50 million Bitcoin users by the end of 2013?

[Severian]

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.

[greyhawk]

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.

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.

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

[tvbcof]

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

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.

[bozak]

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. 

[jubalix]

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.

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 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

[marcus_of_augustus]

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 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 ...

[niko]

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 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.

[jubalix]

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.

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

[mccorvic]

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. 

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

[Mike Christ]

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. 

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

Seconded.

[Severian]

nothing scares them like loosing money

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.

[Tomatocage]

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

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.

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?!?"

[misterbigg]

Is it even possible to measure how many bitcoin users we currently have?

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

[whitenight639]

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.