What Point In the Mainstream Adoption Curve Of Bitcoin Are We in ATM?

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

TL;DR: We are in the early majority Phase.

Trigger warning! Steemit people.

I will rashly criticize Bitcoin. Please stop now so you don't need to flag me if you have religious views on Bitcoin. I will bear no resentment regardless of your actions.

Now, many people would love to think we are the early adopters or in the innovator's phase. I will absolutely double down on the fact that Bitcoin works like a Ponzi, even if I get flagged... again. Some of you would prefer if I use the term Metcalfe's Law for network's growth, but I think Ponzi is far more honest as it doesn't create value but store it, I've already explained why I say this.
Let me explain why the number of Bitcoin "Users" is actually bigger than you would imagine at first.


The fundamental value of Bitcoin technologies lies in giving one out of the many partial solutions to the Byzantine generals' problem by Fault-tolerant computer systems. Perhaps Bitcoin is the first mainstream application but not the first useful application and not the best one.

Here, a video of the Byzantine generals problem.

The problem of how to send reliably a message through an unreliable channel created a new science. Information theory. The particular solution Bitcoin uses is an adaptation of an accounting technique by multiple signatures in a proof-of-work.

This approach is exponentially more expensive than centralized approaches. The whole update drama is about extending the Ponzi.

Almost by any metrics, decentralized applications are WORST: UX, speed, governance, features.
They make sense if the centralized party is abusive. The uses for these networks are limited and could be used by centralized parties.

If Bitcoin entrance transactions don't become cheaper, other alt coins will extend a network to transform fiat into them. Like this Bitcoin use would drop and will start to devalue.

What's happening at the moment is that the early adopters don't want to lose their earning so are starting to behave like a government. After all most of the current problem is one of governance and not of technology. Their response to this extending the network by side-chains.

As of now, the ROI for Bitcoin is approximate 392.857x. For every $100 at the beginning, you would now have 39 Millions of Dollars. This seems impressive but is lowering as time goes by, especially if you compare it to the newcomers.

Ethereum grew 1000X since 2014 in the same period of time Bitcoin grew 10x
Stratis grew 853x since last year in the same period Bitcoin grew 5x.
Doesn't seem like the best idea to have Bitcoin in comparison.

The rate of advancement is increasing for Bitcoin but the logarithmic incentives for conservation are diminishing. Time is compressing in the cryptospace.

Not too long ago, Litecoin was being called a scam coin. All projects are called scams until most early adopters most recognize they have missed out. Well is because all of them are Ponzi's, but there's value in the technology these Ponzies use.

It's pretty naive to think that people with millions of dollars that are currently in this space are gonna go through the exchanges. They use escrows and transact through traders and hold a single account. When they do become visible is because one of them dumps 39.000 ETH in an exchange creating a flash crash. Some of them never get in through Bitcoin.

As the barrier for entry on the low level and high levels of fiat exchange are highly technical and expensive, most people use third parties for this. I have given advice to at least 10 people who have given me cash for crypto-currencies different to Bitcoin. I'm not a trader, I'm a Doctor in a third world country.

Just as Steemit is doubling its active users base during this price rise, the same goes for the number of people that transact in any way with Bitcoin.

There's a white paper by Coinbase and ark investment by January of this year. They estimated >10 million users at the time. Since then just in the past month, Coinbase had to add 1 million new accounts.

By Fermian calculations there must be around 80 million people in the world who have used actively cryptocurrencies at least once for speculative value. Just like there are many people who have multiple accounts there are many who share one (exchanges, hedge funds and families in third world countries)

Out of them, at least 10 million must be active users, and close to 5 million are in for the long term.

Andreas Antonopoulos guessed that Bitcoin would go mainstream in 20 years, ridiculous. It will become Mainstream adoption by August 2018.

Also I estimate thanks to the inaction of the network during the next following weeks and the natural S-curve behavior of this technology, by August Bitcoin price will reach <$1800 out of current users short term exhaustion of the profit, then it would be close to $2000 for a couple of weeks to finish the year with close to $5.000 and $13.000 by the end of January. Just to fall again to close to $3000 by May. This is gonna be probably the last time people don't notice the fractal nature of this game.

"Bubble S-curve adoption".

Bitcoin is decentralizing transaction storage but centralizing value. Governments have already deployed plans to make sure a couple of coins are held distributed through their respective country. Maybe the most famous case is the recommendation by PBOC officials about holding a small amount of bitcoin, distributed through China. In the event, a trillion dollars marketcap is reached. Here the book by Ping Xie

Your life and the life of everybody around you are in for a cool ride in the next couple of years: Automation, Trillionaires, Disparity of resources and people's usefulness like never before.

The times, they are a changing.

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I think we have not passed the 2.5% stage yet. A lot of people have heared about Bitcoin already but only the brave have entered into the cryptocurrency markets. For most people, the practical value (what problem does cryptocurrency solve?) is still very much unclear. I think the user base is the best basis to assess where we are and that means the number of Bitcoin addresses used.

I do not know whether this is the right chart but I do not think the user base (people actually holding Bitcoin) is still very low compared to total population.

Using that graph of Blockchain.info by the time this space is 1 million holders it will be worth approximately trillions of dollars. Yeah, that's the base. Most people use Bitcoin as a revolving door to invest in crypto. Only really early adopters, piggy bankers and big money hold. When that time arrives we'll have other points of entry to Bitcoin and just like Gold, Bitcoin will be valuable but other things will improve more in value.

I linked the study of Coinbase and ark investment on the number of users in the post.

Apologies, I overlooked the paragraph indicating the Coinbase and Ark Investment numbers. This indicates that we are a bit further in the 'adoption' curve.

Yeah I dont use Bitcoin at all now, I convert my fiat directly to SLR on Lykke for example. Yes they ar coloured coins on the Bitcoin blockchain, but Im not actually converting via BTC. I think when more cryptos get direct fiat pairings Bitcoins dominance will fade.

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Are you saying 13.5% of the population has adopted Bitcoin? This is about 1 in 7 people on earth. With 7.5 billion people on the planet, that would mean 1 billion Bitcoin owners. With a market cap of 45 Billion USD, meaning that the average capital per capita is $45. Sorry but you are miles away from reality. You even say it yourself, there are less than 100 million people that have interacted w/ crypto.

Mainstream adoption is not 100% of all possible users.
Not even that much people have access to the internet. You don't need 100% of the world's population using something to consider something mass adopted (Breast feeding babies and UCI patients are not gonna send each other bitcoin). For instance, cell phones passed the threshold for mass adoption in 2012 when the number of users passed 2.5 billion users, Even today the number is calculated at 5 billion people this means roughly 3/4 of the world's population.

In S-Curves of adoption, we observe the logarithmic growth charts. During adoption, growth is exponential. In cell phones we reached the linear growth plateau, that's what is considered the top of mass adoption.

In 2014 Bitcoin did hit its no return point of transaction's technical capacity when mining fees and waiting times augmented exponentially. The network was cannibalizing itself. Still is doing it. That's the moment when the exponential growth diminished the rate of increment.

Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency, as it currently holds >50% marketcap. Which has been decreasing and is expected to continue.
Paypal is considered today mass adopted and has close to 210 million accounts and 50 million users in PayPal one.

But the tipping point for Bitcoin's mass adoption is the number of transactions possible in the ledger. The bottleneck for Bitcoin even after Segwit, lightning network and segwit2x is calculated at 4x the current capacity and close to 7 transactions per second. So when compared with Visa and Mastercard the potential number of users to consider it mass adopted is 200 million active users and 1 billion counting occasional users ever. No, not everyone can or is gonna use Bitcoin for purely technological reasons.

By looking at the curve of scaling and fungibility increase Bitcoin has 1 year to top its actualized capacity and 3 years till the computing capacity of mining hardware is limited by physics itself, since today it consumes as much energy as Denmark and by 2020, at current rate of growth in hashing power, it would consume as much energy as China and America combined.

"The bottleneck for Bitcoin even after Segwit, lightning network and segwit2x is calculated at 4x the current capacity and close to 7 transactions per second"

Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. And you don't even mention scalability improvements post Lightning network.

Third, the Lightning Network, which allows users to transact without broadcasting to the network, is complete [5, 6] and awaits the activation of SegWit. For those users who are able to make a single on-chain transaction, it is estimated to increase both capacity and scalability by a factor of ~1000 (although these capacity increases willvary with usage patterns)

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-July/014718.html

Actually, an infinite amount of transactions will be possible with BTC and LN because they won't be on the ledger.

Finally, 50% of the global population has access to the Internet, and that number will only grow, especially in developping countries where bank wiring is an absolute nightmare, which will naturaly lead to mass bitcoin adoption. But even with your extremely conservative 1 billion occasional users estimate, we are still under 13% adoption. That is, even counting all your 80 million speculators and hodlers, who by definition shouldn't be counted since they're not actually using bitcoin for transactions.

Sorry. No, I didn't meant 1 billion as intermitent users hahahaha
I said 200 million users and meant 1 billion users without fungibility.
I was not clear, my mistake. Understandable if you don't want to keep reading but no, 1 billion no hahaha.
The expected growth for BTC adoption exclusively by logarithmic growth is 200 million tops with fungibility. Speculators and holders are gonna be maybe 1/5 of that. We are at >10 millions according to ark investment and Coinbase speculators and holders by january 2017. That was before the boom of users in May. I say we are at approximately 20%, not 13%, for Bitcoin.
This is assuming there's an S-curve of adoption at current levels of growth by all cryptocurrencies marketcap.

Let's check a little more what your source of information has to say.

57 Bitcoin “Core” developers have signed their support to an official Capacity Increase Roadmap that advocates the Lightning Network as a “non-bandwidth scaling mechanism” that may provide “very high decentralization”.
Same source
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html

They will be "microtransactions" and are more similar to a loan since is a bidirectional channel. There are mathematical proofs that the infinite amount of transaction is possible only with “banking” hubs. It will become more of a collectible than a currency with a broader base of holders and speculators since new users are gonna be priced out.

This doesn't include the whole cryptocurrencies space. Which could well be at its infancy in the innovators-early adopters phase.

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800

lol, not wasting more time here

reason #1

1 billion counting occasional users ever

No, I didn't meant 1 billion as intermitent users hahahaha

Reason #2

The bottleneck for Bitcoin even after Segwit, lightning network and segwit2x is calculated at 4x the current capacity and close to 7 transactions per second

7 transactions per second, I still can't believe you said that.

Glad you don't waste more of your time. If any question feel free to ask.

Don't force me to threaten you. I will provide the answers but your bunghole will ask the questions.

Upvoted and resteemed.
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