Digital Currency Past Present Future - The Road to Mainstream Adoption

Synopsis: The price of bitcoin is highly correlated to its rate of adoption. The more people use the cryptocurrency, the higher its price would be notwithstanding its limited supply. This monthly post attempts to track the adoption rate of bitcoin as it goes mainstream.

Let's look at some historical facts to help us level set:

• since its creation in 1990, the internet took 5 years to reach 16 million users. By the 10th year, there were 361 million users and the 20th year - 888 million;

• It took about 50 years for the telephone to connect 50 million users. The television hit this goal in 22. It wasn’t until 12 years 'till 50 million people were using the plastic money called debit card. Paypal smashed the record at 5 years, but Facebook put all to shame when it shuttered the record in just 3 years. Oh, and Angry Birds - 35 days.

So where are we with bitcoin?

Bitcoin is no Angry Birds or Facebook. It's more serious than social media craze since it's involves money. As of the end of November, there are about 19.5 million bitcoin and altcoin users. During November alone, about 1.2 million new users were added.

NOW, to help us measure how far off the world has adopted bitcoin, let's use the Technology Adoption Life Cycle Model. This chart is broken down into 5 buckets: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. With an estimated 7.6 billion people worldwide, you can see in the chart below how many people falls under each category. And if you're where do Haters, Skeptics, Cynics, Doubters belong to, I'll cover that in another post.

With only 19.5 million people using bitcoin and altcoins as of November 2019, this puts us at the very early stage of the Innovators phase.

Here's a closer look:

When bitcoin was at $1,000 price mark, many pundits speculated that it's not until bitcoin hits the $10,000 mark that the Early Adopters would join the mania. Now, its pretty obvious that this isn't the case. As bitcoin's price rises faster than expected, the new estimate is $100,000.

At the time of this writing, bitcoin is just $200 shy of piercing through the $200 billion market capitalization milestone.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
https://blockchain.info
http://www.internetworldstats.com

See Also Related Posts:
Digital Currency Past Present Future - When Bitcoin becomes-the-Digital Gold

Disclosure: This post does not intend to provide investment nor does it represents 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.

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