payment processors etc. and compared to these guys it's growing super fast.

We are at ~0.1% of adoption potential

probably you are right(maybe a bit more, like 0.1-0.5 range), i overestimated it deliberately, because i wasn't sure about the right percentage, but my % is based on everything not just adoption or price, but also the technology around bitcoin

These 2 charts always seem to put my mind more at ease and put things in perspective:



https://i.imgur.com/LJPjOQ4.png

https://i.imgur.com/jfK7KoQ.png



Just a matter of time...

Indeed, all the indicators show clear progress. The price is still way up compared to when it launched, which was worthless. And the price when something is this new (and 5 years is still new, we are still at 0.1 version) is going to be crazy.

In my opinion, the technology is moving fast but the acceptance of Bitcoin and cryptocoin in common stuck. I guess it needs a new good reason for most people to think about an alternative like a new financial crisis.

i guess the peak rise of Bitcoin was a great factor and the slow rate of the coin in recent times

i love you dude  ;D - very wise words.

in my view we are moving fast and i love to watch it.

I don't think the acceptance of Bitcoin is stuck. It's a new kind of technology with the potential to change the current financial system.

Acceptance and adoption will take time. At this point several fiat currencies are heaving severe problems, that will make people search for alternatives.

I believe we're moving quite fast, even though it's clear that facebook grew faster.

I believe it really depends on where we are going right now. Is this whole thing fizzles out we will see it as a spectacular experiment which went wrong in the end. Nevertheless it will be a very interesting thing having been part of this all. If we continue to go up though, I believe the rise will look quite spectacular in retrospect.

IMO, the major waves of bubble are always planned and driven by institutional traders, now after MTGOX went down, and chinese exchanges heavily restricted, where should these whales drive the next wave? Bitfinex might be the right place to look at, but they are still too young to facilitate a 100x speculative bubble

I had heard about the metoric rise of bitcoin, and then some time later I got into bitcoin. I had thought the meteroic rise was years back, but when i checked thegraphs, it was only a year, and it was worth 5$ only a year before that. I think we are moving incredibly fast.

Considering that we are changing the concept of currency and commerce as ingrained and known to man for centuries, I'd say Bitcoin is moving very fast.

I don't need to look back further than the last 4-5 years to know it's grown insanely fast. It seems like yesterday that Roger Ver had the only brick n mortar store in the world that accepted Bitcoin and I was mining 20-25 coins a day with only GPUs. Now I can walk around the city and spend my coin at a bunch of places and you need warehouses full of special equipment to mine any substantial amount of Bitcoin. We've gone from a handful of nerds playing with a new technology to a world full of (almost) normal people using it to buy real products online and in stores. I remember being so excited when Jeremy (from SpendBitcoins) started selling Amazon gift cards. I remember showing my wife my first Amazon purchase for Bitcoin and proving to her it was real money. Before that she wanted to have me committed for turning our garage into, as she called it, a box fan and video card storage room. lol If you told me overstock.com and Microsoft would accept Bitcoin 4 years ago I would have thought you were nuts. It's been crazy fast.

Altcoins have potentials, NXT is one of the ones .

Isn't NXT pre-mined? I agree with you about altcoins, the altcoin market could boom in the next 5 years but beware of scams.

yes it will growing very fast and in coming days it will be acepted by many peoples !!

Those figures could be manipulated, peter todd once mentioned this.  However i would be confident the network is growing in all areas, it doesnt take charts to know this.  The only thing which is slow atm is the price.

The growth of facebook will slow, but bitcoin will continue to grow for many years.

In fairness the growth of facebook has to slow, unless they want everyone in the world to have multiple accounts!
Bitcoin has a higher potential market than facebook, but is way way behind in terms of growth, but then I use facebook more often than I use Bitcoin, and I am probably a big bitcoin user (I use it whenever I can, within reason)

When bitcoin is accepted in more places, then it will have a tipping point when more people will start using it.  Much like facebook, if your friends are all on facebook and you are on myspace, you will move to facebook.

I think it has grown pretty fast, though we have seen some stagnation recently. I think we will see spurts of growth over the next couple of years but what we really need is some huge industries to get involved like the remittance market or gambling and sex/adult service industries. Those would likely accelerate bitcoin's growth rapidly.

Yeah, that's a very good analysis. It's a very sad thing though to read our beloved cat's name in that list. I do believe though that many of those projects and companies were very good in their days, and right now we just need some time to transit over to the big money and regulations.

Theoretically is has a bigger market as nearly everyone on the planet uses cash as opposed to social networks but to be honest most of the world these days already has a Facebook so I think social networks will likely remain bigger than bitcoin.

The theoretical market capitalization of Bitcoin after mainstream update is on the trillions, as stated by the Winklevii, it makes sense to think so since BTC aims to defeat all existing money transfer methods combined.

Yes, it is growing very fast and I am surprised to see this.

Bitcoin is only Six years old.
Taking that into consideration I wouldn't say it's moving fast.
I would say it's ahead of it's time  ;)

Well, all these regulations, bad news/publicity and thefts/hacks tend to slow adoption in my opinion.
Other than that I think the technology behind it is moving blazing fast.

Even banks and governments are considering utilizing the block chain technology.

+1 I'm quite amazed by the progress despite the seemingly orchestrated efforts to steer people away from it.

Funnily, most of the "average" people around me still seem to parrot the mainstream narrative (underground money, illicit uses, money laundering) without giving it a second thought.

Bitcoin grew tremendously fast over the last year.. Just look at all the start UPS, more professional exchanges and infrastructure being build.

Only thing that is lacking for now is price, but it will come when everything else establishes.

I think yes its gonna grew amazingly fast the only thing it needs is the mass adoption of the bitcoins from the society and the countries across the globe if the demand is more than it will directly attract the supply and if supply goes at the peak no one can stop it in growing.

its the future of the globe.. and you cant afford to neglect the fact that if you hold bitcoin at present then you are a wealthy gentlemen in the future..and its going to be grow amazingly fast and the best as people start accepting it and start using it as a virtual currency.

I don't like the sound of "virtual currency". It's like it isn't real or it doesn't exist. I think this must be a barrier for a good number of people.

It's not good terminology, it's true. I think it is used as a slight put down by people who refuse to know better.

When we are talking about new technology that is going to change the world, at the begining it is all a big turmoil. At the beginning of the internet, a lot of shit happened fast, billonaires here and there (mark cuban etc), lots of stuff and scams etc, but at the end it was a global success.

 For now world is enjoying if price stability ilusion,it can change at any moment

The only one thing is that most transaction and mining is coming from China
Chinise are smart,with his low cost energy thay can mine at that price and kill the competition

will be more free or low cost energy that moment i think something can change,or something in finacial world
that can happen at any moment,or news from China like Baidu accepting btc,demand from that countries
anytime btc is rising there are some news about hackingm souspicious a little

"Slow & Steady Wins the Race"

At present we are moving slow but the situation would not be same in the future. Many countries are not aware about the bitcoins and it will take time for everyone to trust the bitcoin and start adopting it so even we are not moving amazingly fast ..no issues..in future its gonna be great.