397 sats \ 4 replies \ @Athena_Alpha 16 May 2023 \ parent \ on: What if we're wrong? bitcoin
After almost 15 years, less than 200M Bitcoin users, which is terribly low.
You are thinking about Bitcoin wrong. Bitcoin is not an "app" or platform like Facebook. It's a base level technology with the easiest comparison being to the Internet itself. It will stand the test of time for decades, just like the Internet, thanks to the extremely powerful Network Effect with Bitcoin companies coming into existence and falling away regularly.
The Internet uses TCP/IP to transfer information over a global network. Bitcoin uses BP/LN (Bitcoin Protocol / Lightning Network) to transfer value over a global network.
The building of networks, especially organic ones with no marketing department like the Internet or Bitcoin, takes many, many years. Decades in fact. The Internet as we know it started way back in 1973. After ~20 years there was still only about 1M users, so given Bitcoin has amassed 200M in only 14 years, it should indicate that it's actually growing faster than the Internet and doing very well!
Lower your time preference. The next billion Bitcoin users will be adopted as the network grows exponentially over the next 10 or so years.
Source: Engineering degree in Telecommunications and Wiki
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40 sats \ 2 replies \ @phygit 16 May 2023
The argument is classic, tiring... and wrong.
  1. "The Internet as we know it started in 1973". Absolutely not. The Internet we know started with the Web, the first websites and browsers, in 1994–1995. And 5-6 later there were 500M users.
  2. Bitcoin, like any digital innovation, naturally benefited form the existence of the Internet. Launching Bitcoin in the 1980s would have been a challenge, but Bitcoin really started (and got media attention) in the 2010s, with already billions of Internet users, smartphones, blogs, social media etc.
So yes, 200M Bitcoin users (which is already optimistic) in 15 years, in a context of a fully digital era where half the planet live their lives through digital tools and networks, is a very bad result.
The real question is: considering how many people are digital-savvy and aware of the existence of Bitcoin, why so few are actually using it?
If we imagine that only 1B people know about Bitcoin today, it means that 80% of them *have decided" not to use it. We should ask ourselves why.
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64 sats \ 0 replies \ @randy 17 May 2023
He’s not wrong, you’re just missing the point. He didn’t say the web, he said the internet. And the internet as “we” tech people know it as the beginning of the UDP, TCP/IP network.
Bitcoin to “we” Bitcoiners know it as a system where transactions are committed onto the base blockchain but who knows what the “web moment” looks like for Bitcoin. One thing is for sure, we can’t scale to global adoption without L2s in place and I’m sure the “web” moment will be some mix between a series of catastrophic financial event and a killer app (running on an L2 under the hood) ready to onboard the next billion users
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @javier123454321 20 May 2023
Another variable that undermines the "Internet did to telecoms what Bitcoin is doing to money" argument is that telecoms were about a century old industry, while money is a civilizationial level technology. Disruption in telecoms naturally should happen much faster than a disruption in the base layer of value transfer.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Darkbulb OP 16 May 2023
Im aware our prospects are good. We're early in the adoption s-curve. Exciting to see where itll go from here, or if not, what it will inspire down the road
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