Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin – three years later

Once upon a time (three years ago) Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin words were used in one sentence in many articles and TV programs as faces of the cryptocurrencies. A lot has changed during those three years. In this article I will show some estimations of adoption and how it has changed. It is difficult to estimate number of coin holders. One person may own several addresses, on the other hand several people my hold coins in one address (for example exchange address). Data below are based on bitinfocharts, and are not very accurate for this purpose. Therefore take it with a pinch of salt.

Data. From the total number of non-zero balance addresses, I have removed dust addresses. Arbitrary I have assumed that addresses that hold lowest balances, up to a total of 0.01% of total coins do not count.

The first chart shows relative adoption in early summer 2014. Bitcoin had the largest adoption by a big margin. Surprisingly high adoption had Dogecoin:

After three years and a bit Bitcoin grew quicker than any of the other two, also Litecoin did overtake Dogecoin.

• Dogecoin adoption went up by 45%
• Litecoin adoption went up by 216%
• Bitcoin adoption went up by 692%

Relative adoption now looks like this:

In the meantime price changes were even more dynamic:

• Dogecoin price went up by 440% per coin
• Litecoin price went up by 750% per coin
• Bitcoin price went up by 1350% per coin (and not including Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold!)

The chart below shows relative adoption (number of non-dust addresses) at arbitrary points of time:

Second half of 2017 shows significant acceleration in growth. While in June 2017, using above metrics, Dogecoin still had higher adoption than Litecoin, it has changed during the past few months. During those 5 months number of Bitcoin non-dust addresses went up by 900 000. In June 2017 number of all non-dust addresses was only ~700 000.

If you are skilled in blockchain exploration and interested in investigations on adoption changes, wealth distribution etc., - let me know.

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