Bitcoin Forum

Blockchain.info number of users. Not quite parabolic, but nearly so. Adding about 8,000 new wallets a day.


https://i.imgur.com/3bDX90E.png

Metcalfe's Law:  The value of a network increases with the square of the number of nodes in the network.
Rationale:  For n peers in a network there are n^2-n distinct undirected peer-to-peer virtual channels created by the network.

While it's hard to make an argument that this definitely is going to cause a positive increase in price or valuation, it's harder to argue that this is negative.  So, props.

coinbase also has about 1mil users. I would guess there's at least 1 million people now who has owned some fraction of bitcoin at some point. Which is good, but about 8000 times less than the population :) or 1000 times, if you only include the golden billion who has internets. still, at least x1000 times to grow for bitcoin. we've seen nothing yet, I'm telling you.

Why hard?   The fundamental value of bitcoin derives from it's economy.  Each link created between agents adds a potential channel for transaction.  If the economic value of bitcoin increases in proportion to the transaction volume (as PQ/V=M), and the number of transactions per link is proportional to the size of the network, with constant mean transaction value, then the value of bitcoin increases with the square of the number of agents, which I take to be proportional over the long run to the number of active wallets.

Price will trend towards fundamental value, over time, and subject to event shocks, manias, depressions, etc.   It seems a pretty straight-forward argument to me, and the assumptions are valid under ceteris paribus conditions, i.e. they are maximum entropy priors, which is generally reassuring that the domain in which the argument applies is broad-coverage, albeit not exhaustive.

The log chart is even more impressive:
https://i.imgur.com/T8lc2dN.png

It seems that the exponential growth is still going on. The "strange behaviour" (if any) of the chart in 2013 was above the trend.
We now "corrected" towards the trend (just eyeballing here)

edit: My paint skills predict that we will see 10 million accounts in october 2014

Is "my wallet" just anyone generating a new wallet in an account on blockchain or is my wallet a name for someone making a new account on blockchain?

yes. those are good questions as well as how many of the wallets actually contain something.
many people create accounts and never use them. or they just want free access to some other part of the website.

Logic would think that with that many new wallets each day the price has to go up quite a bit.  I suppose the Mt. Gox fiasco is what caused a major sell off, much of which was absorbed by new wallet holders.  It should be just a matter of time before the price continues to jump I would think.  How could it not? 

The website is free and does not require users to have a wallet to use it. The only reason for acquiring a wallet is to store and transfer bitcoins. There is no particular reason for a user to have more than one blockchain wallet so I think the equation of one wallet to one user is a reasonable one. In any event, the ratio is unlikely to change over time so the growth in wallets is a good indication of the growth in bitcoin users/holders.

A lot of people do use new wallets everytime they sweep coins out of cold storage.  It's not unthinkable to create multiple watch wallets for different bitcoin usages.
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to have multiple wallets.

I think you can read "wallets" as accounts with blockchain. Your account is actually called wallet on blockchain.

You can have unlimited btc adresses inside 1 blockchain account for sweeping cold storage etc.