Bitcoin Forum

Who is an early adopter in your opinion? How do you define it?

2009-2012. Early adopters
2013-present. Late adopters.

Anybody who bought Bitcoin less than 100$ is early adopter to me. It doesn't matter what year he bought.

We are stil early adopters.. The masses still have not discovered and embraced bitocin, therefore, we are still within the first 1% to discover bitcoin.

Yes, we may have missed the massive price rise from cents to hundreds of dollars, but we are still far from the endgame. Once the masses embrace bitcoin, we will all be called early adopters.

In my opinion, early adopter is someone who knows bitcoin when it was able to be mined with a CPU.
That time when the difficulty was much less than nowadays

An early adopter is one who has mined coins with his laptop/desktop when cpu  mining was stil enough and when the reward was 50 BTC per block. Like it or not we are not early adopters anymore.

I consider the super early adopters to be people who were around up to the end of the GPU mining era, so mid 2013, just before the price went really high. As NorrisK said, we are all still early adopters, Bitcoin is still young and those of us here now are still a part of a niche market and a special group of people. The late adopters won't come until Bitcoin goes mainstream.

2009-2013: Super early adopters
2013-present: early adopters
When BTC goes mainstream (2020?) and later: late adopters.

I'd say if you own / use BTC today you are an early adopter. BTC is still in its infancy.

Of course the people who is willing to take a risk, when everyone else thinks they're crazy.

My take on this is that the definition of "early adopter" is going to change as time goes on.  In 30 years, we/they'll probably consider someone who was using btc in 2015 to be an early adopter (if btc is still being used).  I think it's way too early to define this though.

Oh, that logic. So people who bought at 1000$ in November 2013 are early adopters? That's crazy to think about.

I think you might look back on this in 5 years and say opps maybe  i got that one wrong.... :-\  even those who bought in during the 2013 rise where actually early adopters.  most off those i know who bought in during the last couple years have been into bitcoin for years before they bought.

 If you ask andreas antonopoulous he said on the joe rogan interview (and i tend to agree, that those in bitcoin now arnt even the early adopters, "we are the lunatic fringe"  ;D).  Think about it most off us are sticking vast amounts of money into something that most people think wont be around in 6 months never mind 60 years.....lol  we do it because we believe in the technology.

 To me early adopter are going to be those who buy in once all the banks and financial institutions come on board, once they start promoting it then people will start to join in because they believe it will be safe.

but to say that those who bought in during 2013 are late adopters is just crazy, most people in the world haven't got a clue about bitcoin what are they going to be called in 10 years ancient adopters,  ??? ??? ???

 ;D

We are all still early adopters. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a perspective problem. People who were around before 2013 were pioneers.

It is still mineable with a CPU, but the mined bitcoins would be worth nothing. Early adopters are the ones that were been able to find blocks with their CPU every few hours.

This is a currency. You never know what will happen when everyone knows about bitcoin. Gold had the same situation - when people started using it, it was worth very, very much.
Lets hope that bitcoin will someday be priceless :)

Alot of people I mention bitcoin to have no idea what it is... I feel as if we need some sort of team of leaders in order to take Bitcoin to the next level

Don't agree with you here. What you are describing are the pioneers. The ones that saw the potential and took the risk. Early adopters copme after that and has nothing to do with the time frame, but all to do with the amount of the populations that has adopted something.

According to this image, we are even still innovators, as early adopters come in to play only after the first 2,5% of the population.

https://apenotes.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/curve-499x275.jpg

When there are still certain countries with only one or two Bitcoins ATMs, that hints to me that we've yet to reach the early adopter phase.

Early adopters were the people who mined BTC with their home computers, when it was possible. So that was before the arms race began with the invention of Asic computers and guys creating BTC farms in China. Before 2012?

I jumped in in early 2013, so I'm not an early adopter.

I think that anyone who used Bitcoin from around 2010, up until now, are all early adopters. Bitcoin is still in its developing stages. Look at something like gold, it has been around for sooo long. Bitcoin has only been around for 7 years.

I think what you are describing, is the innovators of Bitcoin. They are the ones that really started Bitcoin up and took the risk of mining. The early adopters are the people that bought the Bitcoins around 2010.

yes this is true infact its in its early days and expecting a good evaluation later down the years

Where did you get that image and also how did whomever made that graph come up with those stats?

We are all still early adopters. :)

Either we are all early adopters, or this project has failed. There are a few million people using BTC, we are probably a few billion people short of peak usage.

If this thing scales and continues, all of us will be seen as part of the "innovator" phase.

If you don't think this, SELL. Because you don't believe in the project (or you don't understand it).

Anyone can get over 1 free bitcoin are early adoperts

I am very optimistic and have faith in this tech so i think we are all early adopters. Bitcoin have huge growth potential so early stage should last at least for next few years. Till we achieve to Bitcoin become mainstream payment processor, everyone who join should consider him self as early adopter in my opinion.

Even the one who start using bitcoin in some of the countries where bitcoin was recently accepted can also be early adopters. But in global concept we can say people who start mining between 2009-2012 as early adopters.

Satoshi.

My thoughts exactly. Historically speaking innovations usually happened after one or a few pioneers designed something new. Then a latency phase happened and then it was the boom that made it broadly accepted and used.
If we are in the latency phase before the boom, then yes we are still early adopters and early miners should be called pioneers. But if we aren't early adopters anymore, then it means that the boom has already happened (and failed) and that bitcoin is a failure too, which I hope is not your expectation, people. Of course there was the big krash at the beginning of 2014 but bitcoin survived it, and it even helped bitcoin become stronger. Only thing it did was to delay its success (provided it is indeed destined to succeed).

As for me I'm very optimistic as to the future of bitcoin but one shouldn't be in too much of a hurry: if the boom is to happen quickly when it happens, it doesn't mean that it has to happen tomorrow or even in the next ten years. Not being in a hurry is the key.

Satoshi is not an early adopter btw, but an inventor, or at least a creator. I just wanted to say it right now before we get pages and pages of people claiming that Satoshi is "the only early adopter" (which is bound to happen anyway but yeah, anyway...).

At first I thought that those who mined bitcoins way back 2010-2011 were the early adopters then I realized bitcoin was not on mainstream yet so I guess it is safe to say that we, current bitcoiners, were still considered early adopters. I might be wrong though , its just my own opinion and my definition ;D

In marketing terms, about the first 4 to 8 percent that starts using the product or service. Marketing is were the definition of early adopters has been created :)

Yes, yes this totally right bitcoin doesn't have 10 years yet, so if we take a look on bigger picture we are all early adopters.
I didn't spent much time thinking about this topic, but after seeing this graphic posted here, and some comments I realize how much harder was for this innovators and first followers then for is now. Congratulations for these people, and thank you.

Are the people adopting bitcoins in 2015 in the laggards group? I am sad now  :-\

i think sathosi,here is the first Bitcoin block was mined, by Satoshi, on 3 January 2009.
but i dont have more information bout early adopter.

Early adopters are those who took risks to use the innovations before mass adoption. We are not at mass adoption phase yet. We are early adopters. If bitcoin is going bust tomorrow, we are late adopters.  :D

someone that mined the coins when the difficult was really cheap, someone that accumulated 10k easily at launch and someone that has then the chances to buy still very cheap coin

also a rich guy can be difined as a early adopted if he bought bitcoin at 100 each

Basically I think "early adopters" are people who were using bitcoin before the price spike. Because before that, bitcoin was nothing and it was really hard to know about it. Early adopters found out and used bitcoin, and are currently super-rich. Anyone after that are latecomers, and they aren't super-rich. Oh, being rich/mining alot of bitcoin solo also defines you as an early adopter in my books ;D
 

There is a difference between the early adopters and the starters , people who gave away thousands of coins through faucets (gavin) are the starters and promoters as well. We could consider ourselves as (late) early adopters as we are late by a year or two  but still are able to buy/sell with our basic jobs but only if there some success in Coin or else no one is early nor late.

For me an early adopter is someone with high curiosity for the very new and maybe (not always) even (in the first seen) strange things. Then have the desire to be part of those. Or to have from those. There can be two kind of early adopters. The firsts are they who after the first attraction begin to "dig" about those to learn more. Normally more understand more take form a based decision about the becoming more part or to leave those. Then are the second ones who want to try just for trying with the hope that maybe something can be from their effort. Without taking the effort to know more. Or to know only very few possible useful things related to their choice.

Here are not classified the people who know everything of the new thing since the beginning or at least before the appearance on the public of that. They become part of those because have big hopes that their chooses will bring almost for sure benefits. They know all and cannot be named as early adopters. As for me, to adopt something mean that this thing is created (or is in its way of creation, or it is clearly ready to be made) and someone, knowing it in the just told ways and phases, make him interested about it. Following the previous meaning, the ones who knows everything before the phases told in the previous sentence, can be considerate more as a part of the new thing than an early adopter of it.

You might be right.
We can define early adopters based these two factors.
1. Until bitcoin gets a stable prices
2. Until all the bitcoins are mined out
With respect to both the cases we are already into bitcoin ecosystem. I'm so proud because I'm one them.

Even if Bitcoin is eventually adopted by only 1% of the world population, we are still in the innovator phase according to that graph.

 ;D "Late adopters"....you are a funny guy


@odolvlobo

Thx  :-*

It would be nice to think that anyone buying now is still an early adopter but I think that maybe fantasy.  Sub 50 probably.

Late adopters are those who have not born yet, and they are endless  ;D

Personally I believe that we have just crossed the chasm and are about to enter the Early Majority phase. Why? Because there was a lull in activity in the last 2 years where nothing seemed to happen, or even the sense that Bitcoin is dying.

https://i.imgur.com/rhaezir.jpg

2009-2012. Very early adopter.
2013-2015. Early adopter.
2016-2020. Reasonably early adopter.
2021-2030. Good moment to step in for institutional entities.
2031-2040. Good moment to sell a good part of your coins, and enjoy your life as multi millionare.

Early bitcoin adopters are those who mined and started to learn and earn  bitcoin from  around 2009 to 2012. D***, those starting right now can't be considered early adopters.

this

I'm glad that I'm into early adoption period.
But as per these phase calculations, to become multi millionaire I need to wait till 2031. Bitter truth. But I already knew that bitcoin is not the "become rich in quick" kind of program.

It really depends on how you look at it, from different time periods... If you look at a price perspective... it would change as the price goes up. Let's say within a year from now, the

price skyrockets to $ 100 000 per bitcoin... then people coming in after that, would scream ..." Early adopters" to everyone who bought bitcoins at the current price. {$420}

My definition of early adopters, would be 2009 - 2011 ... During these times, Gavin had faucets giving 1 to 2 bitcoins per claim and people mined with desktop pc's. {CPU's}  ::)

I think I agree with some sort of timescale like the above, there's no way somebody who for example bought their first bitcoin today is a late adopter when most of the world doesn't even know exactly what bitcoin is in any great detail.

I guess it also depends how successful bitcoin becomes, if the price went to 0 tomorrow nobody is going to give a shit, but if bitcoin goes to 100,000 dollars in 15 years then everybody on this forum right now is an early adopter.

I'm too happy that I'm one of the early adopter of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not any program. But early adopter are considered as investors and get a chance to be millionaires. Becoming multi millionaire by adopting bitcoin is just a by-product of bitcoin ecosystem. Bitcoin is a electronic cash system for any user regardless of the time period, they are adopting it.

As Bitcoin is still in it's early stages. I think that anyone that has ever used Bitcoin, are considered to be the early adopters.

Exactly. Everyone has their own opinion on this topic and there are many ways to look at it. So really, everyone that has made a reply is correct in their own way.

they are also the only one that matter, since early adopters are only waiting for them to become rich

I think that early adopters are those who have/had lots of bitcoins and some of them didn't know the value of it that will come after some years.

In 20 years, when btc may be 1k$.. we all are early adopters now..

There are graphs like that all of the internet and basically all these stats do is show a normal statistical distribution which is divided into phases. Not number crunching required for that.


In that case, 2,5% of that 1% would be the innovators. Which currently means around 1.5 - 2.0 million people would be innovators at that stage. Which probably means even if we use these less favorable numbers, we are still in the very early stages.

2009-2012 lunatic fringe
2013- today early adopters

The reason is that the number of Bitcoin users is still very small compared with the other payment systems and markets where Bitcon is digging in right now.
Late adopters will be the average joes who doesn't care about financials so much and will jump on board when friends of them are already using it or when they see more and more news and mainstream media about it.
Everyone here in this forum still is having a front seat imo.

optimistic. I like that. :D

2009-2011 =  epic early adopters - brilliant innovators and keen sense of the future of the technology
2012-2014 =  very early adopters - people with instinct to understand potential and also attracted to price action
2015 = still early adopters - people getting on board from what the believers and innovators built
After Bitcoin goes mainstream = way too late

At the end of the day this is all relative based on the price.  If it goes ballistic to 1mill/coin than anyone under 1K is an early adopter. 

Everybody on this board is early adopters. When BTC goes past 10k mark and  has started to become a little mainstream, around that time a line will cross and "you" are not an early adopter anymore.

I consider myself an erly-ish adopter.. I started mining BTC with my laptop when difficulty was around 12M or so and remember watching the advent of the ASIC technology destroy the GPU miners.

I heard about BTC around $3 and laughed at it, Started buying them and doing services for them around $100 or so.
BTC has been a hell of a ride so far and I've made some obvious mistakes.. But I think the Future of BTC looks good for the next few years.
Educating people is my way of contirbuting to bitcoin. As well as accepting BTC at my businesses.

As of now, early adopters would be the people who managed to get Bitcoin when it was just a curiosity with almost no value. If Bitcoin goes mainstream with mass adoptions, then "early adopters" could be us, who use it when not everybody knew about it.

I would say that everyone involved before bitcoin becomes commonplace and used in everyday life is an early adopter.

This is pretty accurate, even tho some people in the early days just got lucky and wanted to buy some weed off the internet or something, bought the coins, then forgot about them and found out later it was an huge thing, but most of the people was dedicated cryptographers, programers etc, and then a few lucky guys that were at the right place doing the right thing (buying cheap as hell BTC).

The arms race began long before there were Asics. Going from cpu-mining to multi cpu-rigs to the first humble gpu-miners to multi-gpu rigs to industrial style gpu-farms. The arms race was at least already full on in q1 of 2011. Apart from the definition I'd say early adopters all the way to end 2012.

off-topic: By that time you could have become a litecoin early adopter/miner and would have seen considerable gains much like BTC if you kept your coins. Nowadays, of course the altcoin game is pretty much over. I don't get why they don't switch ltc to sha256, or multi-algo- I'd mine some ltc again just for fun. Guess it's dead.

The guy that did Litecoin is still pretty active in social media and I think gives crypto related lectures, the software itself is rather slow and always lags behind Bitcoin. Its reddit community is still somewhat active. Id say there are still chances that Litecoin may shine again.

Building up a very high price for Bitcoin takes several decades. It doesn't happen overnight. You can see it as a huge extra retirement bonus. ;D

It's a currency but early adopter means someone who has advantage over others to bought first. Your logic doesn't make any sense. People who bought at 1000$ are not early adopters. Early adoption phase is already finished in 2012.

i think the early adopters of bitcoin is satohi nakamoto and friends,or maybe her family also early dopter ;D

Yes, the very-early-adopters  ;D

Early should be the people who bought bitcoins and traded them before the breakout in 2013.
Everyone who bought it after that are mostly wannabe's (like me) who wanted to earn a lot of money ;)

We are still considered as early adopters considering that the version of core is still at 0.1xx. ;D But seriously, we are still early adopters given that there are still plenty of room for growth and development on the bitcoin ecosystem. We could still establish our own prints on this community before it goes mainstream. Too many businesses and other things are still lacking; we can still fill that spot if ever we wanted to. :)

We first need to understand couple facts. Bitcoin history is not long. Therefore, in the future WE as well might be called early adopters as well.
However from our point in time early adopters are people who knew about bitcoin in its earliest years when bitcoin value were non existent or very low.

Late adopters will be the people embracing Bitcoin when you have everyday ladies chitchatting about it at the local grocery (which will accept Bitcoin as well).

Also agree. It's only the beginning. History is written on our eyes, our actions or inaction. We all are early adopters.

For me anyone that was in the Bitcoin world when Satoshi was still around is considered as an early adopter. So from the begging to December 12th of 2010. This is still also possible to consider 2011 members as early adopters.

I define it as someone that gave all their btc to pirate, Zhou Tong or an ASIC preorder company and no longer visits this forum. lol

The people who remember the home of Bitcoin being at sourceforge. :D

When you bought btc for less than 1$ for one you are pretty early for me. ;D

You're probably right, but I remember that nearly 3 years ago, on this board, there were several guys, individuals, explaining that they had mined their own coins. So I tried, leaving my computer running for 3 days, something I had never done before. Sadly, it was already too late to join the party as an amateur. I went back to switch off the computer when I'm not using it.

Anybody who bought Bitcoin for less than $20 (and held on) is a very early adopter/true believer.
You can say everyone is still early right now, to some degree.

For me, Early Adopters is the people who used Bitcoin before the price rocketed up to $1000. Surely they strongly believe in Bitcoin, because that time Bitcoin was not even worth more than 1 dollar.
I'm proud of y'all Early Adopters :)

Cpu mining was around up until the end of 2011 before gpu mining took over thr scene. I still remember how many dudes on this forum posted their balances and explained how they obtained such an amount (even remember that guy who owns 300k+ of bitcoins). Only if I dug deeper back then, I would probably be an epic early adopter by now.

For me, I consider 2009 - 2011 the early adopters therefor I'm also one of them ... I still remember that we were much active on facebook groups, talking about how to do mining with GPU's (multiple)... Post our rigs there were in was purely tweaked computer rigs (not much asics then)... Faucets were much fun then in comparison to now.

from my experiences with bitcoin, in the future i'd see early adopters as those who can sit down and talk about the madness of the scene when we only had Mt.Gox, so literally everyone was trading on one platform, it was fun because everyone was on the same page and all the action happened in one place.

I'll never forget the day the lag came in and we plummeted from the all time high to about $55, no long bear market just pure carnage in a matter of hours, orders not being placed, people placing sells at one price and it finally going through when the price was 1/3 of when they sold, real blood in the streets and everyone going nuts. Then trading was halted and we all had to wait for it to restart, battle lines were drawn, the buyers vs the sellers. I'll never forget the action of those 24-48hrs.

For me that was the early adopter scene, we basically had gox + silk road and that was it. It was like being able to talk about the amateur scene before btc grew up, it was raw and a lot of fun. Once bitstamp emerged and then other exchanges things got more spread out and that intensity i havent seen again since.

That will be my memory of early adopter btc that i'd sit down and talk about with someone whilst having a beer and thinking what a crazy time it was.

I consider early adopters to be 2009-2010 bitcoin users and those who acquired it before the bubble popped. Without a doubt, the implementation of bitcoin will be tedious and a long path but it shall slowly and surely be acquired.  :D

People who were able to mine with their CPU can be considered as early adopters. Further more, we can add some more period to this consideration, GPU period but before ASIC.
Those who mined or bought bitcoins when the CPU/GPU mining was profitable, may be considered as early adopters.

so those that bought at 21 are not early adopters?  ;D

i think it's better to assess those early adopter by the amount they had at those time

everyone with a big stash of coins in the early stage, is an early adopter

i think they are the first believers of bitcoin, they had faith when bitcoin is falling and still stay to support it.
so i commend them from theyre faith in bitcoin.

Consider Everett Rogers' model of diffusion of innovation:

http://imgur.com/w9AVzs6

Roughly the first 16% of users would be considered early adopters or innovators.  Based on the number of wallets/transactions, this means anyone who adopted by Q1 2013.

People who solo mined 50 BTC blocks using their full node in gen=1 mode.

Those early adopters had a great vision because they invested in Bitcoin before its rise keeping in mind that it would either rise or become worthless still they took the risk and invested their money into Bitcoin and it worked out so I would define the early adopters as Masters.

Definition of "early adopters" will change over the years and I guess it will change with the value of bitcoin changing .
For us the early adopters are the people who knew bitcoin at the start and was mining using their normal PC's or getting bitcoins from faucets (which now worth so much) , for those early adopters ... we are late adopters .
but for the next adopters ... we will be like the early adopters for them while they will be the late adopters . It's all about the price if you ask me.

Gotta go with anyone who was pre MT gox! if you had an account there (I did yikes lol)
and did mining with your video card.

Also if you were in a BFL pre order for a jalepeno and waited a year hehe

I disagree greatly with the idea that we are all early adopters, I personally think it stopped being early adopter space when the price passed 100. Early adopters get rich and in all likeliness very few of us, unless you are holding a decent chunk will become millionaires. The people who pump and call for a million dollar bitcoin havent done the math on what actually needs to happen for that to take place. a 50k bitcoin, possible, but 1m is near impossible.

To me the early adopters are the people wo were into bitcoin before 2013.
sure we are also early, but most of here went into bitcoin to make loads of money.

i think we still in the early adopters area because there still a lot of people who don't know what bitcoin is and bitcoin is still not mainstreamed properly so people who will come after the global mainstreaming will be the followers

Probably the next gen of adopters? The real early adopters are now the founders of bitcoin companies and are filthy rich.

I think, besides satoshi Nakamoto, there was so many early adopter , they can be called early adopter because using bitcoin first, perhaps you could say they've adopted a bitcoin in 2009, the year in which satoshi Nakamoto using bitcoin and may begin to introduce to the public.

People who are now rich because of bitcoin :D

I think everyone who went into Bitcoin did it for the only purpose to profit in some way.