Adoption Stage of Digital Currencies

If you ever wondered in what stage are we in the adoption of digital currency, you’re not alone. Here is an attempt to answer the question.

According to Coindesk’s report, there are about 14 million wallets currently in use. This number maybe screwed in both ways since users may have multiple wallets and some wallets may have been abandoned; and on the flip side, some users don’t use wallets at all (like me the first time I invested through Coinbase). Nevertheless, the 14 million is the best estimate we have at this point.

Now, there are about 6 billion people on this planet which means only 0.23% of the world population is into bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies today.

Using the technology adoption diagram below, that’s puts us in the very early sub-stage of the “Innovators” stage.

The implications of this analysis to the future price of bitcoin is tremendous. To put this in perspective, assuming the price of bitcoin increases proportionately to the number of users, by the time we cross the next stage of “Early Adopters”, there would now be around 800 million users (6 billion x 13.5%) or a growth rate of 5800%! Using this rate, bitcoin price would be approximately $290,000 per coin by then.

Disclosure: I’m not an investment expert and does not intend to provide investment advice through this article and does not represent that the securities or services discussed are suitable for any investor. Investors are advised not to rely on any information contained in the article in the process of making a fully informed investment decision.