Bitcoin Forum

We see articles guestimating the number of Bitcoin users. A general average seems to be about 1.5M currently.

We have also seen an article from Juniper describing about 5M users by 2019.

What are your general thoughts on user adoption per year, over the next 10 years, and why?

What will the curve look like?

Mass adoption cannot be calculated with precision or to be exactly specified.

You can't preddict something like this...it's simply unpreddictable and only time will tell us. It also deppends on many factors.

I wanted to start a similar thread, but from a different angle.

Will bitcoin's path to mainstream be slow and steady, or a sudden explosion? I believe it's the latter. Most people in the developed world already knows about bitcoin. So if they're not adopting it now, they're not likely to adopt it in the future. The only way to change this, is if there's some fundamental change that's happening, for example, a real killer app based on bitcoin comes out, or USD goes to hyperinflation, or something that will cause people to change their mind about bitcoin. I imagine that it will be a relatively sudden rise.


So Expressed in ASCII, I think it'll look something like this:
                          /
                         /
                        /
______________/

Say 200 Million in 10 years. And if not, I think bitcoin pretty much would have failed.

For reference, the Juniper Report article:

https://coinreport.net/report-estimates-nearly-5m-bitcoin-users-2019/


5 million Bitcoin users by 2019 or basically a really big city's worth of people.  Doesn't seem much. :-\

Just shows how much more work and time we got ahead of ourselves, if Bitcoin is going to truly become the world's currency...

I generally think of Bitcoin as a bit of a binary bet, either it will suceed and fluorish, therefore it will have far more than 9 million users in 2019, or it will fail and be used as play money by people who won't give up the ghost, so it will have lots less than 5 million users.

5 million would be a strange middle ground, meaning it is expanding, but it hasn't really cauugt on yet.  It is a guess based on the past, rather than the future, how many great new techmnologies expand, but slowly and consistently?  I think over 1 billion will have used bitcoin by 2019, but I think it could also fail or be adopted for something else and be used by almost no one...

+1

The people will start to "search" or better adopt a new alternative when they will understand that the FIAT money (with this actual economic system) is only a *joke*. Then in that case I think a lot of people will join this "experiment" (or better this reality alternative).

The best way for mass adoption according to me will be:

We know Bitcoins won't die ever and it has written its own destiny itself, but still for that to be completely assured and guaranteed, we must all join our hands and come ahead and "instead of donating", I would urge everyone to please use some part of your Bitcoins in Google Adwords, and advertise Bitcoins with as much relevant keywords as you can. That way, we will be able to get the targeted audience who will be interested in Bitcoins and will surely invest.

Very good advice but I don't think many people will follow it.
Most of the users are not really sure of the future of Bitcoin and see it only as an investment, not as new, revolutionary way of payment, new world currency etc.
Until this change and BTC become mainstream, users will continue to use the BTC as an investment, and will not be interesting to much to spend money on Google promotion.

I find it difficult to calculate because we don't know how bitcoin will be used in the future. Perhaps in 10 years there will still be at 1.5M users, but 500M machines that use bitcoin every day. Or perhaps a loss of net neutrality will drive BTC underground and lead to only a few hundred black market users.
My best guess is mass adoption and a billion or more users. That seems like a lot, however spread out over the planet it's only like 15%.

Really?  With bitcoin you can easily create a web payment gateway with a just little bit of coding knowledge. Ever try to set up a webstore shopping cart before and sign up with a 3rd party payment processor to accept credit cards? With bitcoin I can have a webstore up in a few hours with no 3rd party fees. It really is an easy new way to accept payments online.

a history lesson.

The world’s first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival telecommunications company and informed them he was speaking via a mobile phone. The phone Cooper used, if you could call it that, weighed a staggering 1.1kg and measured in at 228.6x127x44.4mm. With this prototype device, you got 30 minutes of talk-time and it took around 10 hours to charge.

Even at the start of the 1990s this was still the case despite Nokia and NEC entering the fray. Nokia’s first 'handheld' mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, launched in 1989 and weighed just 800g

1990 to 1995 represented an upward swerve in design and portability, with mobile devices gradually starting to appear in the hands of average consumers for the first time. By the late-1990s, mobile devices were fast becoming the norm.


....
so the question to ask yourself. what were the people in the mobile community crying, screaming and arguing about in the late 1970's.. just 5-6 years after the first mobile call was made. i bet they didnt even expect nearly every 13 year old+ person having them, let alone over a billion in population demand for one

Dude, to make Bitcoin mainstream is the only purpose why I gave that advice to put some money out of our pockets.
If you are pocketing profits with BTC, I don't think you or anyone will have some problem to at least spend $10 to advertise BTC in Google Adwords?

If you even multiply even 10% of the current users, i.e., 1.5M x 10% = 0.15M and they all commit to give $10 out of their pockets, then we can have $1.5M which is enough to give Bitcoins enough evolution which it deserves.

1.5 M is too low....as Coinbase has has 2 million unique users and 2.6 million wallets right now and they only exist in a few countries and not the largest market -China.

Thus the most conservative estimate would be 4 million bitcoin adopters worldwide to as high as ~10 million.

I think those numbers are way too optimistic.
I think the actual numbers of individual users are between 900,000 and 1,005,000.
An extremely optimistic number now, one address per user, would currently be around 4,309,000.

Coinbase follows KYC and isn't even available in the largest markets. I'm not guessing and backing up my numbers with evidence and logic:

https://www.coinbase.com/about

Are you suggesting Coinbase is lying?

In January 2015 Coinbase said they passed 2 million users, NOT UNIQUE.

"The question though is whether or not the accounts represent human beings or if there are a lot of duplicate or dormant accounts."

How many of those accounts were created, used once, and then abandoned? The number of actual bitcoin users I expect to be much lower.

There are only 1.8 million addresses with a balance over 0.001 (26 cents).  I think this number is a better representation of users vs how many accounts coinbase has opened.

2 million users and 2.6 million wallets is what they cite. so 600k are not unique wallets.



Where are you getting this number from?

You are aware that many wallets with bitcoin exist off the chain right? I have personally given 40+ of my friends and family members 40 dollars or more in bitcoin with services like coinbase which are held off the chain  and only a few of these have bothered to get a unique public address. Additionally, all changetip users are holding off the chain accounts as well.

If Bitcoin manage to become mainstream internet currency as first step, number of users will go dramaticly up. After we concuer internet, everything is possible and sky will not be limit anymore lol.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-exchange-coinbase-just-passed-2-million-users/

bitcoinrichlist.com

I don't think you count those people you sent money to on changetip unless they actually still use bitcoin. You have to think about those who opened a coinbase account just so they can cash out their changetip they received and have it deposited into their fiat bank account.

What about those that jumped on the train in late 2013 and created an account, and then stopped using once they didn't get rich over night?

If we're going for total historic number of people that have ever tried bitcoin, then maybe we'd be at the 4 million number. But total number of active users has to be 1 mill or less in my opinion.

As for bitcoin adoption I always like to quote Satoshi, as he once said:

"Feb. 14, 2010: I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large (bitcoin) transaction volume or no volume."

And that will be exactly as he said. There is no point of arguing over numbers of bitcoin users now and in the future.

adoption is more likely to occur in africa, russia, developing nations where there is a need for bitcoin .. in the usa and developed nations, people just use credit card and paypal

I have to agree with the binary option. Either it will work or it won't. I don't see it dong half measures, going underground etc. There are many factors at play, one of them being the network effect as well. If it just does not take off, then we get into the situation that email was in say the late 1980s. Cool tech but, whom are you going to send email to?

With regards to the cellphone story - in 1973, that is a little bit concerning. So it means for 20 years there was very little going on until anything really happened with the technology. I somehow doubt this will be the case with Bitcoin as times have changed - many many people know about Bitcoin, so I really think it will have its time to shine, or take a dump. This is a good thing, as we will have some kind of clarity, likely in the next few years. The way it is looking now (barring yesterday's scam news etc, another side effect of centralisation) it does look like things are on the up. A lot of big names and VC investing decent amounts of money (small but still significant in terms of where the technology is now).

I run, in conjunction with a friend of mine the first Bitcoin ATM in Africa, in Johannesburg South Africa. The ATM is in a shopping centre with about 30 shops and we have about 5 shops so far, accepting Bitcoin.

The "problem" we are experiencing is that we are struggling to find a good value proposition for the average Joe out there. Sure, it is fun, cute nad nifty to go to an ATM, put in cash, get your Bitcoin and buy coffee with it. But once the honeymoon phase is over - what then? Strangely, all of the shops are aware that they do not need to pay fees to accept Bitcoin - indeed, most of them pay 40 USD a month just to "rent" the machine/connection, and then 2.5% on top of that. Negotiable from there, but it still hurts them significantly. So our next step, once we have a few merchants on board, will be to try and convince the shops to have a "Bitcoin Monday" or something like that, where they lower their prices by 5-10% and try and get more people on board. I cannot help feeling though that this is an artificial ploy (possibly necessary in the beginning) to get more user adoption.

So the real question which everyone is asking - how can we make this useful, sexy, efficient and "have to have" for the Average Joe and Average Shop out there?

Oh yeah, the only other thing is - to a significant degree you may find that banks/governments do slow down the growth of user adoption.

As for 5M users according to Juniper - I find that to be neither here nor there. If there are only 5M users by 2019 it would be looking rather negative, and like a toy in my opinion. I would also like to know based on what kind of data, statistics and logic these numbers were derived from - I do not recall seeing any of that in the article at all.

The cellphone thing simply isn't a good analogy, because the start point is different. I'd compare bitcoin to the invention of the iPhone.

After all, there's another thread here about how someone came up with a similar system to bitcoin in 2002. And there have been many people working on cryptography and currencies before that.

So if you want to look at it that way, bitcoin has been here for decades as well.

While the distinction may seem academic, wallets that exist offchain do not hold Bitcoin. They hold Bitcoin-IOUs. Those that have not bothered to secure their funds with a unique public address are not Bitcoin users.

Things start counting once they work. All the other cryptocurrency attemps didn't solve the byzantine generals problems to me knowledge, wereas btc does.

I guess you need to compare to the number of people who have a bank account and a credit card. Since BTC is easier to get than those 2, it has a huge future?

Bitcoin is different than a bank account because you need ID to get a bank account and at the moment you dont to get btc although that may change with regulations.
Credit card is easy to get with a good credit rating, they throw them at you but they also throw the charges to use it at you.

IMO bitcoin is waiting for that 'killer ap' to just explod in usage.
There was a good article in Times magazine talking about how many of the chinese public use Alibaba, if they started accepting it they may help a bit, depending on how they handle the income of btc.

This 'killer app' idea is not that bad! I thought about it a little and I hate to say it could be done and definitely can happen. But I am worried about
something. This killer app have to be some kind of ultimate bitcoin wallet. The one and only program you need to pay for everything, receive and send
bitcoins, it should be integrated with some of the leading bitcoin services like bitpay for example. But integrating it with services means that it also can be
compromised as well... And that is my fear.

Bitcoin doesn't need one and only one wallet, it is a decentralized ideology so more wallet, app , etc are needed (that's normal).  I think the killer app will be the smart contracts (not with ethereum) but with the bitcoin blockchain.

The problem is you need an ID to convert your fiat to BTC in most cases, which defeats the purpose. I see this as one of the main reasons I never bought BTC from the main exchanges.

Would be interesting to know the true amount of bitcoin users. This forum alone has nearly half a million registered members, problem being that there's no quick way to count how many sockpuppet / throwaway accounts have been made.