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The value of this post is really in the comments. Great insights all the way around between @ew-and-patterns, @dwarrilow2002, and @tuvokhl.

It's really hard to tell where we truly are now. Lots of great guesses.

And, in 3-5 years, we'll probably be able to tell exactly where we were right now.

This is an example of a technology adoption curve:

Source: Wikipedia
I would say that the value that people are placing on bitcoin technology is at the cusp or at least a point between the early adopters and the early majority. Early adopters tend to be younger, more educated, less prosperous. Early majority tend to be more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours. Once a technology can be demonstrated to be effective early majority push investment into that technology. At this point the rise in adoption or value for a technology is almost vertical. Bitcoin has now entered into the mainstream dialog. You will see the many coins come into development now. Bitcoin the currency is the central medium of exchange an thus like the Tolkien's ring - one coin to rule them all...

Bitcoin brought the basic technology. But it is not written in stone that it will survive, but the technology will. Most coins won't. Only those with mass adoption potential which are offering true value, not just token value, like steem, will survive in the long run.

steem is about power and will survive.
money and power ;-)

Sure. So I have bought some DASH.

I know you are a big fan of dash. i stick with my bitcoin, cloak and zcash. zcash is quiete at a bottom right now. in btc value. dash is very high. i am not sure what this dash evolution will bring. but i think its just half to one year ahead until it gets copied.

We are before early adopters.
innovation-and-the-scurve-10-638.jpg

This i mean with price. The value will not drop the next years.
It will just go higher and higher.

Of course it is probably a case of interpretation. A recent survey found the following:

“not surprisingly, younger Americans were more likely to have heard of bitcoin as compared to their older counterparts. 86.67 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 have heard of bitcoin, while only 75.93 percent of respondents ages 55 and older have heard of bitcoin. It was a consistent trend that as respondents got older, their likelihood of hearing about bitcoin went down.”

In 2015 there were about 686 altcoins

Re: How many altcoins are there?
October 02, 2015, 05:53:32 PM
Reply with quote #3
According to Coinmarketcap, there are 686 alt coins in circulation, however there might be more alt coins around which are not listed in the site.

There were more than 900 cryptocurrencies available over the internet as of 11 July 2017 Source: Wikipedia (as of today

On coinmarketcap as of Sep 22, 2017 2:55 PM UTC there were 1113 altcoins) although I have heard elsewhere there are over 2000. It is as if we are moving beyond an asymptotic behavior into an unbounded behaviour with the expansion of the quantity of altcoins.


Companies like provenance.org are tracking commodities on blockchains. We are on the brink of having altcoins explode exponentially.

Surely we have passed the early adopter stage...

"have heard" is nothing. you have to ask how many used it like an email. i think this percentage is low.

I was very active with something subsequently called CoSy in the late 1980's.
This system was one of the systems that built on the smtp protocol (1972). I can recall as late as 1997 having to convince businesses to use email. Realistically it took about 8 years for email to go through the innovators and early adopter stages. The biggest thing about the 90's was that computers largely were considered business tools. Windows 95 was probably the first consumer oriented Microsoft operating system (Windows 3.1 was okay but still needed a higher level of proficiency to install drivers). Within 3 years Windows 98 was released ... a truly internet integrated operating system.
It was used by about 14% of the population in about 6 months.
The simplest way to gauge the adoption of Bitcoin users would be to look at the two largest online wallets:
Blockchain.info
Coinbase
Combined they have about 37 million users. This does not take into account Bitcoin wallet holders, Trezor etc. wallet holders (lots of duplicates of course).
Possibly the best indicator will be the growth of STEEM. The learning curve is almost non-existent...(write good stuff, like good stuff)

You are allowed to use it.

picture stayes save in blockchain anyway ;-)

You should simply use a logarithmic scale :-)
Then everything looks pretty good.