Wednesday, February 12, 2014

How Big is the Bitcoin Community?

It is tiny and not growing..

Bloomberg explains:
Despite all the hype, the Bitcoin community is probably not large. It is hard to tell how many people actually use Bitcoins. Attempts at producing an estimate are decidedly unscientific, because people use multiple addresses for transactions. According to Blockchain.info, more than 140,000 addresses are now in use to process an average of 60,000 transactions per day, roughly the same number as a year ago and about 0.1 percent the number handled by MasterCard. The current level of Bitcoin activity is low enough that a few thousand "invested" individuals can prop up the exchange rate. For outsiders, however, it looks increasingly as though Bitcoin should be viewed as an experiment, a test case. Other electronic currencies will rise, and be more widely accepted, after all the regulatory and technical issues are resolved.

10 comments:

  1. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

    Got something under your skin Wenzel?

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  2. Replies
    1. Jesus started with only 12 and it took at least 200 years and lots of martyrs before Christianity took off and went mainstream. Wenzel has nothing against Bitcoin. He's just trying to inform those who may not want to wait 200 years or get martyred in the process.

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    2. Alan, would any of the martyrs take back their deaths, knowing that what they did evangelized the world? Or would they only loath even more the cowards of their day who did not also speak out the good word and thus hasten the day of its spread around the world?

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    3. I would bet that many of the martyrs weren't willing martyrs. At least Wenzel is trying to provide adequate information so those Bitcoin fans who want to be martyrs can, and those who don't can sit it out on the sidelines. It's interesting that now the Bitcoin fans are casting themselves as willing martyrs. A few weeks ago, Bitcoin was profitable in and of itself, now its for martyrs!

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  3. I don't know how many exactly but there's Honey Badger and...uh, a few others on here...and uh...oh, yeah, and also the people that lost their shirts buying shitcoins at $1200. Ah hahahahahahahahaha! BUY GOLD!!

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  4. Bloomberg is misinterpreting the data. The 140,000 number says nothing about the number of addresses that have been used, or the number of wallets. It is "A chart of the number of unique bitcoin addresses used per day" (http://blockchain.info/charts).

    A bitcoin wallet is not an address. A wallet is a file containing many addresses. Every transaction generates a new address in the wallet software and sends the change from the transaction to this new address. Almost every person or business accepting bitcoins will also generate a new address for each payment. An exception would be people accepting donations. So we would expect to see double the number of unique addresses per day than we see transactions per day, and we do. Adding up all the unique bitcoin addresses per day for every day since 3/1/2009 gives 41,945,355 unique addresses. The number of bitcoin users lies somewhere between 140,000 and 41 million. There's no easy way to judge just what that number is.

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  5. I wonder if he is really going after Clinton or if the subject of Clinton is just something the media keeps bringing up so he keeps answering to make it look like he's spending a lot of time attacking Bill Clinton.

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  6. Here is an estimate of the number of Bitcoin users by active Bitcoiner Risto Pietila: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316297.0

    He thinks there are over 2 million users of Bitcoin. I think that's about right.

    The online bitcoin wallet company Coinbase.com has over 650,000 users: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/70403865643/coinbase-crosses-650-000-users

    Blockchain.info has over 1,250,000 distinct wallets: http://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users

    Everyone I introduce to Bitcoin (by actually sending them a few millibits and showing them how to send them to others) thinks it's amazing.

    This must be how Johnny Appleseed felt!

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    Replies
    1. I wouldn't say Johnny Appleseed...more like an Amway salesman. you should tell them to buy gold...or silver and not waste any $ on shitcoins.

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