Bitcoin Forum

I found the following chart interesting. If Bitcoin would be adopted as quickly as the Internet, there would be about 50 million bitcoin users by the end of this year.

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

Are they really comparing a technology like the phone or the radio with ANGRY BIRDS? Is this a joke?

Simple answer is no.

Their 4 years to 50M for internet is a dubious claim.  The first two nodes in the ARPANET which eventually would become the internet was in 1969.  I am pretty sure they didn't mean there were 50 million users in 1973.  Likely they are using some artificial "start of the commercial" internet and counting 4 years from there.

I would also point out that while Facebook grew rapidly the concept of social media took roughly a decade from the first sites to facebook hitting millions of users.  I have long believed Bitcoin will be no different.

Right now there are what, a million unique public keys in the block chain?

Yep, seems so.

Compare Oranges and Apples: check

http://www.beautifulbodybistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/apple-orange.jpg

Gangnam style video has over a billion of views in less than a year, that technology was adopted very quickly  :o

That is interesting. But I wonder how they might differ in adoption also. For example, many people were aware of the internet for years before connecting. With bitcoin it seems like many people go from goggling to some ownership in weeks. The internet was also becoming something you "can't live without", while bitcoin is an option for payment among many.
me-->  ???
 

Let's not kid ourselves. Money is arguable the single most important thing in the entire world. Everyone deals with it on practically a daily basis, and with few exceptions it is needed to live. Most people would rightfully be extremely skeptical of a new form of money especially one that is not "backed by a government" or one that has "no intrinsic value".

The growth in users of Bitcoin will be directly tied to the extent to which people will be willing to overcome an entire lifetime of currency bias and accept something that is totally new and opaque as money. That is to say, that it will be slow. I'm not saying that Bitcoin won't eventually "win" but 50 million users by the end of 2013 ain't happening.

This doesn't mean that the price can't follow a parabolic trajectory though. It can, and will, and is.

 Yeah, but at the point when its rise was at 250k, everyone was talking about will it reach million, and it was like a game, everyone clicked to se what it is. Bitcoin is money, people are not so easy on valuables

Yup, wich is why this chart is pointless. Comparing the phone with angry birds is nonsense.

Nope. Not parabolic trajectory (unless you mean inverse para?)  
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Parabolic_trajectory.svg/641px-Parabolic_trajectory.svg.png

How about rising almost exponentially in the last two months?
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=180&i=&c=0&s=&e=&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=0&p=0&

Those curves don't even remotely resemble each other.

I mean parabolic as in having the shape of a parabola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabola).

Lol, gotcha. :D It's all good.

TC

Anyways, the Internet might not have reached 50 million users after 4 years, but the point here is that technology is generally accepted faster than it used to. I don't think it will take Bitcoin as long as the Internet to reach a critical mass. At a certain point a lot of people will think they are missing the train and will open a wallet.

Lets not forget all the new users who order something from thebitcoinstore and tell their friends about how they saved money using Bitcoin. And that's just one example, there are a lot of very talented and entrepreneurial people within the bitcoin community who will make us reach 50 million people faster than anyone thinks.

I think we're going to see a shake-up in peoples' faith in fiat in the next year or two. Now that a viable alternative to fiat exists, we could see a quick adoption rate if a critical mass lose faith in the central banks in a short period of time. Bitcoin price highs seem to be a leading indicator of future adoption as this past rally illustrates.

50M Bitcoin users.. Even after the last coin is mined, that's less than a half BTC per user. :(

We will see a shake up but it will take place over the course of at least a decade or two. The global econonmy is HUGE, it will take at least a generation to unwind.

What you talking about that 420 coins per person (420 mBTC that is).

If that happens I think I will make a platinum 1 BTC coin.  "Wow you got a WHOLE Bitcoin". :)
Or maybe to be future proof it should say 1,000,0000 microBitcoins.

They're likely confusing WWW with the Internet again. Happens all the time.

Probably.  Did WWW grow that fast.  It "launched" in 1990.  50 million users by 1994?  I guess it is plausible although I don't recall it being that popular.

I got curious and had to look it up. 16 million internet users in 1995 to a billion users ten years later.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

To mrbiggs point, this is money. Nothing accelerates adoption like people watching other people make money.

WWW outside of CERN started in 1993 when Mosaic became available. 50 million by 1997 seems about right.

I remember being pretty confused about www.  It pre-dated my exposure to the Internet after a brief period of messing with BBS's, but I had a terminal connection and got into gopher, usenet, etc first and somehow www didn't mean much to me for a while.  I never really got into irc.  One of the early times I looked into it it seemed like a sea of chat-rooms consisting of a lone pervert looking for someone to remotely diddle.  Probably just bad luck, but it influenced how my involvement in the internet progressed.  I've always tried to remember how confusing it was and have empathy for new users because of this.

Is it even possible to measure how many bitcoin users we currently have?  We can count unique addresses, but most bitcoin users have more than one address and some have many.  I think transaction volume is really the only way to measure an increase in adoption of bitcoin. 

I was using mosaic on sun sparcs in 1993 in Australia, surfing the web much as I do now, except search with webcrawler!!!! so maybe
ans www 0.2 websites

I think transaction volume vastly overstates real trade activity since there is a lot of bitcoin shuffling that happens with people moving from one wallet/address to another and coin mixing bots, etc. In fact, I don't see how you can get those kinds of figures without doing surveys of users ... the blockchain might then be used to correlate some of that data for extrapolations at a later date ...

Large exchanges could provide valuable service to the community by publishing aggregated, anonymous data about the user base. With a little bit of effort on their side we could get a decent estimate about the numbers of active users, frequency of use, etc. Gox was on the good path with their transparency report, but I haven't seen any new ones recently.  The whole "trade secret" and "business intelligence" excuse to not publicize the data is mostly bullshit. It would not hurt anyone to make the information public.

On the other end, counting unique public addresses in the blockchain, together with some intense analysis of transactions could at least provide the maximum number of users - that is, we would know for sure that there is less then X million of people using the currency.

having said that there is a large entry point for many people

nothing scares them like loosing money
I mean you cant buy insurance for BTC (yet hmmm maybe a business here)

the understanding of the system, the cryptography, legal issues perceived or real, the learing curve will be out of reach for the masses until some killer apps come along

I'm pretty sure this applies to the Internet now.

Seconded.

Agreed but people do have a way of ignoring their fears when the prospect of profits is looming. If Bitcoin gains more traction, I see a rush coming from non-Bitcoin holders.

I imagine a day will come when when the significance of the digits to the right of the decimal point become greater and greater. We're going to look back and say "Holy shit, I paid .005 BTC for a single transaction?!?"

We can definitely put an upper limit on it, since the number of unique addresses is known.

I think there's a fundamental difference between the adoption of technology and the adoption of software,

Many people would have bought TV sets to watch TV and computers to surf the WWW but the tech was expensive back then, probably why the adoption rate of Facebook and angry birds is much faster,

I think bitcoin adoption would be faster if there wasn't so much miss information about it, when I googled it a few months back and read a few articles I left with a misunderstanding that it was a giant ponzi scheme created by an illusive guy, I had to look into it again more thoroughly recently to better understand it.