Are we still early adopters? Or did that pass after 2010/2011?

[freedomno1]

Thinking about it I guess we should use two scales
One for media penetration
One for user adoption
Media penetration is starting to become bigger and users catching up

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[Serge]

today just as good as few years back.  

global awareness is only increasing along with demand. demand will skyrocket btc prices into again unbelievable highs. supply.. heh, the supply is going to be in a huge deficit, it will be provided only by those taking partial profits from past years accumulation and, in my opinion, mainly by bitcoin related businesses having immediate cash expenditures along with partial employee salaries of these companies being converted from btc to traditional fiat for day-to-day living expenses.  in a few months today's rates may look pale low, like a $10/btc less than a year ago.  i would not underestimate bitcoin even if slams back to rates we had a short while ago, which in my view is very unlikely today having current news developments such as China and US Senate Hearing. i wouldn't not be surprised if next year some major online retailer would start accepting Bitcoin, and surely Ebay/Paypal must be thinking how can they get piece of an action.

i would not advise to convert all savings into bitcoin, but investing some small, insignificant amounts for an average person into bitcoin every month may render great returns in future, amounts that easily spent on some useless crap on a routine basis.

[wachtwoord]

Nice chart but are you sure buddy? It looks like we're finishing the early majority phase and going down hill for a while


 

Haha no way in hell

[PenAndPaper]

in a few months today's rates may look pale low, like a $10/btc less than a year ago.

For that to happen BTC must climb to 100.000$ in a few months. I wouldn't bet on that.
Can you imagine everyone here being a millionaire? It just doesn't look right 

[Piper67]

Are we still early adopters?

Easy. Go out on the street and ask 10 people if they've ever heard of Bitcoin, then ask them if they own any.

If five or more say they do, we're past the early adoption stage.

[bitmarket.io]

I think what OP is referring to is the difficulty we're at to generate more of them coins.   I believe that somewhat correlates to the value of BTC.  Having passed 11.5M BTC we are over the equilibrium and the difficulty isn't slowing down one bit.

I'd say we are late in the mining game.  It's the early adopters and innovators that made the serious fortunes.  Generating insane amount of BTC with GPUs.  Those days are gone.  It's gonna take very refined chips today to mine the future.

As far as the value of BTC is concerned... well, the sky's the limit.  By the time all 21m coins are out there, just 1btc will be worth a fortune and folks will trade with satoshis.

[PenAndPaper]

As far as the value of BTC is concerned... well, the sky's the limit.  By the time all 21m coins are out there, just 1btc will be worth a fortune and folks will trade with satoshis.

If this is to happen it will happen much sooner since after some time only a few bitcoins will be left for mining.

[mrjeff]

Right now there are only 12million BTC available to go around yet you can find and buy a bitcoin pretty easily so I think this means to me that there are well less than 12 million people right now who all want to hold at least one bitcoin. 

How many of you would sell ALL your coins and not keep just one?  Probably very few..We'll know when we are no longer in the early adopter phase when it becomes hard to buy a bitcoin and people are only buying or selling fractions of a coin.  If we start dealing in mBTC I could see the price going much higher very quickly.

[TheButterZone]

I started bitcoining in 2012, and wouldn't call myself an early adopter. I almost always try to let others work shit out and read reviews and other discussions before dipping my own toe in. If I were qualified to be beta testing stuff, I'd be getting paid.

[Dabs]

I saw bitcoin when it was $5. But I couldn't buy a lot. ... Oh well, you can still buy now.

[wachtwoord]

Yes, everyone that owns a single Bitcoin today is an early adopter.

[MicroGuy]

People say we missed the train... but yet most people don't understand what bitcoins are let alone even know about it, and its still in it's early stage. Some say it has potential to increase in value 1000x more... but some say that will never happen. So do you guys think people who invest now are still the "early adopters"? Why can't I ever be a part of explosive gains??

What most people actually don't understand is that Bitcoin is not the only digital currency. But this is changing and very very rapidly. Bitcoin is like the web crawler of the early 90's, we still don't know who will be Google.

Yesterday for the first time, Max Keiser talked about Litecoin on his show. As Bob Dylan one said, "the times they are a changing". This is good website for tracking the changing times: http://coinmarketcap.com/

[Rival]

I would suggest we are not yet even at the "I" in innovators. Probably less than a millionth of the needed infrastructure and institutions required have been built. When you compare what the bitcoin protocol is capable of with what we have, you quickly realize we have barely scratched the surface.

Future generations will envy us and look back with amazement. They may even read the words we type here on the forum as class assignments.

[PenAndPaper]

What most people actually don't understand is that Bitcoin is not the only digital currency. But this is changing and very very rapidly. Bitcoin is like the web crawler of the early 90's, we still don't know who will be Google.

Yes we do. Bitcoin is google. Actually it is google - yahoo - bing - lycos and altavista together.

[safirtas]

http://susanlucas.com/it/images/categories.gif

I think we're only just leaving the "Innovators" phase ATM. Once mining is out of the general public's hands we'll be in the "Early Adopter" stage.

I think the chart should be taken not as a representation of innovativeness in bitcoin per se but as of the concept of cryptocurrency in general. The world will evetually stop using paper and plastic cards as a medium of exchange, but this won't necessarily be under the domain of bitcoin. The concept will be inherited to whatever inhabitants of the world that still need their exchanges be encypted but smart enough to have a decentralized system about it. Such a system will probably be a highly evolved version or versions of bitcoin. So yes, I think we are in the early innovators phase, along with holders of any other type of cryptocurrency.

[wachtwoord]

Future generations will envy us and look back with amazement. They may even read the words we type here on the forum as class assignments.

I pity them already

Q5: What is the Thai name of the one known as goat?
Q6: Name the exact aristocratic limits first proposed my rpietila
Q7: What was the original name of Bitcoin's Savings and Trust?
Q8: Write a short essay about Atlas and why he's an idiot

[Ibian]

Future generations will envy us and look back with amazement. They may even read the words we type here on the forum as class assignments.

I can almost see it. "Okay kids, today we will learn how to spot a troll and why you should listen to SoapyThePig about the blockchain".

[PenAndPaper]

Future generations will envy us and look back with amazement. They may even read the words we type here on the forum as class assignments.

Yeah and graduate dissertations might be about btc-e's trollbox!

[bitjoint]

Bitcoin right now is like the 90's Internets... We are at the very bottom of the technology adoption S curve (probably we still are innovators), so expect it to grow during 5 to 10 years..





Now, let's take as example Facebook. If bitcoin could potentially reach 1 Billion users like facebook, taking into account current users and current monetary mass, then you can quickly come up with a guesstimate of 1 bitcoin = $1M (I'm not saying it will reach it). Bitcoin right now (after this week's spike) should have around 600-800k users.  User adoption is the real deal. More users = more market cap = bigger valuation. (1 User = 1 person, 1 organism, 1 company, etc)*



Bitcoin, like other technologies/products, seems to be following a pattern defined by viral diffusion (logistic function):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI



So growth, user adoption and valuation are deeply related... For instance, rpietila's growth/valuation model with a linear regresion shows we are at the bottom of an exponential curve:



The wallets stats usage shows we are at the bottom of an exponential curve...




The questions remains... where is the top of the S-Curve? Here there are some attempts by forum members to fit user adoption + valuation + logistic function (viral diffusion pattern)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322058.msg3525760#msg3525760
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArD8rjI3DD1WdGhDN3FBWFptTlZTREN0cFkxZ3JHTnc#gid=13


TL'DR: If btc ever makes it, then expect it to grow A LOT, so chillax, we ain't seen shite yet.

[Equus]

Can you imagine everyone here being a millionaire? It just doesn't look right 

In early 2013 I owned about $150 worth of bitcoins, and it seemed like everyone else in this forum was suddenly a millionaire.  You should go back and read the threads from April to see what happens when a few dozen people suddenly realize that they are all rich.

If 2014 goes anything like 2013, I know what side of the fence I want to be on.