Reliable data on increasing adoption?

[JorgeStolfi]

There are recurrent claims that "bitcoin adoption is increasing", but there seems to be few if any reliable numbers suporting the claim, and a few signs that it may not be true.

* The number of stores that "accept bitcoin" through Bitpay or similar service appears to be growing; but since the lowest ("starter") level of merchant registration in Bitpay is free (with a 1% fee on each payment), that number does not imply growing number of clients, or growing volume of payments.  Moreover, it is hard to guess what percentage of the people who use Bitpay are "new adopters", or old adopters that buy more bitcoins specifically to use the service.  It may be that most Bitpay clients are old adopters who use Bitpay to spend their old coins, since that payment method does not seem to have any advantage for the other two categories.

* Bitpay declared that they processed payments totalling 100 M USD in 2013.  However it is not known how much of that is actual commercial payments (bitcoins changing owner in exchange for goods or services other than national  currencies); as opposed to coins being bought or sold for investment and speculation.

*  Blockchain traffic analysis shows subtantial transaction volume: about 100 kBTC/day = 60 M USD/day presently.  However, the evolution of these numbers since January suggests that only a small fraction of that volume is actual commercial payments, the rest being investment/speculation or coins being moved between addresses belonging to the same person.

* The number of new posts on bitcointalk.org had its peak in January 2014 and has then stagnated.  A visual scan of the recent posts page suggests that many of the new posts are now about altcoins. The number of registered members keeps increasing by 15'000 -- 20'000 per month, but there is no data on how many cease to be active.  The number of active members may well be stagnating or decreasing. The number of pages read per month keeps increasing, slowly, but that may be a consequence of the increased number of topics.  In any case, a breakdown of these numbers by geographic country or region and by topic would be necessary to interpret them.

[Nicolas Dorier]

You can deduce the rise and fall of bitcoin price by the post rate of this forum.
This mean that effectively, most people on this forum are involved in speculation.

However, entrepreneurial investment is just starting.
The growth that is driven by speculation for now, will become driven by entrepreneurial activity.

So the best metric to track is whether Bitcoin market attract capital investment.
And whether the number of Bitcoin related companies are growing. (correlated with capital investment)

The result of such investment will show only monthes after the funding, when products are fully developed.

[JorgeStolfi]

To get an idea about the current focus if this forum, I collected and analyzed three screenfuls of the "recent posts" page, taken several hours ago, spaced several minutes apart (so that there was no intersection).  I classified by hand the 120 posts into the six categories below:

Posts !    % ! Category                       
------+------+--------------------------------
    8 |  6.7 | Off-topic                      
    4 |  3.3 | Gambling                       
   18 | 15.0 | Bitcoin mining                 
   18 | 15.0 | Bitcoin non-Mining, non-Chinese
   19 | 15.8 | Bitcoin non-Mining, Chinese    
   53 | 44.2 | Altcoins (including mining)

So, modulo the limitations of this small particular sample, it would seem that the forum posts are now evenly split betwen Bitcoin and altcoins (~45% each).  Apart from mining, the Bitcoin-related posts are evenly split between Chinese-language posts and non-Chinese (mostly English).

[ Data file ]

[CEG5952]

Honestly, I don't think there is any reliable way to measure the rate of user adoption. Looking at nodes, addresses, etc. miss the mark by a long shot. And the other metrics mentioned don't really address the question.