Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook

[keanbosch]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

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[DannyElfman]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

[EcuaMobi]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

For it to reach 173 billions, each Bitcoin would need to be worth about $13k. That's entirely possible in a couple years.

[zubelutte]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

[oXo]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

I don't think they were comparing the two sites in that way. They meant how popular it got, once you heard about it you had to go make a facebook account, same as bitcoin, once you hear about it you have to own one.

Bitcoin is still in its early stages. 9 out of 10 people I ask (probably more like 99 out of 100) if they have heard about bitcoin and most say no. I have met very few people IRL that has never seen it on CNN or heard of it online. The majority of people that use it are the ones online on their computers, not the average person that works a 9-5.

[TaunSew]

Global remittance is $500 billion.  Investment Gold is $2 trillion.  Retirement funds are $20 trillion.  There's $97 trillion investments worldwide.  Derivatives are $400 trillion.

Dot.Com bubble of late 1990s was $7 trillion and created new billionaires like Mark Cuban overnight.

Housing Bubble of 2008 was $10 trillion.


It's far from bullish to suggest that Bitcoin or Crypto Currencies will be worth hundreds of billions.  Quite likely that crypto currencies will hit $1 to $10 trillion within our lifetimes (and not in some hyperinflation scenario    ).
 

[newIndia]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

For it to reach 173 billions, each Bitcoin would need to be worth about $13k. That's entirely possible in a couple years.

Looks like they r comparing the market cap. But how did u calculate this 13k thing ? More bitcoin will be mined with time and it'll require less value to reach 173 Billion, whereas currently we are standing at around 7 Billion.

[Ron~Popeil]

The exciting aspect of bit coin is that it could happen rapidly or slowly. I don't think it is a question of if but when.

[EcuaMobi]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

That'd be even more ambitious!

I hope Bitcoin will be more popular than Facebook in less than a few years. That's the idea.

I don't think the world is ready for this, but it will be eventually.

[EcuaMobi]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

For it to reach 173 billions, each Bitcoin would need to be worth about $13k. That's entirely possible in a couple years.

Looks like they r comparing the market cap. But how did u calculate this 13k thing ? More bitcoin will be mined with time and it'll require less value to reach 173 Billion, whereas currently we are standing at around 7 Billion.

I just calculated it as 173 / 7.7 * 600 to get that market cap as today.

Yes of course, in the future when more Bitcoins are mined, a smaller price per coin will achieve that.

[CoinMode]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

[acs267]

Comparing a digital currency to a social media website. Damn that's so smart, bro! Nah, it's not. I think the Twins should be actually trying to get on good terms with Zucker. Together, they could become even bigger.

But, the more you don't know.

[newIndia]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

You are either Mike Hearn or inspired by him.

[cozk]

A very neutral source yes.

This has no credibility at all.

[CoinMode]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

You are either Mike Hearn or inspired by him.

You must not understand the transaction limit of the blockchain, or how side-chains would serve to fix this and allow hundreds of exchanges and payment processors to do the required number of transactions for a worldwide bitcoin economy.

[zimmah]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

Not in the current state, but hopefully it is ready when it needs to be ready.

[Mikez]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

What if they compare they're usefulness instead?
Either way, it's not quite a fair comparison. But I do hope Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook in all three aspects.

[newIndia]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

You are either Mike Hearn or inspired by him.

You must not understand the transaction limit of the blockchain, or how side-chains would serve to fix this and allow hundreds of exchanges and payment processors to do the required number of transactions for a worldwide bitcoin economy.

Implementation of side chain has nothing to do with money flowing to Bitcoin core dev team. If they limit the team to a few selective people and dont open the door for worldwide devs... money wont flow in.

[tokeweed]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

coming from the winklevoss twins, that statement is lol.

[chaosPT]

Bitcoin cant be bigger than facebook .

Just like a USD are not the biggest in the whole world .

[CoinMode]

Bitcoin cant be bigger than facebook .

Just like a USD are not the biggest in the whole world .

Your logic is so genius that it only makes sense to yourself.

[tokeweed]

Bitcoin cant be bigger than facebook .

Just like a USD are not the biggest in the whole world .

Your logic is so genius that it only makes sense to yourself.

he's chinese, so cny is the biggest in the world.

j/k. 

[lihuajkl]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

Not ready for the time being. There are still all of issues that is needed to be addressed in Bitcoin. The majority of people don't know bitcoin or misunderstands it.

[monim1]

I don't understand what is the point of comparing Bitcoin with Facebook.

[gotfrid22]

Facebook is used by pretty much anyone who has internet. Theoretically bitcoin can become just as popular but not more popular unless facebook nosedives. We can't have more users than "pretty much anyone who uses internet", can we?

[DannyElfman]

Facebook is used by pretty much anyone who has internet. Theoretically bitcoin can become just as popular but not more popular unless facebook nosedives. We can't have more users than "pretty much anyone who uses internet", can we?

There are roughly 1 billion people on facebook, there are many more people who have access to and use the internet

[ChiefTime]

So you mean to tell me that a couple of goofballs who hate Facebook and who have a bunch of real money tied up in bitcoins say that bitcoins will be bigger than Facebook?

[jonald_fyookball]

Bitcoin is already the biggest computational network on the planet.

[bitcoinbit111]

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

Not in the current state, but hopefully it is ready when it needs to be ready.

The questions you should be asking yourselves and trying to answer ABOVE ALL ELSE are:  

Why is the average slob not using bitcoin?
AND
What can "I do" to make bitcoin convenient and accessible to the average slob?

Come up with simple answers to those questions and yes bitcoin will be BIG. Until then its still for "nerds" lol. I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm just sharing my observations so far.

BONUS QUESTION: Why should the average slob care about BTC or $ when credit will suffice?

[newIndia]

Facebook is used by pretty much anyone who has internet. Theoretically bitcoin can become just as popular but not more popular unless facebook nosedives. We can't have more users than "pretty much anyone who uses internet", can we?

U live in the wrong side of the earth, if u think...

internet population = facebook population

[daviducsb]

For answer to this Q, please see the thread I started about bitcoin's killer app that people are oddly not giving enough credence to.

The ability to earn interest should entice mom and pop.

Do they mean Bitcoin's market cap will be greater than Facebook.

Hopefully they mean popularity instead, I mean number of people using it. Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

Not in the current state, but hopefully it is ready when it needs to be ready.

The questions you should be asking yourselves and trying to answer ABOVE ALL ELSE are:  

Why is the average slob not using bitcoin?
AND
What can "I do" to make bitcoin convenient and accessible to the average slob?

Come up with simple answers to those questions and yes bitcoin will be BIG. Until then its still for "nerds" lol. I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm just sharing my observations so far.

BONUS QUESTION: Why should the average slob care about BTC or $ when credit will suffice?

[novacn]

Maybe better compare it with the advent of Internet.

[Sydboy]

Doesn't facebook have a credit system or something you can buy already.
not like bitcoin at all, but their own facebook currency ?

[leex1528]

I think it won't even come close to as big as Facebook.

Plus like others have said, they are 2 different things.

My example is I have a lot of older relatives who got into Facebook so they could stay in touch with some friends and family.  They simply will never go to Bitcoin.  It would be far to confusing for them(even though its not confusing)  They don't care about a lot of the technology.  They are retiring soon anyway, but they will still use Facebook and I can't imagine I have the only family in the world that has members like it.

[Dogtanian]

I'm not sure wether it will become bigger than facebook but it easily could be. Everyone uses money but not everyone uses social networks.

I think it won't even come close to as big as Facebook.

Plus like others have said, they are 2 different things.

My example is I have a lot of older relatives who got into Facebook so they could stay in touch with some friends and family.  They simply will never go to Bitcoin.  It would be far to confusing for them(even though its not confusing)  They don't care about a lot of the technology.  They are retiring soon anyway, but they will still use Facebook and I can't imagine I have the only family in the world that has members like it.

If they can figure out Facebook why can they not figure out bitcoin? What makes a blockchain.info wallet any more complicated than online banking or PayPal?

[newIndia]

I'm not sure wether it will become bigger than facebook but it easily could be. Everyone uses money but not everyone uses social networks.

I think it won't even come close to as big as Facebook.

Plus like others have said, they are 2 different things.

My example is I have a lot of older relatives who got into Facebook so they could stay in touch with some friends and family.  They simply will never go to Bitcoin.  It would be far to confusing for them(even though its not confusing)  They don't care about a lot of the technology.  They are retiring soon anyway, but they will still use Facebook and I can't imagine I have the only family in the world that has members like it.

If they can figure out Facebook why can they not figure out bitcoin? What makes a blockchain.info wallet any more complicated than online banking or PayPal?

Because FB is a social n/w, whereas BTC is a financial instrument. People tend to trust govt as long as financial instrument is concerned. Only people's extra money is coming to BTC, NOT heard earned money, whereas FB does not require money at all !!!

[leezay]

Both compete in their own domain.

Hard to say which come out ahead.

[leex1528]

I'm not sure wether it will become bigger than facebook but it easily could be. Everyone uses money but not everyone uses social networks.

I think it won't even come close to as big as Facebook.

Plus like others have said, they are 2 different things.

My example is I have a lot of older relatives who got into Facebook so they could stay in touch with some friends and family.  They simply will never go to Bitcoin.  It would be far to confusing for them(even though its not confusing)  They don't care about a lot of the technology.  They are retiring soon anyway, but they will still use Facebook and I can't imagine I have the only family in the world that has members like it.

If they can figure out Facebook why can they not figure out bitcoin? What makes a blockchain.info wallet any more complicated than online banking or PayPal?

I am not saying they are experts at Facebook, but they are decent enough to where they don't mess up all the time.

What if they do mess up on Facebook?  Oh well no big deal.

What if they mess up on Bitcoin and send to the wrong address, or get scammed....way to many ways for them to actually lose their money, and I don't think they would be interested in it.

[DannyElfman]

...
If they can figure out Facebook why can they not figure out bitcoin? What makes a blockchain.info wallet any more complicated than online banking or PayPal?

The blockchain.info wallet itself is really simpler then online banking or paypal, the issue is that it is much easier to have your coins stolen then either of the two above. There are also more phishing attempts against blockchain.info wallets

[iluvpie60]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

You do realize Zuckerberg stole their idea, he got sued by the Winklevoss twins and lost because HE DID SOME SHIFTY SHIT.

That is why they are comparing it to Facebook lol.

[leex1528]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

You do realize Zuckerberg stole their idea, he got sued by the Winklevoss twins and lost because HE DID SOME SHIFTY SHIT.

That is why they are comparing it to Facebook lol.

Sounds like someone watched The Social Network.  haha

Who actually knows what happened and who stole what?  Probably only them and you probably will never get the truth out of any of them involved.

[iluvpie60]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

You do realize Zuckerberg stole their idea, he got sued by the Winklevoss twins and lost because HE DID SOME SHIFTY SHIT.

That is why they are comparing it to Facebook lol.

Sounds like someone watched The Social Network.  haha

Who actually knows what happened and who stole what?  Probably only them and you probably will never get the truth out of any of them involved.

The case that launched a thousand cinema trips – after it became the basis for the Hollywood film The Social Network in 2010 – ended with a whimper rather than a bang in a one-paragraph court filing by the twins. They said they would forgo a trip to the US supreme court and accept a 2008 settlement which gave them a mixture of $20m cash and Facebook stock which at the time was worth around $45m. Since then the putative value of the privately-held Facebook has grown more than fourfold, from $15bn to $70bn. The twins' stock is thus in theory worth more than $150m.


As a general rule people don't "Settle" when they are right for high amounts of money btw. Sounds like you aren't smart. DERPPPPPPPPPPPP

[leex1528]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

You do realize Zuckerberg stole their idea, he got sued by the Winklevoss twins and lost because HE DID SOME SHIFTY SHIT.

That is why they are comparing it to Facebook lol.

Sounds like someone watched The Social Network.  haha

Who actually knows what happened and who stole what?  Probably only them and you probably will never get the truth out of any of them involved.

The case that launched a thousand cinema trips – after it became the basis for the Hollywood film The Social Network in 2010 – ended with a whimper rather than a bang in a one-paragraph court filing by the twins. They said they would forgo a trip to the US supreme court and accept a 2008 settlement which gave them a mixture of $20m cash and Facebook stock which at the time was worth around $45m. Since then the putative value of the privately-held Facebook has grown more than fourfold, from $15bn to $70bn. The twins' stock is thus in theory worth more than $150m.


As a general rule people don't "Settle" when they are right for high amounts of money btw. Sounds like you aren't smart. DERPPPPPPPPPPPP

I know they are worth tons of money, I didn't say they weren't.

I said you have no idea what happened, neither do I.

Why I do agree that people don't usually settle if they are right, people will settle if the following occurs:  They were in the right, but didn't have enough proof to say otherwise, even if they settle, it isn't going to hurt anything at all financially to them.

Soooo....Don't just go randomly insulting people on the internet  because you are hiding behind a computer.

[wordman267645]

We know that bitcoin is a P2P "currency" and facebook is social media,  two things are totally different from each other and also their "GOALS".So why we do compare between bitcoin & facebook  like a foolish..

[giveBTCpls]

Facebook is already lossing steam, most people are getting bored with it and moved into "cooler" things like Instagram and Twitter. All of this shit is only useful to get laid if you have a good face anyway.

[bornil267645]

I dont think so!!!

[MightyStorm]

I know that topic is quite old but i'm interesting how much people are using Bitcoins?

[LeMiner]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

I'm not sure why so many people are opting for side-chains when it's already been proven that hardware exists that can accommodate for all transactions world-wide even when multiplying it with 10 times what VISA does today.... Non specialized equipment would run "lite" clients.


VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), so call it a daily peak rate of 47,000 tps. [1]

PayPal, in contrast, handles around 4 million transactions per day for an average of 46 tps or a probably peak rate of 100 tps.

Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal. Obviously if we want Bitcoin to scale to all economic transactions worldwide, including cash, it'd be a lot higher than that, perhaps more in the region of a few hundred thousand tps. And the need to be able to withstand DoS attacks (which VISA does not have to deal with) implies we would want to scale far beyond the standard peak rates. Still, picking a target let us do some basic calculations even if it's a little arbitrary.

Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps by some artificial limits. These were put in place to stop people from ballooning the size of the block chain before the network and community was ready for it. Once those limits are lifted, the maximum transaction rate will go up significantly.

The protocol has two parts. Nodes send "inv" messages to other nodes telling them they have a new transaction. If the receiving node doesn't have that transaction it requests it with a getdata.

The big cost is the crypto and block chain lookups involved with verifying the transaction. Verifying a transaction means some hashing and some ECDSA signature verifications. RIPEMD-160 runs at 106 megabytes/sec (call it 100 for simplicity) and SHA256 is about the same. So hashing 1 megabyte should take around 10 milliseconds and hashing 1 kilobyte would take 0.01 milliseconds - fast enough that we can ignore it.

Bitcoin is currently able (with a couple of simple optimizations that are prototyped but not merged yet) to perform around 8000 signature verifications per second on an quad core Intel Core i7-2670QM 2.2Ghz processor. The average number of inputs per transaction is around 2, so we must halve the rate. This means 4000 tps is easily achievable CPU-wise with a single fairly mainstream CPU.

As we can see, this means as long as Bitcoin nodes are allowed to max out at least 4 cores of the machines they run on, we will not run out of CPU capacity for signature checking unless Bitcoin is handling 100 times as much traffic as PayPal. As of late 2012 the network is handling 0.5 transactions/second, so even assuming enormous growth in popularity we will not reach this level for a long time.

Of course Bitcoin does other things beyond signature checking, most obviously, managing the database. We use LevelDB which does the bulk of the heavy lifting on a separate thread, and is capable of very high read/write loads. Overall Bitcoin's CPU usage is dominated by ECDSA.

Let's assume an average rate of 2000tps, so just VISA. Transactions vary in size from about 0.2 kilobytes to over 1 kilobyte, but it's averaging half a kilobyte today.

That means that you need to keep up with around 8 megabits/second of transaction data (2000tps * 512 bytes) / 1024 bytes in a kilobyte / 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte = 0.97 megabytes per second * 8 = 7.8 megabits/second.

This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today, and is certainly at the low end of what colocation providers would expect to provide you with.

When blocks are solved, the current protocol will send the transactions again, even if a peer has already seen it at broadcast time. Fixing this to make blocks just list of hashes would resolve the issue and make the bandwidth needed for block broadcast negligable. So whilst this optimization isn't fully implemented today, we do not consider block transmission bandwidth here.

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

Optimizations

The description above applies to the current software with only minor optimizations assumed (the type that can and have been done by one man in a few weeks).

However there is potential for even greater optimizations to be made in future, at the cost of some additional complexity.

CPU

Pieter Wuille has implemented a custom verifier tuned for secp256k1 that can go beyond 20,000 signature verifications per second. It would require careful review by professional cryptographers to gain as much confidence as OpenSSL, but this can easily halve CPU load.

Algorithms exist to accelerate batch verification over elliptic curve signatures. This means if there are several inputs that are signing with the same key, it's possible to check their signatures simultaneously for another 9x speedup. This is a somewhat more complex implementation, however, it can work with existing signatures (clients don't need upgrading).

Newly developed digital signature algorithms, like ed25519 have extremely efficient software implementations that can reach speeds of nearly 80,000 verifications per second, even on an old Westmere CPU. That is a 10x improvement over secp256k1, and most likely is even higher on more modern CPUs. Supporting this in Bitcoin would mean a chain fork. This ECC algorithm has also been shown to be easily accelerated using GPUs, yielding scalar point multiplication times of less than a microsecond (i.e. a million point multiplications per second).

At these speeds it is likely that disk and memory bandwidth would become the primary limiting factor, rather than signature checking.

Simplified payment verification

It's possible to build a Bitcoin implementation that does not verify everything, but instead relies on either connecting to a trusted node, or puts its faith in high difficulty as a proxy for proof of validity. bitcoinj is an implementation of this mode.

In Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) mode, named after the section of Satoshi's paper that describes it, clients connect to an arbitrary full node and download only the block headers. They verify the chain headers connect together correctly and that the difficulty is high enough. They then request transactions matching particular patterns from the remote node (ie, payments to your addresses), which provides copies of those transactions along with a Merkle branch linking them to the block in which they appeared. This exploits the Merkle tree structure to allow proof of inclusion without needing the full contents of the block.

As a further optimization, block headers that are buried sufficiently deep can be thrown away after some time (eg, you only really need to store say 5000 blocks).

The level of difficulty required to obtain confidence the remote node is not feeding you fictional transactions depends on your threat model. If you are connecting to a node that is known to be reliable, the difficulty doesn't matter. If you want to pick a random node, the cost for an attacker to mine a block sequence containing a bogus transaction should be higher than the value to be obtained by defrauding you. By changing how deeply buried the block must be, you can trade off confirmation time vs cost of an attack.

Programs implementing this approach can have fixed storage/network overhead in the null case of no usage, and resource usage proportional to received/sent transactions.


SOURCE: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

[cryptworld]

actually they say that because they lost facebook and they are in bitcoin now
but I don't think so now
facebook is so viral and mainstream that it is incredible and bitcoin can't be over that

[DooMAD]

I'm a little surprised no one's made a decent attempt at a blockchain powered social media site yet.  Closest things so far are Twister and possibly OneName.  I suppose crypto enthusiasts are big on keeping personal information secure, so perhaps there's just less interest in developing something loosely equivalent to a decentralised facebook.  Might help make crypto awareness spread more quickly if someone could make it work, though.

[jabo38]

Bitcoin is already the biggest computational network on the planet.

What great and interesting computations has it made? Any new discoveries? Any huge breakthroughs?

It is the biggest, yes, the biggest waste.

I love bitcoin, I do, but I think there is a mining problem.

[jabo38]

Is Bitcoin ready for Billion of users actively using it ?

No, bitcoin is nowhere close to being ready to handle the entire world economy in a way like Visa or Mastercard. We simply do not have enough payment processors or exchanges to make this feasible yet. It is very alarming how the Winklevii are putting all of their money into their ETF project and not giving anything to the bitcoin core development team. We need side chains and we need them fast if we want this to go global. It is such a disgrace that $200million in VC funding is there and they can't even spare a couple 100k dollars to hire a few more core developers.

I'm not sure why so many people are opting for side-chains when it's already been proven that hardware exists that can accommodate for all transactions world-wide even when multiplying it with 10 times what VISA does today.... Non specialized equipment would run "lite" clients.


VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), so call it a daily peak rate of 47,000 tps. [1]

PayPal, in contrast, handles around 4 million transactions per day for an average of 46 tps or a probably peak rate of 100 tps.

Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal. Obviously if we want Bitcoin to scale to all economic transactions worldwide, including cash, it'd be a lot higher than that, perhaps more in the region of a few hundred thousand tps. And the need to be able to withstand DoS attacks (which VISA does not have to deal with) implies we would want to scale far beyond the standard peak rates. Still, picking a target let us do some basic calculations even if it's a little arbitrary.

Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps by some artificial limits. These were put in place to stop people from ballooning the size of the block chain before the network and community was ready for it. Once those limits are lifted, the maximum transaction rate will go up significantly.

The protocol has two parts. Nodes send "inv" messages to other nodes telling them they have a new transaction. If the receiving node doesn't have that transaction it requests it with a getdata.

The big cost is the crypto and block chain lookups involved with verifying the transaction. Verifying a transaction means some hashing and some ECDSA signature verifications. RIPEMD-160 runs at 106 megabytes/sec (call it 100 for simplicity) and SHA256 is about the same. So hashing 1 megabyte should take around 10 milliseconds and hashing 1 kilobyte would take 0.01 milliseconds - fast enough that we can ignore it.

Bitcoin is currently able (with a couple of simple optimizations that are prototyped but not merged yet) to perform around 8000 signature verifications per second on an quad core Intel Core i7-2670QM 2.2Ghz processor. The average number of inputs per transaction is around 2, so we must halve the rate. This means 4000 tps is easily achievable CPU-wise with a single fairly mainstream CPU.

As we can see, this means as long as Bitcoin nodes are allowed to max out at least 4 cores of the machines they run on, we will not run out of CPU capacity for signature checking unless Bitcoin is handling 100 times as much traffic as PayPal. As of late 2012 the network is handling 0.5 transactions/second, so even assuming enormous growth in popularity we will not reach this level for a long time.

Of course Bitcoin does other things beyond signature checking, most obviously, managing the database. We use LevelDB which does the bulk of the heavy lifting on a separate thread, and is capable of very high read/write loads. Overall Bitcoin's CPU usage is dominated by ECDSA.

Let's assume an average rate of 2000tps, so just VISA. Transactions vary in size from about 0.2 kilobytes to over 1 kilobyte, but it's averaging half a kilobyte today.

That means that you need to keep up with around 8 megabits/second of transaction data (2000tps * 512 bytes) / 1024 bytes in a kilobyte / 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte = 0.97 megabytes per second * 8 = 7.8 megabits/second.

This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today, and is certainly at the low end of what colocation providers would expect to provide you with.

When blocks are solved, the current protocol will send the transactions again, even if a peer has already seen it at broadcast time. Fixing this to make blocks just list of hashes would resolve the issue and make the bandwidth needed for block broadcast negligable. So whilst this optimization isn't fully implemented today, we do not consider block transmission bandwidth here.

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

Optimizations

The description above applies to the current software with only minor optimizations assumed (the type that can and have been done by one man in a few weeks).

However there is potential for even greater optimizations to be made in future, at the cost of some additional complexity.

CPU

Pieter Wuille has implemented a custom verifier tuned for secp256k1 that can go beyond 20,000 signature verifications per second. It would require careful review by professional cryptographers to gain as much confidence as OpenSSL, but this can easily halve CPU load.

Algorithms exist to accelerate batch verification over elliptic curve signatures. This means if there are several inputs that are signing with the same key, it's possible to check their signatures simultaneously for another 9x speedup. This is a somewhat more complex implementation, however, it can work with existing signatures (clients don't need upgrading).

Newly developed digital signature algorithms, like ed25519 have extremely efficient software implementations that can reach speeds of nearly 80,000 verifications per second, even on an old Westmere CPU. That is a 10x improvement over secp256k1, and most likely is even higher on more modern CPUs. Supporting this in Bitcoin would mean a chain fork. This ECC algorithm has also been shown to be easily accelerated using GPUs, yielding scalar point multiplication times of less than a microsecond (i.e. a million point multiplications per second).

At these speeds it is likely that disk and memory bandwidth would become the primary limiting factor, rather than signature checking.

Simplified payment verification

It's possible to build a Bitcoin implementation that does not verify everything, but instead relies on either connecting to a trusted node, or puts its faith in high difficulty as a proxy for proof of validity. bitcoinj is an implementation of this mode.

In Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) mode, named after the section of Satoshi's paper that describes it, clients connect to an arbitrary full node and download only the block headers. They verify the chain headers connect together correctly and that the difficulty is high enough. They then request transactions matching particular patterns from the remote node (ie, payments to your addresses), which provides copies of those transactions along with a Merkle branch linking them to the block in which they appeared. This exploits the Merkle tree structure to allow proof of inclusion without needing the full contents of the block.

As a further optimization, block headers that are buried sufficiently deep can be thrown away after some time (eg, you only really need to store say 5000 blocks).

The level of difficulty required to obtain confidence the remote node is not feeding you fictional transactions depends on your threat model. If you are connecting to a node that is known to be reliable, the difficulty doesn't matter. If you want to pick a random node, the cost for an attacker to mine a block sequence containing a bogus transaction should be higher than the value to be obtained by defrauding you. By changing how deeply buried the block must be, you can trade off confirmation time vs cost of an attack.

Programs implementing this approach can have fixed storage/network overhead in the null case of no usage, and resource usage proportional to received/sent transactions.


SOURCE: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Great post.

I'd love to see many of these changes implemented. It seems like they would make bitcoin much more awesome. Why do you think they haven't been?

[desired_username]

Great post.

I'd love to see many of these changes implemented. It seems like they would make bitcoin much more awesome. Why do you think they haven't been?

I don't think that the devs should rush any changes. Everything needs to be tested and thought out properly before implementing.

[Gargulan]

To be as big as facebook, Bitcoin needs to go up to $20,000 per coin to reach facebook market cap.


Is it possible to reach such market size? And be the sole survivor in the cryptocurrency world?

[oceans]

I can see where they are coming from in terms of how well established they are and will be and bitcoin could top that but how can you compare the two in other terms with one being a currency and the other being a social network? With anything relating to money that people can own it's surely to be a lot bigger than Facebook for sure within time.

[botany]

To be as big as facebook, Bitcoin needs to go up to $20,000 per coin to reach facebook market cap.


Is it possible to reach such market size? And be the sole survivor in the cryptocurrency world?

If bitcoin truly succeeds, its value will be more than the market cap of any company.
You do not compare the total USD in circulation with the market cap of google, do you?

[CreamyPie]

Its a good news, people should start using BTC rather than sitting whole day on FB uselessly.

[Sindelar1938]

I think BTC will exceed FB's market cap within the next 5 years
That's just a no-brainer for me. BTC solves a problem that is much bigger and several orders of magnitude harder to solve that what FB has accomplished.

[EndlessStory]

 "Bitcoin is a choice and Facebook is a need in today's world the day Bitcoin replaces the currencies and be a need,that day Facebook would be life "

[Mybitcoinz]

To be as big as facebook, Bitcoin needs to go up to $20,000 per coin to reach facebook market cap.


Is it possible to reach such market size? And be the sole survivor in the cryptocurrency world?

If bitcoin truly succeeds, its value will be more than the market cap of any company.
You do not compare the total USD in circulation with the market cap of google, do you?

With a such high market cap bitcoin's value could be more than 100.000$, nowadays this seems fantascience but in the future it could be reality.

[Cream]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

[Nagle]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Remember, the Winklevii are trying to set up an ETF so they can dump their Bitcoins. They need to find enough suckers.

[itsAj]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Remember, the Winklevii are trying to set up an ETF so they can dump their Bitcoins. They need to find enough suckers.

I don't think hey are trying to dump their bitcoin. I think they are trying to profit off of bitcoin. They will obviously sell a portion of their bitcoin when the ETF starts trading, but I think they hope to be able to make most of their money from the fee that the ETF charges it's holders (the management fee). I would also not be surprised if a fee what charged anytime that an AP exchanges the ETF for BTC or BTC for the ETF.

[trader001]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Remember, the Winklevii are trying to set up an ETF so they can dump their Bitcoins. They need to find enough suckers.

I don't think hey are trying to dump their bitcoin. I think they are trying to profit off of bitcoin. They will obviously sell a portion of their bitcoin when the ETF starts trading, but I think they hope to be able to make most of their money from the fee that the ETF charges it's holders (the management fee). I would also not be surprised if a fee what charged anytime that an AP exchanges the ETF for BTC or BTC for the ETF.

ETF fee is normally 1-2%. Doubt they can charge more than this.

Kind of make me wonder, why they want to go thru so much trouble to make 1-2% a year. There are other way to make more money easily.

[Onetallnerd]

Shouldn't you be glad that they are "dumping" I'd rather them not hold too many.

[valvalis]

I don't know why you are comparing bitcoin with facebook.
This is really different thing. It's like you are comparing Computer with Panties.

[blablaace]

how can you at all compare social network with currency 

[Picasso7]

What is facebook ?

[Picasso7]

how can you at all compare social network with currency 

agree 

[Hasher99]

Are you comparing users or investors? I think BTC can beat FB in investors but not users )

[mercistheman]

The stars are aligning... the infrastructure is well established... governments are starting to understand that a heavy hand will leave them behind.
It was a fad... now it's a trend.

[DDuckworth]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

[botany]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Remember, the Winklevii are trying to set up an ETF so they can dump their Bitcoins. They need to find enough suckers.

I don't think hey are trying to dump their bitcoin. I think they are trying to profit off of bitcoin. They will obviously sell a portion of their bitcoin when the ETF starts trading, but I think they hope to be able to make most of their money from the fee that the ETF charges it's holders (the management fee). I would also not be surprised if a fee what charged anytime that an AP exchanges the ETF for BTC or BTC for the ETF.

ETF fee is normally 1-2%. Doubt they can charge more than this.

Kind of make me wonder, why they want to go thru so much trouble to make 1-2% a year. There are other way to make more money easily.

1-2% on the money others invest. Not their money. 

[itsAj]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

[DDuckworth]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

[itsAj]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

[DDuckworth]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

I don't think it would be a demanding sort of situation where they say up front "PAY US IN BITCOIN." I think it would be much more gradual, something like this.

1. Slowly bitcoin becomes accepted everywhere, much like a credit card.
2. People start to realize bitcoin is easier and safer than credit cards (which at current it isn't easier, but by then it will be)
3. Some businesses start to offer bitcoin as an alternative method of payment (some already have started this)
4. All business offer bitcoin as an alternative choice
5. Slowly fiat as a source of pay is no longer an option at some businesses
6. Eventually once less than 10% of the population is taking their pay in fiat, BTC will become standard pay at all junctures
7. Governments will be paying out in bitcoin because they need to compete to keep a workforce employed.

This change would probably kick off once step 1 was complete, and a company springs up that offers to convert your paycheck to BTC instantly upon arrival but they'll take a cut as the service, this will cause employees to ask their place of business to do it directly since they don't want to pay a 1% fee on every paycheck just to have it in the common currency.

I'm not saying this is likely, but very possible.

[BIT-Sharon]

Essentially, just as HTTP or Bittorrent, Bitcoin is an agreement based on Internet, an invention by genius. It is also based on Internet and makes impossible things to be possible. On the scale, I believe it can come to that of Facebook. On the number of users, I think it will be equal to that of Facebook one day.

[pajrinn]

Bitcoin cant be bigger than facebook .

Just like a USD are not the biggest in the whole world .

yes I think so with you 
imposibble  ?

[catlinhappy]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Making a comparism between the two is rather very hilarious.

[devonne]

Very hilarious comparing the two.They are both different platforms.

[Cream]

Its possible, because I think fb has reached its peak now..time for a decrement..

[bellicose]

Looking for 10 differences:

* Green and Wet
* Loud and Cold
* FireFox and C#
* Bitcoin and Facebook

[melisande]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

I agree it will encourage financial openness  but don't you realize they are both different platforms.

[vitalemontea]

Doubtful

[minerpumpkin]

It could be bigger one day, either if Facebook goes bust, or Bitcoin really gets accepted as the useful tool of transferring money - like a backbone-protocol so to say. But it needs to get easier, needs to be accepted by the wide public and really offer advantages to people.

[TheJohn]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

But more people know facebook as compare to bitcoin, so what is the article trying to prove?

[jazzhot]

When bitcoin will be bigger than facebook, most users of this forum will be millionaires.

[MoonRise]

Bitcoin and facebook are relevantly two different things and there is no way you compare one with the other while they are not similar

[alwinlinzee]

When bitcoin will be bigger than facebook, most users of this forum will be millionaires.

Exactly i would probably be a rolling in trillions of btc's if this happens.

[EndlessStory]

Its possible that btc will have more investors, but its only theory. However I do see a high chances of that happening. Tons of people have made their lives by investing in BTC.

[noel57]

This is quite achievable but the only setback for now is time.

[giveBTCpls]

We need the Blockchain.info rebranded and made nicely. I think Amazon buying Blockchain.info would make sense. That would make Bitcoin explode, but of course we never know the intentions behind Amazon owners.

[Candystripes]

They are not competitors, and Facebook will be the biggest thing on the Internet for the next 5 years at least.

[Wooden Plate]

Bitcoin will have more investors in future than bitcoin because its growing and people are more willing to use it now.

Thats a clear truth.

[zahra4571]

Compare the time of popularity increasing at both sides and you will see what boom fb made.
Bitcoin is harder to understand and its not simple service like fb, btc cant be compared with it because fb its not payment service,
You can compare it with Paypal or some other payment service.

[blablaace]

Bitcoin and facebook are relevantly two different things and there is no way you compare one with the other while they are not similar

agreed with you

[Hobbes2]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different, somebody can use both, one of them or neither.

[itsAj]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

I don't think it would be a demanding sort of situation where they say up front "PAY US IN BITCOIN." I think it would be much more gradual, something like this.

1. Slowly bitcoin becomes accepted everywhere, much like a credit card.
2. People start to realize bitcoin is easier and safer than credit cards (which at current it isn't easier, but by then it will be)
3. Some businesses start to offer bitcoin as an alternative method of payment (some already have started this)
4. All business offer bitcoin as an alternative choice
5. Slowly fiat as a source of pay is no longer an option at some businesses
6. Eventually once less than 10% of the population is taking their pay in fiat, BTC will become standard pay at all junctures
7. Governments will be paying out in bitcoin because they need to compete to keep a workforce employed.

This change would probably kick off once step 1 was complete, and a company springs up that offers to convert your paycheck to BTC instantly upon arrival but they'll take a cut as the service, this will cause employees to ask their place of business to do it directly since they don't want to pay a 1% fee on every paycheck just to have it in the common currency.

I'm not saying this is likely, but very possible.

Bitcoin will not ever be safer then using credit cards for consumers. Credit cards offer many consumer protections that protect them in the event they get ripped off. Bitcoin does not have this, the fact that bitcoin transactions are not reversible is one of it's selling points. What will get bitcoin to continue to grow is that fact that it is cheaper then credit cards and other payment methods.

[marcus_of_augustus]

FB will be a footnote in history as a temporary social fad for kids, gossips, exhibitionists and sundry show-offs. It is a simple server-client web app and some code for farming data from idiotic sheeple who can't see through the con.

It is not even in the same league as Bitcoin which is a revolution in the fundamental technology used for the efficient functioning of markets, economies and resource allocation.

[PowerCordZ]

There is no comparison between bitcoin and facebook. Both are totally different things.

[Nawaytes]

There is no comparison between bitcoin and facebook. Both are totally different things.

that's right,
Facebook is a social network and bitcoin e-currency that is a different matter,
and may indeed want to compare, the comparison is its user network,
if so, even now bitcoin network larger than Facebook.

[Mars not Moon]

I read the article but I am still confused if in reality this will actually happen or not. Nevertheless, a good sign for bitcoin past investors.

[ariyaromadhona]

Comparing Cryptocurency to Social media ? ..

i dont think so .. event the popularity .. i think Bitcoin will never bigger than FB

[Damnyo]

FB will be a footnote in history as a temporary social fad for kids, gossips, exhibitionists and sundry show-offs. It is a simple server-client web app and some code for farming data from idiotic sheeple who can't see through the con.

It is not even in the same league as Bitcoin which is a revolution in the fundamental technology used for the efficient functioning of markets, economies and resource allocation.

This legendary gentleman is spitting knowledg right there.

FB = another shitty myspace
BTC = a technological milestone

[DooMAD]

FB will be a footnote in history as a temporary social fad for kids, gossips, exhibitionists and sundry show-offs. It is a simple server-client web app and some code for farming data from idiotic sheeple who can't see through the con.

It is not even in the same league as Bitcoin which is a revolution in the fundamental technology used for the efficient functioning of markets, economies and resource allocation.

Even if it is just a tool for harvesting data for big business, it's still useful.  I'd be hopeless at organising my social life without events reminding me where and when I'm supposed to be somewhere.  Even though it essentially serves as a glorified calendar and somewhere to put photos up, it's too convenient for me not to use.  Convenience is something people should never fail to underestimate the importance of.  While BTC is certainly revolutionary, it's still not all that convenient for people to obtain and that will need to change before mass adoption occurs.

[airpline1]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Weird, Facebook is social, and Bitcoin is crypto, but hearing that its going to be bigger kind of excites me and also make me uncomfortable.

[marcus_of_augustus]

FB will be a footnote in history as a temporary social fad for kids, gossips, exhibitionists and sundry show-offs. It is a simple server-client web app and some code for farming data from idiotic sheeple who can't see through the con.

It is not even in the same league as Bitcoin which is a revolution in the fundamental technology used for the efficient functioning of markets, economies and resource allocation.

Even if it is just a tool for harvesting data for big business, it's still useful.  I'd be hopeless at organising my social life without events reminding me where and when I'm supposed to be somewhere.  Even though it essentially serves as a glorified calendar and somewhere to put photos up, it's too convenient for me not to use.  Convenience is something people should never fail to underestimate the importance of.  While BTC is certainly revolutionary, it's still not all that convenient for people to obtain and that will need to change before mass adoption occurs.

Not "inconvenient" when your savings lose value or disappear altogether in a banking bust?

[Snorek]

Facebook is invigilation tool used only by sheeps. Bitcoin is already bigger that this. Aso comparing facebook to digital currency is like comparing mobile phone with fork. Both are usable but in different way...

[azguard]

On popularity this is a contest.
Only BTC rise so height that we can follow every step now.
FB is on hold yes but more and more people are talking about cryptos in real life then take FB likes or stuff.

Cryptos rise every second so you can imagine what will happen in near future

[DDuckworth]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

I don't think it would be a demanding sort of situation where they say up front "PAY US IN BITCOIN." I think it would be much more gradual, something like this.

1. Slowly bitcoin becomes accepted everywhere, much like a credit card.
2. People start to realize bitcoin is easier and safer than credit cards (which at current it isn't easier, but by then it will be)
3. Some businesses start to offer bitcoin as an alternative method of payment (some already have started this)
4. All business offer bitcoin as an alternative choice
5. Slowly fiat as a source of pay is no longer an option at some businesses
6. Eventually once less than 10% of the population is taking their pay in fiat, BTC will become standard pay at all junctures
7. Governments will be paying out in bitcoin because they need to compete to keep a workforce employed.

This change would probably kick off once step 1 was complete, and a company springs up that offers to convert your paycheck to BTC instantly upon arrival but they'll take a cut as the service, this will cause employees to ask their place of business to do it directly since they don't want to pay a 1% fee on every paycheck just to have it in the common currency.

I'm not saying this is likely, but very possible.

Bitcoin will not ever be safer then using credit cards for consumers. Credit cards offer many consumer protections that protect them in the event they get ripped off. Bitcoin does not have this, the fact that bitcoin transactions are not reversible is one of it's selling points. What will get bitcoin to continue to grow is that fact that it is cheaper then credit cards and other payment methods.

I am sure that many companies will probably spring up offering up "bitcoin insurance" which essentially will protect your purchases, much in the same way paypal offers.  They may end up being vile, wretched companies, or they may end up being the best thing ever.  But one way or another I am sure they'll exist sooner or later.

[botany]

There is no comparison between bitcoin and facebook. Both are totally different things.

that's right,
Facebook is a social network and bitcoin e-currency that is a different matter,
and may indeed want to compare, the comparison is its user network,
if so, even now bitcoin network larger than Facebook.

How is the bitcoin network larger than Facebook?

[DooMAD]

FB will be a footnote in history as a temporary social fad for kids, gossips, exhibitionists and sundry show-offs. It is a simple server-client web app and some code for farming data from idiotic sheeple who can't see through the con.

It is not even in the same league as Bitcoin which is a revolution in the fundamental technology used for the efficient functioning of markets, economies and resource allocation.

Even if it is just a tool for harvesting data for big business, it's still useful.  I'd be hopeless at organising my social life without events reminding me where and when I'm supposed to be somewhere.  Even though it essentially serves as a glorified calendar and somewhere to put photos up, it's too convenient for me not to use.  Convenience is something people should never fail to underestimate the importance of.  While BTC is certainly revolutionary, it's still not all that convenient for people to obtain and that will need to change before mass adoption occurs.

Not "inconvenient" when your savings lose value or disappear altogether in a banking bust?

I get that part, but the general populace out there clearly don't understand that yet.  The point I'm getting at, though, is if you don't know someone willing to sell you some BTC, it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to get hold of.  Articles like this one probably explain it better than I am.  Obviously there's LocalBitcoins.com and ATMs in certain places, but it's still not exactly what you'd call convenient yet.  People for the most part are quite lazy and won't go out of their way to try something new.  Maybe a banking bust would give them the incentive they need, but let's not rely on that outcome to be the driving force behind adoption.

[wasserman99]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

I don't think it would be a demanding sort of situation where they say up front "PAY US IN BITCOIN." I think it would be much more gradual, something like this.

1. Slowly bitcoin becomes accepted everywhere, much like a credit card.
2. People start to realize bitcoin is easier and safer than credit cards (which at current it isn't easier, but by then it will be)
3. Some businesses start to offer bitcoin as an alternative method of payment (some already have started this)
4. All business offer bitcoin as an alternative choice
5. Slowly fiat as a source of pay is no longer an option at some businesses
6. Eventually once less than 10% of the population is taking their pay in fiat, BTC will become standard pay at all junctures
7. Governments will be paying out in bitcoin because they need to compete to keep a workforce employed.

This change would probably kick off once step 1 was complete, and a company springs up that offers to convert your paycheck to BTC instantly upon arrival but they'll take a cut as the service, this will cause employees to ask their place of business to do it directly since they don't want to pay a 1% fee on every paycheck just to have it in the common currency.

I'm not saying this is likely, but very possible.

Bitcoin will not ever be safer then using credit cards for consumers. Credit cards offer many consumer protections that protect them in the event they get ripped off. Bitcoin does not have this, the fact that bitcoin transactions are not reversible is one of it's selling points. What will get bitcoin to continue to grow is that fact that it is cheaper then credit cards and other payment methods.

I am sure that many companies will probably spring up offering up "bitcoin insurance" which essentially will protect your purchases, much in the same way paypal offers.  They may end up being vile, wretched companies, or they may end up being the best thing ever.  But one way or another I am sure they'll exist sooner or later.

I don't think this would be a viable business option. It would be too easy to collude with the seller/counter-party the insurance company is insuring losses against to scam the insurance company.

I am not 100% sure on this but I believe that paypal will only reimburse the buyer in the event they can recover funds from the seller. Regardless if this is accurate or not, paypal has a lot of ways they can recover funds from a scamming seller while an insurance company would not.

[TimeWatch]

Read the article but I doubt investors are still ready to risk their money for BTC, they would better go for FB as its going very very fast...but in future maybe.

[BitcoinBadger]

Bitcoin will be bigger than FB only if large number of investors are convinced about idea behind bitcoin and speculations etc.

Other than that, no way it will happen.

[Timetwister]

Bigger in what sense? It's of course much more useful for people, it's amazing how many advantages Bitcoin have over fiat. Facebook is mainly just a waste of time...

[The Great Gatsby]

Bitcoin will be as big as the internet, or even bigger old sport.

[Winner]

The name Bitcoin might become bigger than facebook but the people that invest in it might drop some because of the volatility of the market.

[tzortz]

Apples to oranges comparison.

[omnidoge]

Not gonna happen. Everyday facebook grows making millions and millions without making a decrease of their worth. Bitcoin dove a couple of times in a month.

[bajlox]

Isn bitcoin already bigger that FB.

All use crypto, not all use FB.

So in no time bitcoin (cryptos) are in for all.

[Timetwister]

The name Bitcoin might become bigger than facebook but the people that invest in it might drop some because of the volatility of the market.

Volatility will decrease when volume increases. As more people demand it, volatility will go down (and price up).

[bitcoinaarush]

Facebook now got their foothold. And noty foothold, foothold. I mean a 20foot concrete foundation foothold. Bitcoin.. hmmm slightly lesser than that for sure.

[mancala]

Impossible to happen. Facebook will rule the world for another 10 years.

[liteboozer]

not gonna happen.

[ObscureBean]

Well it really depends on what you mean by 'bigger'. If you're referring to adoption (the number of people that uses Bitcoin) then sure, in some years I can totally see Bitcoin being overwhelmingly bigger than Facebook. Bitcoin is just money and can be used by everyone whereas FB will only ever appeal to a small portion of the world.

[Hiro_Y3k]

Facebook is already being challenged for market share of new users from Twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, snapchat. http://bgr.com/2014/01/16/facebook-teens-leaving-service-11-million/
Social media can change quickly. Facebook could end up looking like old college yearbooks.

[kingcoin111]

Facebook is already being challenged for market share of new users from Twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, snapchat. http://bgr.com/2014/01/16/facebook-teens-leaving-service-11-million/
Social media can change quickly. Facebook could end up looking like old college yearbooks.

Suppose it will go like that, what happens next? What happens to the people that are using FB?

[marney111]

Facebook is already being challenged for market share of new users from Twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, snapchat. http://bgr.com/2014/01/16/facebook-teens-leaving-service-11-million/
Social media can change quickly. Facebook could end up looking like old college yearbooks.

Suppose it will go like that, what happens next? What happens to the people that are using FB?

Maybe in 10 years there will be something new for them

[King Agamemnon]

not possible. But if in a year facebook will drop its popularity rate then bitcoin will be much bigger. but as long as fb is still working great, there will be no competition.

[MaryKris]

Couldnt happen. When facebook is gone and other surfaces it will still be bigger than bitcoin. Maybe it (bitcoin) will be bigger than fb in some other countries but not all over the world.

[David1978]

Right now its hard to imagine how Bitcoin will beat Facebook. I don't know how those people can be so certain about their statements.

[pajrinn]

Isn bitcoin already bigger that FB.

All use crypto, not all use FB.

So in no time bitcoin (cryptos) are in for all.

I don't think so,
I'm not sure all use crypto
People know crypto if user more know internet

[botany]

Facebook is already being challenged for market share of new users from Twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, snapchat. http://bgr.com/2014/01/16/facebook-teens-leaving-service-11-million/
Social media can change quickly. Facebook could end up looking like old college yearbooks.

And bitcoin is being challenged by litecoin. 

[Fearless]

I have full faith that bitcoin will attract lot of investors[as many of wall street people are already doing]

So bitcoin in terms of investors and investment will beat facebook in few years.

[ChuckBuck]

I believe Bitcoin will have a larger impact than Facebook when all is said and done: economically, sociopolitically, philanthropically etc...just that we're still several years from seeing this come to fruition.  When it does reach mass network effect, Bitcoin can be used for elections and the voting process, used for large scale charitable movements, used for large scale fundraising for a grass roots cause, used as a global payment and money transmitter and remitter.  There's some signs of this happening, but not quite the scale I'm talking about.

Facebook is global, is the largest multinational social media website, is on practically every PC, MAC, phone, tablet, and portable device.

Bitcoin can and I believe will get there, but to dethrone Facebook, will take a truly global revolution in the way everyone sees it.  Someone mentions Facebook, you already know what that person is talking about.  "Oh that's the site where you see everyone's vacation pictures".  "Everyone shares their favorite pages and likes and dislikes and pokes with imaginary gifts, before going on their virtual farm".  "Everyone at school is on it, we see their spring break pics all the time."  "Aww, isn't that cutest baby ever, look at the video of her crawl!"

Bitcoin still isn't common speak, still isn't on that level where a 9 or 10 year old can describe pretty much what it's all about.  If we get there, it'll be once we have soccer mom's talking about their Bitcoin savings, several Mom and Pop stores selling everything in the store in Bitcoin, and the immigrant worker working hard sending money back home to Central America, South America, Europe, Asia etc in Bitcoin....we still have a ways to go.

[Ardenyham]

Bitcoin has potential to be used by more people than Facebook. Money uses everyone but not everyone need Facebook

While Bitcoin has many advantages over fiat (on internet), we have to see if Bitcoin become preffered way to use money on internet.

[master-P]

Facebook is already being challenged for market share of new users from Twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, snapchat. http://bgr.com/2014/01/16/facebook-teens-leaving-service-11-million/
Social media can change quickly. Facebook could end up looking like old college yearbooks.

Facebook actually owns instagram so any "market share" taken by instagram is still had by facebook. I believe the same is true for whsatsapp as well.

[Timetwister]

Bitcoin has potential to be used by more people than Facebook. Money uses everyone but not everyone need Facebook

While Bitcoin has many advantages over fiat (on internet), we have to see if Bitcoin become preffered way to use money on internet.

And money is much more relevant than that stupid website. Widely using bitcoin would create a lot of wealth, because of its advantages over fiat money. It's much more efficient, secure, etc.

[itsAj]

I highly doubt BTC will have more users than FB>..because FB is used by everyone from kids to teens, adults and aged. And not everyone wants to use BTC

What about the likelihood of bitcoin replacing every currency in the world though?  At that point, even allowances would be given in bitcoin.

It would take a lot for bitcoin to potentially replace any fiat based currency that exists today, let along every fiat based currency. It really would not be able to replace currencies like the dollar, euro, british pound or the yen because their governments are so influential worldwide and would likely not accept anything other then their own local currency for payment of taxes.

But if everyone stopped using the fiat the government's own money would be useless, it wouldn't be accepted by others because nobody would be paid in it.  What do governments use taxes for, police, war, firefighters, infrastructure etc.

So let's say all of these workers are only using bitcoin, well the government can't pay them because they won't take it, it's worthless.  The government is already attempting to impose taxes upon BTC, why wouldn't you think they'll succeed?  Once they do I am pretty sure they won't care what money we use - the problem is the banks themselves who have the control over our government at the moment.

The government has too much influence for this to be possible. In order for a movement like the one you describe to potentially be successful the people demanding to be paid in bitcoin must be willing to work elsewhere if they will not be paid in bitcoin. The problem is that there is little to no demand for this kind of work outside of the government. So these people would not have the skills to work a a job that would pay them for their potential because they would not be able to utilize all their skills.

I don't think it would be a demanding sort of situation where they say up front "PAY US IN BITCOIN." I think it would be much more gradual, something like this.

1. Slowly bitcoin becomes accepted everywhere, much like a credit card.
2. People start to realize bitcoin is easier and safer than credit cards (which at current it isn't easier, but by then it will be)
3. Some businesses start to offer bitcoin as an alternative method of payment (some already have started this)
4. All business offer bitcoin as an alternative choice
5. Slowly fiat as a source of pay is no longer an option at some businesses
6. Eventually once less than 10% of the population is taking their pay in fiat, BTC will become standard pay at all junctures
7. Governments will be paying out in bitcoin because they need to compete to keep a workforce employed.

This change would probably kick off once step 1 was complete, and a company springs up that offers to convert your paycheck to BTC instantly upon arrival but they'll take a cut as the service, this will cause employees to ask their place of business to do it directly since they don't want to pay a 1% fee on every paycheck just to have it in the common currency.

I'm not saying this is likely, but very possible.

Bitcoin will not ever be safer then using credit cards for consumers. Credit cards offer many consumer protections that protect them in the event they get ripped off. Bitcoin does not have this, the fact that bitcoin transactions are not reversible is one of it's selling points. What will get bitcoin to continue to grow is that fact that it is cheaper then credit cards and other payment methods.

I am sure that many companies will probably spring up offering up "bitcoin insurance" which essentially will protect your purchases, much in the same way paypal offers.  They may end up being vile, wretched companies, or they may end up being the best thing ever.  But one way or another I am sure they'll exist sooner or later.

I think the possibility for fraud would be too great. What would prevent someone from signing up for an account, making a purchase and claiming fraud (and then repeating)? It would not be unreasonable for a person's first transaction to be fraudulent, so they could not deny the claim for this reason.

Credit card companies on the other hand have the ability to go after the merchant for any fraudulent charges (regardless if the merchant is responsible or not) as well as attempting to go after the fraudster. 

[altcoinlady]

not possible. But if in a year facebook will drop its popularity rate then bitcoin will be much bigger. but as long as fb is still working great, there will be no competition.

Agreed....And you dont think facebook admins will not do anything about the future of facebook? They will surely prepare for this...

[bigassboy]

Facebook is too ingrained into peoples minds for this to happen

[SF-Man]

not possible. But if in a year facebook will drop its popularity rate then bitcoin will be much bigger. but as long as fb is still working great, there will be no competition.

Facebook is too ingrained into peoples minds for this to happen

facebook has its own, well paid team to make sure facebook will be there for 100 more years.

[DaveSaldana123]

not possible. But if in a year facebook will drop its popularity rate then bitcoin will be much bigger. but as long as fb is still working great, there will be no competition.

Facebook is too ingrained into peoples minds for this to happen

facebook has its own, well paid team to make sure facebook will be there for 100 more years.

You got that right. Are these people thinking that facebook will just leave just like that? No, we should brace ourselves for a new facebook soon.

[Ayers]

the comparison doesn't make sense, bitcoin is more of a money technology, facebook is another thing all together

[hardleft121]

I don't understand what is the point of comparison between BTC and Facebook. BTC is a currency and Facebook is a social network.

[panju1]

not possible. But if in a year facebook will drop its popularity rate then bitcoin will be much bigger. but as long as fb is still working great, there will be no competition.

Facebook is too ingrained into peoples minds for this to happen

facebook has its own, well paid team to make sure facebook will be there for 100 more years.

Technology companies can go down very quickly....
Nokia is one example.

[Datcracktho]

Bitcoin is beyond "ohh its just this thing, it could be replaced by that thing". Bitcoin is unique, it has 0 competition. This is a revolution.

[csis]

Mp3's will be bigger than Microsoft! 

[ShintoshiBTC]

You are comparing apples and oranges.

[tzortz]

Could not ever thought such a thread would ever exist.

[gamblethis]

Could not ever thought such a thread would ever exist.

Some people cant stop comparing everything to fb.

[pajrinn]

You are comparing apples and oranges.

I dont think so, apples anda orange it's fruits
Bitcoin and Facebook very diferent 
like the sky and the earth 

[Bitcoinpro]

Samsung has half a million employees,

[evoked22]

I am not too sure whether it will be bigger than Facebook in the coming years though I am pretty sure it will be just as popular in terms of an app being preinstalled on your phone, having facilities around to support bitcoin etc...

[jennifer21]

I am not too sure whether it will be bigger than Facebook in the coming years though I am pretty sure it will be just as popular in terms of an app being preinstalled on your phone, having facilities around to support bitcoin etc...

As theyve said, facebook and bitcoin is not on the same page. Maybe you can compare twitter and facebook.

[misscointamer]

Bitcoin is still on its developmental stage while facebook is on its full blown, money making but still upgrading stage. And believe me that is a long way.

[Skrillex]

I also think it will be bigger than any existing social site or network.

[Neotox]

bitcoin and facebook are two different things
bitcoin is a cryptocurrency
and facebook a social website and a company

so comparing bitcoin to facebook makes no sense

[Kolakazki]

Bitcoin will never be bigger than Facebook. Facebook is not even bigger than dollar. Facebook is there because of dollar.

[LitcoinCollector]

Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook, because Bitcoin is to stay.

[Eastwind]

Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook, because Bitcoin is to stay.

BTC 1.0 can be replaced by BTC 2.0.

[inibapaknak]

let's hope so 

[panju1]

bitcoin and facebook are two different things
bitcoin is a cryptocurrency
and facebook a social website and a company

so comparing bitcoin to facebook makes no sense

Maybe the comparison is in terms of users?

[ikydesu]

bitcoin and facebook are two different things
bitcoin is a cryptocurrency
and facebook a social website and a company

so comparing bitcoin to facebook makes no sense

Maybe the comparison is in terms of users?

I think not only users, but also different in terms of usability.

[mancala]

bitcoin and facebook are two different things
bitcoin is a cryptocurrency
and facebook a social website and a company

so comparing bitcoin to facebook makes no sense

Maybe the comparison is in terms of users?

I think not only users, but also different in terms of usability.

Hmmmm okay if in terms of users, all people who uses bitcoin are using facebook for sure. Maybe 90% of the time. But, not all people who are using facebook are using bitcoin. So, there..

[Unkle]

It's possible but unlikely bitcoin will become bigger than Facebook, though I hope I'm wrong. If it does actually happen it'll be a very long time. Maybe there'll be an even bigger Facebook then too.

[Balls]

I think by comparing them he's just using that comparison to speculate how big bitcoin can become. IT could become bigger than Facebook as everyone uses money, but not everyone uses social networks. FB could also integrate Bitcoin payments which would be great.

[Gambiteesee]

Not gonna come true.. Maybe bitcoin can reach paypal's level but not fb.

[sandykho47]

I don't get it
How can you compare 2 very different subject ?

If you mean how much facebook company worth compared to Market Cap Bitcoin it's okay.
If you mean total user, facebook still win

[bajlox]

Lets not argue anymore.
Booth are big on there own way.

And they dont need to be compared.
I think.

[azguard]

Lets not argue anymore.
Booth are big on there own way.

And they dont need to be compared.
I think.

Vote on this.
No need to argue which is bigger better and......

Btc is good FB is good.
They have all more then enough users.
So I like FB i can find some friend that i have been in schooldays.
But like BTC better cuz i can make cash and invest and make cash or loose.

[BIT-Sharon]

“Bitcoin is a protocol for decentralisation, so you could build a decentralised company on top of it, a stock market. It’s an internet of ownership, so it’s not quite a direct comparison.” In the same way Facebook encouraged us to be socially open, bitcoin encourages us to be financially open, he argues. The Winklevoss vision is of a kind of decentralised financial utopia, where payments cannot be intercepted by middlemen and where developing countries have an equal stab at the global markets."


Yes, there are different way of  comparison. However, it is not bad for Bitcoin to compare with Facebook which is popular and accepted by people all around the world.

[Daniel91]

i don't think that you can compare Bitcoin with Facebook.
Facebook is social network, bitcoin is crypto currency.
They can work together, of course, if FB accept bitcoin for payments, but we are talking about 2 very different things here.

[King Agamemnon]

No it wont.. it wont..

[johncarpe64]

winklevoss have always understood new business I think its worth saying that they are promoting Bitcoin heavily and they are a positive force but you cannot compare as they are both very different

[azguard]

i don't think that you can compare Bitcoin with Facebook.
Facebook is social network, bitcoin is crypto currency.
They can work together, of course, if FB accept bitcoin for payments, but we are talking about 2 very different things here.

They are both big in there own way.
But if they integrate payment of any crypto in FB then i must say this.

Where will be end for those two. Moon. Or even bigger.

[mllenios]

No.. It will not happen.. Ever.

[leex1528]

Is anyone else concerned that Bitcoin will be like Myspace?  It looks like that more and more each day is the price goes down.  Which means some other coin will come along and be bigger than bitcoin and it will be like Facebook....

[huoiuu]

I will be waiting for the arrival of this day.

[ChuckBuck]

Is anyone else concerned that Bitcoin will be like Myspace?  It looks like that more and more each day is the price goes down.  Which means some other coin will come along and be bigger than bitcoin and it will be like Facebook....

Whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes bro!  Before you start throwing out the Myspace analogies, take a look at the big picture:



Next in line is Ripple, and they're still quite a few magnitudes away from even sniffing Bitcoin's level.

Let's all take a breath and see things as they are.  Until something bigger comes along, there is none.

[djokica]

both are good and big on there own way.

btc prime in crypto fb prime in social networks.

big will be if fb integrate maybe paying in crypto?

[maurya78]

My guess is that btc will really hit the high market cap notes in 2016 with significant momentum built starting the second half of next year with the next halving on the horizon and forward inflation coming down. And adoption.
No question that it's gonna be bigger than FB in time.

[bajlox]

I dont think that they integrate any crypto just yet.

More they will hold and wait if someone else on social network do it first to see how it look and function.

[DinaErfan]

what do you mean by bigger do you mean in user number or in total  value?

[SecureExchange]

The comparison alone is not relevant at all

[azguard]

Is anyone else concerned that Bitcoin will be like Myspace?  It looks like that more and more each day is the price goes down.  Which means some other coin will come along and be bigger than bitcoin and it will be like Facebook....

Whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes bro!  Before you start throwing out the Myspace analogies, take a look at the big picture:



Next in line is Ripple, and they're still quite a few magnitudes away from even sniffing Bitcoin's level.

Let's all take a breath and see things as they are.  Until something bigger comes along, there is none.

i will take time to pass but i agree.
lot will happen maybe some coin will drop out others will come in no one now for sure.
yet it will be seen in following months.

[BTCIndia]

what do you mean by bigger do you mean in user number or in total  value?

Market cap and brand value.

[jacktheking]

Comparing Bitcoin with Facebook is.. way too 'off'. Comparing Bitcoin to alt coin or Facebook to Twitter is better.

Well, Bitcoin will only be better if Facebook accept Bitcoin as payment.

[BTCat]

Ripple stinks. Why do bigger players adopt it?

[llanillo]

Comparison doesn't have any sense.... you can't compare a website with a currency... earth and the sky... different things

[madken7777]

Comparison doesn't have any sense.... you can't compare a website with a currency... earth and the sky... different things

Bitcoin is not really a currency. The value is backed by literally no one.

[lucky88888]

lets just say cryptocurrency (btc or not) will be bigger than facebook+google+apple+microsoft combined for sure! so far btc is showing great promise!

[ebliever]

Comparison doesn't have any sense.... you can't compare a website with a currency... earth and the sky... different things

Bitcoin is not really a currency. The value is backed by literally no one.

All of us using it and exchanging it for things others value, are backing it. It is backed by the only thing that matters in the long run, people who have faith in it. Take away the (fire)power of governments, and how much backing would their monopoly-money (pun intended) currencies have?

[evok3d]

Ofcourse it will be bigger than facebook!

If you were to put it into real life aspects it would be like bitcoin being the internet and facebook being a feature/platform/app built on top of it that uses the technology to provide a service.

There will be a time where we will have a decentralized facebook!!! **fingers crossed in hope**

Cheers

[leex1528]

Whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes bro!  Before you start throwing out the Myspace analogies, take a look at the big picture:



Next in line is Ripple, and they're still quite a few magnitudes away from even sniffing Bitcoin's level.

Let's all take a breath and see things as they are.  Until something bigger comes along, there is none.

Well, That is sort of my point.  When Myspace came along Facebook was absolutely nothing.  It was sort of a fresh, just like Bitcoin was if you will.  Once Facebook went public, and Myspace already started putting out ads Facebook came back and went public and took over everything....

[BTCat]

It's like saying Facebook will be bigger than the internet, at least for now.

[remotemass]

Maybe. And Oculus Rift as well 

[santaClause]

Whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes bro!  Before you start throwing out the Myspace analogies, take a look at the big picture:



Next in line is Ripple, and they're still quite a few magnitudes away from even sniffing Bitcoin's level.

Let's all take a breath and see things as they are.  Until something bigger comes along, there is none.

Well, That is sort of my point.  When Myspace came along Facebook was absolutely nothing.  It was sort of a fresh, just like Bitcoin was if you will.  Once Facebook went public, and Myspace already started putting out ads Facebook came back and went public and took over everything....

If you look at longer term charts you will see that the price of most altcoins have been on a long term price decline. While bitcoin has not.

Facebook added real new features to social networking that myspace did not offer. It was not merely a copy of myspace. The altcoins on the other hand do not add anything that bitcoin does not offer and is actually less secure making them less attractive

[azguard]

We can speculate much as we want but it will be the same.
Btc prime crypto equals big.
FB prime social equals big.

Both big on there own way. Period.

[bajlox]

There will be one once fb integrated paying in crypto.
Then wont be any more who is bigger or better or something else.

[djokica]

both are big
both will be big
and they are leading in theirs field.
fb social
btc crypto

[ytr8]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

I look forward to and wait for the arrival of this day.

[lilin321]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

when BTC is bigger than Facebook, then  who will get the  biggest advantage?

[TheMasterKey]

They both are very different from each other therefore comparing them doesn't make any sense.

[BillyBobZorton]

Ripple stinks. Why do bigger players adopt it?

Because Google. They have connections and deals happen. Thats my fear, that a shitty crypto goes #1 because of connections.

[faceplantz]

Ripple stinks. Why do bigger players adopt it?

Because Google. They have connections and deals happen. Thats my fear, that a shitty crypto goes #1 because of connections.

So you mean google is connected with ripple?

[azguard]

Ripple stinks. Why do bigger players adopt it?

Because Google. They have connections and deals happen. Thats my fear, that a shitty crypto goes #1 because of connections.

So you mean google is connected with ripple?

This is little of topic.
We can create new one on this.


BTW nothing is big on new.
Both Fb and BTC are big on there own way in different field.
So this means that this is blind race.

[bajlox]

Arent they both big in there own way.

FB leading social network BTC leading crypto.
So what are we argue about?

[Eastwind]

Arent they both big in there own way.

FB leading social network BTC leading crypto.
So what are we argue about?

There is not much to argue about. In terms of market capitalization, BTC will be much bigger in 20 years time if it is still there.

[faince222]

You cannot consider "Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook", same thing of it is "Salad is more good than steak". I want to tell to the brother Winklevoss that they have to work in their ETF and open it as soon as possible !

[altcointalk.org]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

The uses are different but the potential repercussions in terms of technological, economic (Bitcoin more than Facebook on this point) and social change are similar.

[Nerazzura]

however, we can not deny that the development of bitcoin so far is because of facebook,
like groups devoted bitcoin or other crypyo,
then hunters introduce bitcoin bitcoin that spirit through their friends on facebook

[TaunSew]

Myspace had 100 million accounts in year #3.  Bitcoin is 500K-2M users after 5 years, so no it's not a "Myspace".

Bitcoin now I think has a problem with userbase expansion.  I mean it's already all over the television and newspapers - why isn't mainstreet coming in?  It leaves me to conclude that some other coin better at promotion and userbase expansion will simply replace Bitcoin.  A couple of months of exponential userbase expansion could shoot pass Bitcoin's userbase.

[briantree]

Myspace had 100 million accounts in year #3.  Bitcoin is 500K-2M users after 5 years, so no it's not a "Myspace".

Bitcoin now I think has a problem with userbase expansion.  I mean it's already all over the television and newspapers - why isn't mainstreet coming in?  It leaves me to conclude that some other coin better at promotion and userbase expansion will simply replace Bitcoin.  A couple of months of exponential userbase expansion could shoot pass Bitcoin's userbase.

Remember the dot com bubble? I was 18 years old and I thought the Internet was something too vague to bet on.
And Google was founded in a garage; to allow people to search! How can you set up a company that helps people search, and dream to become rich?  That (was) ridiculous. And Google became big.

Hold on to your faith.
Regarding userbase, there are mainstream companies jumping on board to help this. Look at www.circle.com They make Bitcoin more user-friendly, at least for US people. And virtual currency has been helping people in Africa since 2007 already. It's not Bitcoin's problem that we don't accept it. It's us. We're usually okay with sub-standards. But it is changing. We are trusting AirBNB, Uber. We might as well trust Bitcoin.

[MadGamer]

They are totally different mate :p don't see how you can compare them
but on popularity .. yeah why not , Bitcoin have a chance

[TaunSew]

Myspace had 100 million accounts in year #3.  Bitcoin is 500K-2M users after 5 years, so no it's not a "Myspace".

Bitcoin now I think has a problem with userbase expansion.  I mean it's already all over the television and newspapers - why isn't mainstreet coming in?  It leaves me to conclude that some other coin better at promotion and userbase expansion will simply replace Bitcoin.  A couple of months of exponential userbase expansion could shoot pass Bitcoin's userbase.

Remember the dot com bubble? I was 18 years old and I thought the Internet was something too vague to bet on.
And Google was founded in a garage; to allow people to search! How can you set up a company that helps people search, and dream to become rich?  That (was) ridiculous. And Google became big.

Hold on to your faith.
Regarding userbase, there are mainstream companies jumping on board to help this. Look at www.circle.com They make Bitcoin more user-friendly, at least for US people. And virtual currency has been helping people in Africa since 2007 already. It's not Bitcoin's problem that we don't accept it. It's us. We're usually okay with sub-standards. But it is changing. We are trusting AirBNB, Uber. We might as well trust Bitcoin.

Dot.com was $7 trillion and only 2% of the world's population had internet access.    Digital currencies because of their asset characteristics, if it were to reach the size of PayPal (150 million users) would probably be worth $Trillions.

 PayPal is only worth $40 billion because this is a payment processor and their capitalization is derived from the transaction fees (there is no stored value).  If PayPal was a like Bitcoin then it would be worth a huge fortune no doubt.



I think digital currencies can take us there but I'm not entirely convinced that Bitcoin can lead that charge, because I noted the issue we've had in user base expansion.  500K-2M users just isn't cutting it.  Bitcoin is all over the media and yet I haven't seen mainstreet come in yet.


The funny thing is this guy I listen to on the radio always tells people about AirBNB, UBER and those sort of alternatives... but strangely he's still fiercely anti-Bitcoin..  mind you his reason for disliking it, if I recall, is Satoshi being anonymous and the hashing power being monopolized by Ghash.

I don't know about Asia or Europe but if you want Americans to adopt something then the radio hosts across the country need to embrace Bitcoin and digital currencies.

[chopstick]

Facebook sucks cock. Of course bitcoin will be bigger than Facefuck.

When bitcoin exceeds facebook's market cap bitcoin will be 10K+ per coin.

[briantree]

The funny thing is this guy I listen to on the radio always tells people about AirBNB, UBER and those sort of alternatives... but strangely he's still fiercely anti-Bitcoin..  mind you his reason for disliking it, if I recall, is Satoshi being anonymous and the hashing power being monopolized by Ghash.

I don't know about Asia or Europe but if you want Americans to adopt something then the radio hosts across the country need to embrace Bitcoin and digital currencies.

I do know about Asia. Asian are not risk-aversion. They prefer holding golden bars, written contracts, face-to-face meeting. Nothing wrong with it, it's just culture, it takes centuries to change.
I don't know about Europe.
I do know about American. We are risk takers. Even if we fail, we will make some comedy movies of it, have some good laugh, and move on to other ventures. Quoted Richard Branson: "business ventures are like buses, there are ALWAYS new ones coming".
Thanks TaunSew for pointing out GHASH. Quite interesting. I'll keep an eye on this along the way.
Again, it's a test of trust in a trust-less system.
If people trust the protocol, they will withdraw themselves from GHASH, preventing it to reach 51%.
If people don't care or they don't know, they will flock to GHASH, helping it to reach 51%, 60%, 99% and BAM, GHASH turns the table -> virtual currency loses -> everyone withdraws -> no more BITCOIN! We convert BITCOIN to fiat, pick ourselves up and jump on other buses. Not so bad.

[pequelore]

Facebook sucks cock. Of course bitcoin will be bigger than Facefuck.

When bitcoin exceeds facebook's market cap bitcoin will be 10K+ per coin.

LOL so you think Satoshi Nakamoto is richer than Mark Zuckerberg?

[mezmerizer9]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

You mean by popularity? Well, who knows maybe in  afew years when bitcoin is widely spread and accepted by everyone. But bigger than Facebook? Those can't be really compared. Still I hope that in a few years, bitcoin will be widely accepted as a secure and fast mean of payment.

[cryptomanik]

It won't happen and it will never happen. Ever.

[leex1528]

Seriously....Probably will never happen.  Facebook has roughly 1.28 Billion users.  The internet has roughly 2.6 billion users.  Means about 50% of the internet has facebook and uses it.  I am guessing Bitcoin doesn't even come close to that.  If we could hit 20% of the global internet users I think that would be huge, 50% is way out of the question.

[funkenstein]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

Actually facebook is a website. 

[azguard]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

That's right! When they speak about bigger do they mean value, adoption-wise or what?

How about all.
In value one is big other is huge.
Adoption will be key. If and I hope that i will happen that FB accept btc then there is now end.
Price will be big, people will even more accept cryptos and there will no more argue what is bigger cuz both will be huge.

[Ionchamp]

It wont happen and it will not happen. 

[bitsmichel]

Seriously....Probably will never happen.  Facebook has roughly 1.28 Billion users.  The internet has roughly 2.6 billion users.  Means about 50% of the internet has facebook and uses it.  I am guessing Bitcoin doesn't even come close to that.  If we could hit 20% of the global internet users I think that would be huge, 50% is way out of the question.

In time Bitcoin could reach a much larger percentage of the internet, Bitcoin is very young.  If it hits 20% all of the posters here would be very rich. 

[Balls]

Seriously....Probably will never happen.  Facebook has roughly 1.28 Billion users.  The internet has roughly 2.6 billion users.  Means about 50% of the internet has facebook and uses it.  I am guessing Bitcoin doesn't even come close to that.  If we could hit 20% of the global internet users I think that would be huge, 50% is way out of the question.

In time Bitcoin could reach a much larger percentage of the internet, Bitcoin is very young.  If it hits 20% all of the posters here would be very rich. 

Really? Even those with next to nothing in bitcoins? With that being said, I don't see why it's impossible that we couldn't hit 20% of internet users eventually. If you use the internet there's no reason why you can't use btc.

[neoneros]

Could we make a decentralised 'social media' with a new protocol, based on what we learned from the bitcoin?

- A new basic protocol for messaging and commenting on content(or an old one in a new jacket, like jabber)
- Content not on a central location, but on a diverse set of different cloud or local storage sollutions?
- Revenue of the big datapool would roll back to the owner of the data(in bitcoins ofcourse!) and not to a facebook ceo

the chain would connect all things, transfer messages and bits and bytes.. you choose your own frontend, facebook could facilitate this, or any other party, like hootsuite. Instead of fixing your social media to a single entity like google+, facebook, twitter and the likes, you just share what you want on the social chain, keep contact with other social chainers.

just a bit like the internet, but more structured

[Daniel91]

I don't think so.
In fact, you can't compare Bitcoin and FB.
FB is social network, Bitcoin is crypto currency.
I think that eventually FB will accept bitcoin as another payment option, and this will be added value to their service.

[david wilson]

There is no comparison between social media and cryptocurrency.

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

[james martin]

How can you compare a social media website with virtual currency?

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

[marcus_of_augustus]

Could we make a decentralised 'social media' with a new protocol, based on what we learned from the bitcoin?

- A new basic protocol for messaging and commenting on content(or an old one in a new jacket, like jabber)
- Content not on a central location, but on a diverse set of different cloud or local storage sollutions?
- Revenue of the big datapool would roll back to the owner of the data(in bitcoins ofcourse!) and not to a facebook ceo

the chain would connect all things, transfer messages and bits and bytes.. you choose your own frontend, facebook could facilitate this, or any other party, like hootsuite. Instead of fixing your social media to a single entity like google+, facebook, twitter and the likes, you just share what you want on the social chain, keep contact with other social chainers.

just a bit like the internet, but more structured

http://twister.net.co/

[TheLoser]

I think bitcoin or cryptocurrency will skyrocket facebook 10 folds.

[funkenstein]

I don't think so.
In fact, you can't compare Bitcoin and FB.
FB is social network, Bitcoin is crypto currency.
I think that eventually FB will accept bitcoin as another payment option, and this will be added value to their service.

No, FB is a website. 

[Cranky4u]

Feels like BTC has stalled...

[Peegasus]

It will never be bigger than facebook. Never be bigger than paypal. Never be bigger than ebay.

[cbeast]

I wonder how much electricity is wasted on Facebook?

[azguard]

It will never be bigger than facebook. Never be bigger than paypal. Never be bigger than ebay.

Cryptos are future.
So it doesnt need to bee big or bigger.
Popularity is the same.

Why are you here then?

[CUNÉGONDE]

They are different things, how did you compared?

[neoneros]

Different things can be compared on the levels they intersect. You define the variable that exists in both things and compare the value of that variable.

You could compare userbase/acceptance. It could well be the amount of people having a bitcoin wallet outgrows the amount of people having a facebook account.

[neoneros]

http://twister.net.co/

Yeah, like that, thanks!

[boy2k]

lol so now things are measured in facebooks?

[rockyrotcoin]

It will never happen in my lifetime.Maybe bitcoin will be bigger than facebook if people stops using facebook just like what we did with friendster.

[mullerdan]

Bitcoin is a digital money and Facebook is a social network, why we have to compare the both?
Maybe are you talk about global effect? Because I don't see the comparison...

[BreezeSpy]

maybe Bitcoin will be used in Facebook someday in the future 

[azguard]

maybe Bitcoin will be used in Facebook someday in the future 

That is the point.
More integration of cryptos in social and real life.
Hope to see this is near future to come.

Off course this requires time to applied so I have good hope for this.

[vinda]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

I don't think so!
facebook is a place for socialising while Bitcoin is an alternative for payment, almost all of us love socialising, but Bitcoin payment can be replaced by credit card, cash, or other cards.so it won't be bigger than facebook, even won't bigger than twitter.

[xcapator]

It will never be bigger than facebook. Never be bigger than paypal. Never be bigger than ebay.

Cryptos are future.
So it doesnt need to bee big or bigger.
Popularity is the same.

Why are you here then?

BTC / Crypto is not so popular yet, only few people in facebooks know about crypto. when I ask most people what they think of BTC or Crypto Currency they get the Deer in the Headlights look. Some have only a Silk Road Reference, and assume BTC is illegal because Silk Road got shut down.

[kingkedi]

its a no surprise evn it is bigger because facebook is different and bitcoin for payments and when more people adopt it and more security given to it then ultimately its bigger than facebook

[HeroCat]

But not in the nearest future - FB is very large, covering all world  Step by step, with time 

[ChuckBuck]

We all need to pump the breaks on Bitcoin being bigger than [enter Tech Giant or existing currency/commodity].

Let's all just continue the grass roots movement by all doing our part, buying and actually using/transacting Bitcoin, and educating our brethren first. 

Let the devs and investors do their thing, and let's do our part.

2015 bitches!  Can't think too far ahead.

[CryptoRaver]

Facebook is garbage and mind f#ckers i hope it die soon. BTC is the best we can have

[The Chainmaker]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

I don't think so!
facebook is a place for socialising while Bitcoin is an alternative for payment, almost all of us love socialising, but Bitcoin payment can be replaced by credit card, cash, or other cards.so it won't be bigger than facebook, even won't bigger than twitter.

I honest wouldn't be surprised if Facebook was struggling to retain its share in 5 years from now, but that bitcoin was still growing.

[RiverBoatBTC]

I think that one day Bitcoin will be bigger than the internet itself, much bigger than facebook.

[Sutters Mill]

I wonder how much electricity is wasted on Facebook?

Define 'wasted'. It would be interesting to see how much electricity they use, but I'm guessing bitcoin uses more but they both have their uses in generating income (Bitcoin in bitcoin and Facebook in ad revenue). I hope one day there will be some sort of decentralised social network though where the ad money gets shared out between their users.

[Eastwind]

I think that one day Bitcoin will be bigger than the internet itself, much bigger than facebook.

Do you mean BTC can be transmitted in other ways?

[Guido]

Imho bitcoin will be far bigger than facebook

facebook will eventually shrivel and die like myspace

[azguard]

Imho bitcoin will be far bigger than facebook

facebook will eventually shrivel and die like myspace

For some point your right, but all are in lead roll in there fields.
I will be glad to see FB down but this is hard to happen, maybe if somebody hacked them good with some serious sh...

Eventually everything will be based on crypto even FB so this is will be true that btc is bigger that FB.

[tokeweed]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

i wonder what the twins are doing right now...

[tokeweed]

Imho bitcoin will be far bigger than facebook

facebook will eventually shrivel and die like myspace

For some point your right, but all are in lead roll in there fields.
I will be glad to see FB down but this is hard to happen, maybe if somebody hacked them good with some serious sh...

Eventually everything will be based on crypto even FB so this is will be true that btc is bigger that FB.

 i think fb will evolve as they will be using stellar via stripe.

[leex1528]

Simply no way this ever happens.  Facebook is used by so many people it is actually insane.  Bitcoin should be proud if they get half of the people that Facebook has.

[Rico Suave]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

i wonder what the twins are doing right now...

https://i.imgur.com/huFMropl.jpg

I bet they're not giving a fuck. I'm sure they can see the long term value.

Simply no way this ever happens.  Facebook is used by so many people it is actually insane.  Bitcoin should be proud if they get half of the people that Facebook has.

But a lot more people use cash than people use facebook.

[cyberpinoy]

Simply no way this ever happens.  Facebook is used by so many people it is actually insane.  Bitcoin should be proud if they get half of the people that Facebook has.

Hello developers HINT HINT, you guys do know Facebook is like FREEE advertising, why dont you try it assholes.

[tokeweed]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

i wonder what the twins are doing right now...

I bet they're not giving a fuck. I'm sure they can see the long term value.

Simply no way this ever happens.  Facebook is used by so many people it is actually insane.  Bitcoin should be proud if they get half of the people that Facebook has.

But a lot more people use cash than people use facebook.

sure. but the thing is how low and how long will it stay there?  cloud miners are closing shop and who knows who's next...  there must be at least some worry and anxiety from their part.  

[tokeweed]

Simply no way this ever happens.  Facebook is used by so many people it is actually insane.  Bitcoin should be proud if they get half of the people that Facebook has.

Hello developers HINT HINT, you guys do know Facebook is like FREEE advertising, why dont you try it assholes.

stellar is getting there first via stripe.

[ChuckBuck]

The Winklevii don't give a rats ass about Bitcoin.  They were born rich, and they'll die rich.

They got uber lucky with Facebook, since Zuckerberg blatantly ripped off their Harvard Connection social media site.

If Bitcoin fails, they'll brush off the residual dust and move on to the next project.

We'll see their true faces if we reach $0.

[Daniel91]

Imho bitcoin will be far bigger than facebook

facebook will eventually shrivel and die like myspace

I don't think so.
Look, FB is social media and everybody using it.
Bitcoin is virtual currency, unstable, with very changeable value, which most merchants don't accept and don't trust yet.
I don't think that bitcoin will ever be important as FB.

[azguard]

Imho bitcoin will be far bigger than facebook

facebook will eventually shrivel and die like myspace

For some point your right, but all are in lead roll in there fields.
I will be glad to see FB down but this is hard to happen, maybe if somebody hacked them good with some serious sh...

Eventually everything will be based on crypto even FB so this is will be true that btc is bigger that FB.

 i think fb will evolve as they will be using stellar via stripe.

Let it evolve and it doesnt need to be btc just some crypto that will change things.
Btc is prime coin so we all think on it but let just integrate some coin or coins for any matter.

[cbeast]

i think fb will evolve as they will be using stellar via stripe.

An identity based money on FB, what could go wrong?

[leex1528]

How do people think this will happen?   I can barely get technical people involved in Bitcoin because they don't care about iat, everyone is on facebook

[Honored Olympus]

I doubt bitcoin will be bigger than facebook facebook will be forever growing bitcoin will reach a point where all bitcoins have been generated and everyone will be exclusive to bitcoin not everyone in the world can own bitcoin.

[marcus_of_augustus]

facebook will soon go into decline, the teens are not using it ... they refer to it as "an awkward family dinner photo you can never leave", and bemoan the barrage of advertising ... i.e. it has become yesterday's fad.

[Baitty]

How much is facebook increasing in vale each day?

[MUFC]

sure. but the thing is how low and how long will it stay there?  cloud miners are closing shop and who knows who's next...  there must be at least some worry and anxiety from their part.  

Aren't most Cloud Mining companies Ponzis that disappear after a short while anyway? Regardless, just because one or two companies go under doesn't mean bitcoin is doomed  but there certainly will be some hurdles along the way and those companies will just have to deal with them why they come. I think bitcoin will move on without them, though.

[blablaace]

Bitcoin and facebook are two different things and there is no way you compare social network with currency..

[ChuckBuck]

How much is facebook increasing in vale each day?

Not sure the rate that Facebook is increasing in value each day, but I do know that it's Market Cap is currently at 209 Billion.

By comparison Bitcoin has a market capitalization of about 2.8 Billion.

So if you were to go by just this, you can say Facebook is just shy of 75 times in value of what Bitcoin is.

Of course we don't simply measure by market cap, but you get an idea of the scale of FaceBook's overall market value.

[azguard]

Bitcoin and facebook are two different things and there is no way you compare social network with currency..

you got the point. more and more people are hearing or collecting some coin but fb have ti deal with more users going out of it.

[Madness]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Sorry but they are completly different things Facebook is a social media obviously and Bitcoin is a DIgital currency which worth month money you definitly can't compare them between each other . but if you mean from the numbers of the users and fame then I guess you can say that . not anytime soon because some people are just not open minded and will think that bitcoin is a scam  Maybe in 10-20 years let's say

[Wendigo]

Facebook is big because of spammers, scammers, desperate housewives and Call of Duty loving little children. And Zynga games 

[AGD]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

[erikalui]

I don't think it will be bigger than Facebook as Facebook has millions of members and are more popular among common people than bitcoins.

[cellard]

Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook. The brothers, two of the most influential players in a new generation of investors, say bitcoin will encourage financial openness.

http://www.ahametals.com/bitcoin-bigger-than-facebook/

Sorry but they are completly different things Facebook is a social media obviously and Bitcoin is a DIgital currency which worth month money you definitly can't compare them between each other . but if you mean from the numbers of the users and fame then I guess you can say that . not anytime soon because some people are just not open minded and will think that bitcoin is a scam  Maybe in 10-20 years let's say

Even if they are different things you can still compare them in terms of adoption, success etc. Also new technologies like MaidSafe will make decentralized facebooks.

[cakebet]

If it does, I won't leave when my parents start using it lol

[azguard]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

this is not the price issue.
if you think like that the compare price of one mined btc with price of 1 fb share.

[BilderbergExecutive]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

interesting and original comparison
but one little remark - 1BTC is worth more 1 fb account for now

[Possum577]

We can all hope but the Winklevoss twins have a lot of reason to diss Facebook and have a horrible track record (so far) predicting what will happen with Bitcoin.

[botany]

Facebook is big because of spammers.....

Hello.... Signature campaigns?
I bet Bitcoin has its fair share of spammers too, at least in this forum. 

[R2D221]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

[girb16]

When something is new, timing is everything. Facebook's timing was perfect.
So the question remains, is this the perfect time for Bitcoin?

[elephantas1]

When something is new, timing is everything. Facebook's timing was perfect.
So the question remains, is this the perfect time for Bitcoin?

what time could be better? its perfect because everything is modern so money could be too

[azguard]

When something is new, timing is everything. Facebook's timing was perfect.
So the question remains, is this the perfect time for Bitcoin?

what time could be better? its perfect because everything is modern so money could be too

still it can.
i really dont think it will be any time sooner.

reason i simple to much hacking on markets for theft and this is something that i dont like.

[AGD]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

One day facebook will end up just like myspace, but BTC is here to stay, folks.

[azguard]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

One day facebook will end up just like myspace, but BTC is here to stay, folks.

Yes that is fate of all community sites sad but true.

BTC or some other coin will be for generation to come.

[Wendigo]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

Depends on whose Facebook account that is. Some celebrity accounts are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[rayhan]

Facebook is big because of spammers, scammers, desperate housewives and Call of Duty loving little children. And Zynga games 

i think the biggest one income from ads

[ensurance982]

Effectively everyone can just go ahead and use Facebook. They profit instantly - they can communicate with their friends. Sure, to us this also applies to Bitcoin. Everyone can use it, there's no hurdle. But in reality, when it comes to money, people seem much more hesitant to adopt new things. We'll have to wait and see!

[Guido]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

One day facebook will end up just like myspace, but BTC is here to stay, folks.

agreed

[grendel25]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

Apples oranges, sure.  But it's also like comparing money to a website.  Money just seems inherently better and far more potential to be bigger.

[azguard]

Effectively everyone can just go ahead and use Facebook. They profit instantly - they can communicate with their friends. Sure, to us this also applies to Bitcoin. Everyone can use it, there's no hurdle. But in reality, when it comes to money, people seem much more hesitant to adopt new things. We'll have to wait and see!

that was true whole history nothing that is new is never accepted instantly we always have to wait for some time to actually be adopted.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

are yo7ur sure ?bitcoin already bigger from now . this price . makes people tell bitcoin with
mouth to mouth .
it will be really good

[twister]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

Apples oranges, sure.  But it's also like comparing money to a website.  Money just seems inherently better and far more potential to be bigger.

I think OP wasn't saying that they both are same, I think he meant in popularity Bitcoin will be bigger than what facebook ever was.

[Gervais]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

One day facebook will end up just like myspace, but BTC is here to stay, folks.

agreed

But you could say that about bitcoin. Bitcoin may be just the myspace of social networks. I really hope not but it something obviously better comes along then it will easily go the same way.

[1Referee]

If you referring to total users, it's still a long way
But, if you referring to total market cap, it's already happen

Total market cap of what. Bitcoin and Facebook in USD?

Facebook currently +- 210B Bitcoin currently +- 2.9B

So what exactly is already happening?

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

Bitcoin already IS bigger than Facebook, because 1BTC is worth more than 1 Facebookaccount

It's not like I can have 0.2187 FB account, or can I?

One day facebook will end up just like myspace, but BTC is here to stay, folks.

agreed

Yes, social networks are trends that are easily replaced, the blockchain tech will always be relevant, pretty much forever as in as long as our lifetimes. Even if other projects arise, they will Co-exist with Bitcoin.

[Gervais]

If you referring to total users, it's still a long way
But, if you referring to total market cap, it's already happen

Total market cap of what. Bitcoin and Facebook in USD?

Facebook currently +- 210B Bitcoin currently +- 2.9B

So what exactly is already happening?

I think the only thing that is happening here is false information (unless he would like to clarify). Bitcoin isn't bigger than facebook in any capacity currently, but I can see it becoming bigger in terms of users and worth other time, though I am sceptical it ever will sadly.

[BillyBobZorton]

Has the winkleviiii comented on the current downtrend? Feels bad man, they spent like what, a couple dozen million dollars on Bitcoin? they have lost of o money. Hopefully the downtrend begins this years. I hope it stays low so I can buy a lot more tho.

[Gervais]

Has the winkleviiii comented on the current downtrend? Feels bad man, they spent like what, a couple dozen million dollars on Bitcoin? they have lost of o money. Hopefully the downtrend begins this years. I hope it stays low so I can buy a lot more tho.

I wouldn't worry about them, they can take the losses pretty comfortably. They're also big believers in the future of bitcoin so I don't think they'll be that worried. They both have twitters so you could have a look on there if you're interested to see their recent comments though I haven't been personally following them.

[azguard]

Has the winkleviiii comented on the current downtrend? Feels bad man, they spent like what, a couple dozen million dollars on Bitcoin? they have lost of o money. Hopefully the downtrend begins this years. I hope it stays low so I can buy a lot more tho.

I wouldn't worry about them, they can take the losses pretty comfortably. They're also big believers in the future of bitcoin so I don't think they'll be that worried. They both have twitters so you could have a look on there if you're interested to see their recent comments though I haven't been personally following them.

FB guys invest in project internet all over the world, with some drones seem like they accepting additional 8000 people.

[girb16]

I all I know is that if Bitcoin was as popular as Facebook the world of finance would be a very different place!

[blablaace]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

[PaulPierce]

I think comparing bitcoin to facebook is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Bitcoin is a P2P "currency" while Facebook is a social network. The uses of the two platforms are just too different

Apples oranges, sure.  But it's also like comparing money to a website.  Money just seems inherently better and far more potential to be bigger.

100% agreed to it! Its kinda ridiculous comparing money n website in this way!

[oblivi]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

Why compare things that are the same? thats not interesting.


Everything needs an userbase and funding so Bitcoin and a social network can be compared in terms of success.

[Gumbork]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

Why compare things that are the same? thats not interesting.


Everything needs an userbase and funding so Bitcoin and a social network can be compared in terms of success.

i would compare btc to a world economy not a social network

[50ouncebrew]

dont think so probably in 100 years

[blablaace]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

Why compare things that are the same? thats not interesting.


Everything needs an userbase and funding so Bitcoin and a social network can be compared in terms of success.

i would compare btc to a world economy not a social network

That one is a good choice.

[azguard]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

Why compare things that are the same? thats not interesting.


Everything needs an userbase and funding so Bitcoin and a social network can be compared in terms of success.

i would compare btc to a world economy not a social network

you can do this create new tread so we can discuss about that also.

[Gumbork]

How can you at all compare currency with social network?

Why compare things that are the same? thats not interesting.


Everything needs an userbase and funding so Bitcoin and a social network can be compared in terms of success.

i would compare btc to a world economy not a social network

you can do this create new tread so we can discuss about that also.

sounds good, i was just thinking what if a country decide to go all in btc, their is a few countries that use usd has main currency, would it be good or bad for bitcoin?

[Mr.K]

As more and more people know bitcoin,the cryptocurrency rwill be bigger and bigger.