An analysis on how Bitcoin gets to 1 billion users

[bbc.reporter]

I want to be optimistic but I am shaking my head in skepticism. In spite of the fact that the analysis is correct and it has based everything on data collected since the beginning of bitcoin, it assumes that the rate of adoption will not slow down. It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

Also, the anaylsis only mentions bitcoin's adoption as a technology. This might be wrong because bitcoin is also a type of asset that is also trying to compete against banks. Those people behind the banks have made fiat currencies their life blood and would try to kill competitors to protect them.

In any case, according to the analysis there are presently 30.8 million net users in bitcoin or 0.36% of the world's population.



By taking a cumulative sum of entities net growth, this gives us a value of 30.8 million unique entities (users) on the network right now.

Dividing Cumulative Sum of Net Entities Growth by Global Population (with respect to each year) gives us the percentage of the global population that has adopted bitcoin. By this estimation ~0.36% is currently using the Bitcoin network.

Read in full https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5de588aa3e9c044c1ad8cb59/t/62a0cee064cb4b79ded25894/1654705890141/Bitcoin+User+Adoption+Report.pdf

[pooya87]

it assumes that the rate of adoption will not slow down.

The rate may actually speed up since we are still at the bottom of the S curve.

It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

Reaching 1 billion adoption is different from having 1 billion users using bitcoin every day. Not to mention that 1 billion (~12%) according to the chart would be reached around 2030 which is still far in the future and by then LN will have grown more and the on-chain capacity should have been increased.
It's not like tomorrow we are going to see 1 billion users!

[NotATether]

It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

That's on L1. But 1 billion users on the Lightning network is doable. But that's not going to happen as long as there are multiple competing LN implementations competing against each other. There must be just one standards maker, and making another LN reference client won't help you with that because you will just end up with the N+1 problem (look it up on XKCD).

Think about it. If there were multiple Bitcoin protocol implementations, it would've hamstrung the implementation of various BIPs and soft-forks if the multiple groups of maintainers disagree with each other. Fortunately for us, the alternate projects of L1 died out very quickly either because of lack of interest, increased complexity of codebase (and not enough hands to work on it).

I propose the community will do a decentralized election process by means of running the LN client they prefer to be the reference body (this process will be significantly easier as Lightning Labs/lnd is already enveloped in scandals around its own implementation, and there are no other major competitors to c-lightning & lnd).

[Darker45]

I guess it is safe to assume that the rate of adoption is gaining acceleration and is therefore expected to speed up instead of slow down. The level of Bitcoin awareness has been rising. The level of acceptance is also rising. So there's no reason why the current 0.36% of the world's population that is into Bitcoin, which is still very low, will not double or triple or quadruple in size in just a matter of a few years.

The adoption rate of the first decade of Bitcoin is certainly not comparable to the adoption rate of the next decade considering that the former starts from scratch while the latter begins with Bitcoin's level of popularity already high. So Bitcoin will probably be facing a bigger influx of institutional and individual newcomers in the coming years.

The overall development seems to suggest that banks are more likely to bend rather than break. The people behind them won't kill for the sake of fiat. It looks like they are willing to adapt instead.

[pooya87]

If there were multiple Bitcoin protocol implementations, it would've hamstrung the implementation of various BIPs and soft-forks if the multiple groups of maintainers disagree with each other.

There already are multiple implementations of Bitcoin protocol and they are not causing any problems including but not limited to disagreements. Not to mention that if developers are disagreeing on a certain proposal they will disagree on it whether there is more than one implementation or not. Lest we forget the 3 year long scaling debate or the most recent BIP119 PR.

[tadamichi]

I want to be optimistic but I am shaking my head in skepticism. In spite of the fact that the analysis is correct and it has based everything on data collected since the beginning of bitcoin, it assumes that the rate of adoption will not slow down. It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

I think the average user just does very few on-chain transactions every year tho. I also saw on glassnode that around 60% of Bitcoins supply didn’t move in over a year, which indicates people use on-chain as a store of value primarily at the moment. Scaling with blocks alone will also not work, without becoming centralized at the moment. So we will need to rely on off-chain solutions and they’re probably ready to handle 1 billion users by then, so i wouldn’t be too pessimistic.

https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=supply.ActiveMore1YPercent&resolution=24h

Also, the anaylsis only mentions bitcoin's adoption as a technology. This might be wrong because bitcoin is also a type of asset that is also trying to compete against banks. Those people behind the banks have made fiat currencies their life blood and would try to kill competitors to protect them.

Sure, they can slow things down, but don’t forget the mess fiat is bringing billions into at the moment. Bitcoins game plan is strong and you could say banks are the best marketers for Bitcoin at the moment, by their own actions. Fiat will collapse by itself, it’s like a house of cards, once there’s problems it’s unable to fix itself, so it’s just a matter of time.

[Kakmakr]

As long as Bitcoin is used and defined by governments as a "Commodity" .... it will have a flat adoption curve. The governments and Banks made sure that it painted Crypto currencies into a Commodity box ..to prevent it to be in a position to be a threat to Fiat currencies and also to the Banking sector.

OP is 100% correct by saying Fiat currencies are their "Life Blood" ...because governments control Fiat currencies (Supply & Value) and Banks are making Billions of Dollars on charging people fees and interest on loans and Bonds and other financial instruments. 

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[LodisMcguire]

As long as Bitcoin is used and defined by governments as a "Commodity" .... it will have a flat adoption curve. The governments and Banks made sure that it painted Crypto currencies into a Commodity box ..to prevent it to be in a position to be a threat to Fiat currencies and also to the Banking sector.

OP is 100% correct by saying Fiat currencies are their "Life Blood" ...because governments control Fiat currencies (Supply & Value) and Banks are making Billions of Dollars on charging people fees and interest on loans and Bonds and other financial instruments. 

Yes,that's right,mass adoption will not happen as long as it categorized as commodity.
Maybe only world war will make that happen,we already see some example in afghanistan where people convert their money to crypto to avoid their asset confiscated by the taliban and to make transaction more convenient for them.

[tadamichi]

As long as Bitcoin is used and defined by governments as a "Commodity" .... it will have a flat adoption curve. The governments and Banks made sure that it painted Crypto currencies into a Commodity box ..to prevent it to be in a position to be a threat to Fiat currencies and also to the Banking sector.

OP is 100% correct by saying Fiat currencies are their "Life Blood" ...because governments control Fiat currencies (Supply & Value) and Banks are making Billions of Dollars on charging people fees and interest on loans and Bonds and other financial instruments.  

I don’t think how Bitcoin is defined will play a big role. Because if you look at the state of government, banks and the economies finances, it’s clear that they became fragile. They opened pandoras box with inflation now, which they can’t get out of, because they rely on the printer to pay back debts.

They will need some kind of monetary reform or extreme control over how money flows to keep this system alive. Which means Fiat will continue to become worthless, to the point that it eradicates any wealth a regular citizen had stored there.

There was a situation like this in 1929 where banks started to collapse and people were rushing into gold, which then was forbidden by the government in 1933.

There will be a need and probably no alternative to escape Fiat in the future.
So Bitcoin will be adopted because there is a need for it, unconfiscatable assets have the highest chance of surviving economic turmoil and Bitcoin is the most sound money there ever was. What do you think people will do when governments shed apart their bank accounts? Waiting till they define Bitcoin differently?

Bitcoin will win because it’s better, not because the government says so.

[buwaytress]

Yeah, honestly I always see this kind of news as a bit of cherry picking. For example, a lot of data still uses "new addresses" created as an indicator of user growth -- it CAN be, but given my own rate of new address creation (I easily do 2/3 new addresses every day, sometimes more and I don't even use them all).

Very vague as well when people say Bitcoin adoption as a tech, particularly when more and more users aren't adopting the tech but the asset -- even merchant networks expanding to accept Bitcoin hardly use the tech (BitPay merchs, for example, don't even need to own a Bitcoin wallet, much less ever interact with the network).

30 million users interacting with the Bitcoin network, I'm still not really convinced. Off-chain users (exchanges, OTC, custodial wallets etc) maybe.

[franky1]

It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

That's on L1. But 1 billion users on the Lightning network is doable. But that's not going to happen as long as there are multiple competing LN implementations competing against each other. There must be just one standards maker, and making another LN reference client won't help you with that because you will just end up with the N+1 problem (look it up on XKCD).

I propose the community will do a decentralized election process by means of running the LN client they prefer to be the reference body (this process will be significantly easier as Lightning Labs/lnd is already enveloped in scandals around its own implementation, and there are no other major competitors to c-lightning & lnd).

doesnt matter if LN is run but different dev teams on different protocols(separate sub-nets)
or there is a single LN... the problem is all the versions lf LN have major flaws..

the main being lack of consensus protocol (fails to solve byzantine generals problem)
the next being the actual paying of more people on a network
by which the three directions for LN are..
a. master hubs everyone has a channel with.. (avoiding routing)
b. users playing pass the parcel down a stream of users (using routing) where the more users on the network means more hops to go through to reach everyone
c. users require more channels for more potential destinations to have a more direct contact without as many hops.


each of these directions fall flat into the problem of value liquidity.
a. this scenario needs a master hub to have alot of value locked up to have liquidity in each of its channels to palm off to its customers
b. for every hop along a lengthy route they have to rely on each person along the route to have available balance and be online to service that payment. the more people in the network. the more distance between source and destinations, the more hops means the more chance of running into a roadblock
c. the more channels a user needs to open the more funds it needs to lock up (like the (a) hub problem, but where funds are locked on the user side) where the user becomes a hub. meaning if all they have invested/acquired of  crypto is like $800 worth. 2 channels is $400 per channel 16 channels is $50 a channel. which then limits how much they can spend at at given time to a destination available only on one channel

LN has many other flaws too. not just routing bottlenecks of liquidity issues of channels or the requirement of all parties involved in a payment needing to be online. or the requirement of middlemen to sign whereby they can just be assy and refuse, holding payments up/delaying 'success'/fail messages. or the fact that the more hops needed=more fee due to having to pay each hop. or the issue around having to map larger routing tables becomes a bloat of gossip the bigger the network gets and the more data required just to update. or the issues around centralisation of hubs or the dilution of spendable value if users had to have more channels.
.
but also that the settlement and punishment parts and the initial funding locks are not firmly ruled systems which are audited by the network to ensure compliance.. yep LN is not a consensus network and does not fulfil the byzantine generals problem

[DaveF]

Looks & sounds like clickbait. Wanting to get 1 out of every 8 people on the planet into BTC?
Eliminate the very young (kids under 4 or 5) those with very limited access to tech and so on you eliminate even more.

Possibly in the FAR future, but in the short and medium terms. We would need a lot more price stabilization and places (businesses) accepting it.

We here on the forum are a very small bunch of people for whom BTC is important  There are a lot more people who outside of some news blurbs have no idea about it.

-Dave

[masterrex]

IMO, I believe that the 30.8 Million net Bitcoin users are already a huge achievement of the crypto industry. But making it a Billion users is a big task to do, but it's not impossible because as the technology is improving the adoption will continue to increase on a year-to-year basis thats why we should continue to support the Bitcoin to make that one Billion target users a reality, nevermind those competitors. After all, they have also the interest to protect so they gonna hate, But one thing is for sure they cannot destroy Bitcoin.

[stompix]

By taking a cumulative sum of entities net growth, this gives us a value of 30.8 million unique entities (users) on the network right now.
Dividing Cumulative Sum of Net Entities Growth by Global Population (with respect to each year) gives us the percentage of the global population that has adopted bitcoin. By this estimation ~0.36% is currently using the Bitcoin network.
Read in full https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5de588aa3e9c044c1ad8cb59/t/62a0cee064cb4b79ded25894/1654705890141/Bitcoin+User+Adoption+Report.pdf

An interesting roundabout way of doing something.

They first went to the blockchain and counted "new entities" which actually means addresses of not known wallets that have received funds then cut out the "leaving entities" so people who have depleted their balance only to arrive at current users of 30.8 million unique entities (users) on the network right now, which hmmm, you could have predicted by only looking at the addresses with a balance over 0.0001 satoshi which, guess what is 31,047,646

So you had to go through all these mambo jumbos only to reach an obvious metric that ironically they also list on their website in their charts.

Also by that metric, I have some really bad news for the 1 billion targets, for years ago the numbers on the same metric were 24 million, even if we increase each year adoption by 10% (which didn't happen previously), the 1 billion mark won't be reached till 2037, so you need to reach pretty fast a more than 20% growth in usage each year for that.

[wiss19]

The only way for the adoption to slow down is when many governments ban bitcoin which is still possible up until now. There are also other reasons on why people won't engage in bitcoin even if bitcoin is already legalized on their country. A long term bear is one it and also the following; extreme volatility, fees, slow transaction, being to complex or complicated, and many more.

It is possible for 1 billion users to be accommodated because one whole bitcoin can still be divided into to smaller pieces and also not all that who engage in bitcoin are using it daily as a currency but majority of them is using it passively therefore it cant cause an issue on the network.

[franky1]

an average block does 1800tx, an average day would be 144 blocks
this allows for an average of ~260,000 transactions a day.

under people do one trade a day on bitcoin to be classed as "using bitcoin". only allows 260k people
are using bitcoin

under the assumption people hoard/lock funds and only do 2 trades a month thats 3.94m people
under the assumption people hoard/lock funds and only do 2 trades a year thats 47.3m people
under the assumption people hoard/lock funds and only do 2 trades per 22 years thats ~1billion people

.. i know the altnet girls will cry how using their network will help reach billions of people and trillions of transactions by not having 'people use the bitcoin network'. but to achieve this, without scaling BITCOIN(scaling the bitcoin network) means people have to hoard/lock funds up for 22 years to cater to 1 billion people hoarding btc while transacting in pegged value on altnets.

even if THEY pretend their altnet value is "bitcoin"(pfft(facepalm) would it truly be using bitcoin if you never move coin on the actual bitcoin network for 22 years

the only way to bring this down into the realms of actually still calling it "people using bitcoin". is to have people actually using bitcoin network... after all bitcoin never ever leave the bitcoin blockchain/network... rather then the delusions of the pegged altnets which wouldnt need monitoring/ using bitcoin network for 2 decades.. which pretend to be next gen/next level bitcoin(facepalm)

by this i mean.
if we assume hoarding/locks of 12 months instead of 22years. . then bitcoin transactions need to increase by 22  (~28mb blocks)
if we assume hoarding/locks of 1 month instead of 22years. . then bitcoin transactions need to increase by 22  (~343mb blocks)

this is not a call for massive leaps overnight.
this is not a call for needing to cater to 1billion users this year.

but we really need to stop thinking the solution is to avoid using bitcoin and moving everyone over to an alternative network for a couple decades. and instead we really need to think about SCALING BITCOIN

emphasis
SCALING: not leaps or huge jumps, just small step increases progressively over time
BITCOIN: by this i mean the bitcoin network, not altnets co-branding the name, or pretending to be next gen/level bitcoin

..
i hope even the altnet girls are enlightened to realise that their altnets cant even cater to 1 billion users right now without subjugating users to never touch the bitcoin network for 2 decades, thus scaling bitcoin is required

[PrimeNumber7]

It also does not mention that technically bitcoin cannot accomodate 1 billion users to use it every day for their transactions without causing the network to increase fees and price out many users.

That's on L1. But 1 billion users on the Lightning network is doable.

I am not sure about this. With LN, people will need to periodically add/remove coin from their various channels, and I am not aware of any reasonable assumptions as to how frequently users would remove coin from a channel for the max block size to remain reasonable.

But that's not going to happen as long as there are multiple competing LN implementations competing against each other. There must be just one standards maker, and making another LN reference client won't help you with that because you will just end up with the N+1 problem (look it up on XKCD).

The current implementation of LN is not necessarily going to be the best. The current devs are working on improving it, and there is no reason why they should be given a monopoly on improving L2 implementations.

[Ebede]

Bitcoin has more than 1 million adoptions in the world if there is census all people isn't Bitcoin I will say that Bitcoin is almost 75% uses who grab it's bitcoin across the world. And then Bitcoin was known true advent from social media and without social media nobody would have known the Bitcoin is existing right now but you're all the world so many of them have one bitcoin today true the profit is a give people

[South Park]

I guess it is safe to assume that the rate of adoption is gaining acceleration and is therefore expected to speed up instead of slow down. The level of Bitcoin awareness has been rising. The level of acceptance is also rising. So there's no reason why the current 0.36% of the world's population that is into Bitcoin, which is still very low, will not double or triple or quadruple in size in just a matter of a few years.

The adoption rate of the first decade of Bitcoin is certainly not comparable to the adoption rate of the next decade considering that the former starts from scratch while the latter begins with Bitcoin's level of popularity already high. So Bitcoin will probably be facing a bigger influx of institutional and individual newcomers in the coming years.

The overall development seems to suggest that banks are more likely to bend rather than break. The people behind them won't kill for the sake of fiat. It looks like they are willing to adapt instead.

I think we are bound to see a pattern similar to what we saw with social media, in which at the beginning we see a slow expansion, then a critical point is reached which lead us to explosive growth only to reach a point in which the growth becomes way slower and stabilizes, in my opinion we have yet to see the explosive growth, and if I were to take a guess I think the adoption will accelerate during this decade at a speed way faster than the previous one.