Adoption of new technologies has seen a reliable increase in rate in the last 100 years. It took only seven years from the first web pages in 1991 for the web to be used by a quarter of the American population. That compares with 46 years for electricity, 35 years for the phone and 26 years for television. Bitcoin, which can be seen as a system built on top of the internet, has been displaying patterns of adoption which make the internet pale in comparison to the speed at which people are experimenting and using digital money. As a study done by the Federal Reserve Board of Washington, D.C. shows, the number of daily users is likely to have grown exponentially in the past few years. In particular,
coarse calculations suggest that the user base has doubled every 8 months for the last 3 years. Much in the same way people now refer to physical mail as “snail mail”, will we soon be referring to physical and state-controlled currency as “snail money”?
From an adoption perspective, bitcoin has a great momentum in that it conveys the whole product concept. When you get down to the finer details, bitcoin clearly is more than just a lone financial instrument. It’s a framework to decentralize traditional business models whose power has been pinned to centralized monopoly. Libertarians love it, and rightfully so; a creation that breaks the shackles of dependence like never previously in man’s history has the potential to reduce international economic friction and lubricate the cogs of financial markets, not to mention transition away from national economies which operate from toxic debt-based systems.
Read the full article on Diginomics.
