5 ms·

Bitcoin in 2012: By the Numbers

93 points by mrb 14y ago

dmix 14y ago
I posted this on /r/bitcoin, but this might be relevant here. It seems Bitcoin is moving from the innovator phase of the technology adoption lifecycle to the early adopter one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle The community and services around it is maturing. As long as it keeps it's "slow and steady" adoption, it may be able to find some mainstream adoption. But that will still take many years and will entirely going to depend on some vendors and markets accepting it. With acquiring bitcoins and some stability in the market due to volume, the only remaining question will be what can I buy with bitcoins?
austenallred 14y ago
I heard of bitcoin forever ago, but I had no inclination to use it as a currency. I'm now using it somewhat frequently. Turns out it's becoming the standard currency in "affiliate marketing" worlds that are... we'll say not quite "white hat."
- jacquesm 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure that a large part of the bitcoin early adopters market is centered around things that can't quite stand the light of day. But there are plenty of good uses too, have some alpaca socks: http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffer.html http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffe... Most of the businesses accepting bitcoin do so because of the free publicity associated with it, and yet they also re-inforce the trend for bitcoin to become more mainstream. Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things to happen to the net in years, and even if it fails the amount of interesting data gained is staggering. The ECB had a meeting recently on about this new kid on the block, the outcome was quite interesting: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-of-bitcoin-can-be-found-in-the-austrian-school-of-economics/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-...
snitko 14y ago
Reason I became so passionate about Bitcoin is because it backs the ideology, which is anarcho-capitalism. Not all bitcoin users realize this (and they don't have to in order for Bitcoin to work), but many do. And the beauty of this situation is that anarcho-capitalism seems to be the only political ideology that is actually backed by a technology voluntarily produced by people contributing to it. A huge step forward from any kind of political movement trying to achieve its goals by force.
- maaku 14y ago
  Bitcoin has no ideology. It's a protocol. Satoshi and many of the early adopters appear to share your philosophy, and Bitcoin is especially applicable to the needs of anarcho-capitalists. But it is not married to that ideology.
  - snitko 14y ago
    That's why I said it "backed" the ideology. And that's why I also said Bitcoin users don't have to share or even know it in order for it to work. I agree with you completely that it's just a protocol, but if you look at it in the context of politics, it is obvious governments wouldn't be exactly happy if more people started using it.
    - maaku 14y ago
      Sorry, I somehow read "backs the ideology" as "backed by the ideology", which obviously has opposite meaning. One of my main beefs with Bitcoin right now is that the most vocal people advocating it are extremist, non-mainstream ideologues. Although I'm not of the Austrian-school, I do consider myself a libertarian-anarchist which is probably just another word for your anarcho-capitalism. However it's not doing my/our cause any good to have Bitcoin move more and more out of the mainstream and the Bitcoin user community become more insular.
      - snitko 14y ago
        That's my bad, I'm sorry. I should have said it is "backed" by the ideology. My initial comment was not exactly clear.
jacquesm 14y ago
Bitcoin transaction volume is up tremendously but that is in large part due to 'satoshidice.com'. The reason why they're so large is because you can't really do all that much with bitcoins (yet, this is improving though), so people will gamble their bitcoins away. As an experiment I put a bitcoin donation link on reocities.com customer pages to see if anybody would donate but the counter is solidly stuck at '0'. I figured if the general public starts to see bitcoin as viable then I'll see some donations there, there have been offers enough of people that want to donate money, bandwidth or server capacity to the project in the past. The bitcoin ecosystem is tremendously interesting, both from a game-theory perspective as well as an economical one (and technical too). Within a short time we've seen CPU, GPU and FPGA miners to go to insane hashrates with a generation of ASIC based hashers about to turn the previous generation of FPGA/GPU units into expensive doorstops. The guys behind bitcoin (who I think are related to Michael Peirce and Donal O'Mahony somehow [1]) have done their homework very well and the fact that bitcoin has survived relatively unscathed over the first couple of years has definitely made me shift from 'fad' to 'possible'. This likely won't be our last crypto currency but it definitely has life and merits serious scrutiny. The bitcoin economy is now already very substantial and it will likely grow enormously in the coming year. [1] http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/ http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/
- mrb 14y ago
  Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gold"(!): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html He also seems to have tried to postdate his blog post (URL says 2005, but date in the post says 2008) to perhaps hide the fact he was the first one to come up with these concepts :D He was even a contractor for Digicash back in 1994-95.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.
Argote 14y ago
While a nice idea, there's still nothing I want that can be purchased with BitCoin.
- stuhood 14y ago
  Are you certain? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
perlpimp 14y ago
google trends geographics of search queries for bitcoin. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_nHZ-VCYAAzZN-.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_nHZ-VCYAAzZN-.png:large
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

93 points by mrb 14y ago

dmix 14y ago

I posted this on /r/bitcoin, but this might be relevant here. It seems Bitcoin is moving from the innovator phase of the technology adoption lifecycle to the early adopter one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle The community and services around it is maturing. As long as it keeps it's "slow and steady" adoption, it may be able to find some mainstream adoption. But that will still take many years and will entirely going to depend on some vendors and markets accepting it. With acquiring bitcoins and some stability in the market due to volume, the only remaining question will be what can I buy with bitcoins?

austenallred 14y ago

I heard of bitcoin forever ago, but I had no inclination to use it as a currency. I'm now using it somewhat frequently. Turns out it's becoming the standard currency in "affiliate marketing" worlds that are... we'll say not quite "white hat."

jacquesm 14y ago
I'm pretty sure that a large part of the bitcoin early adopters market is centered around things that can't quite stand the light of day. But there are plenty of good uses too, have some alpaca socks: http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffer.html http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffe... Most of the businesses accepting bitcoin do so because of the free publicity associated with it, and yet they also re-inforce the trend for bitcoin to become more mainstream. Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things to happen to the net in years, and even if it fails the amount of interesting data gained is staggering. The ECB had a meeting recently on about this new kid on the block, the outcome was quite interesting: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-of-bitcoin-can-be-found-in-the-austrian-school-of-economics/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-...

snitko 14y ago

Reason I became so passionate about Bitcoin is because it backs the ideology, which is anarcho-capitalism. Not all bitcoin users realize this (and they don't have to in order for Bitcoin to work), but many do. And the beauty of this situation is that anarcho-capitalism seems to be the only political ideology that is actually backed by a technology voluntarily produced by people contributing to it. A huge step forward from any kind of political movement trying to achieve its goals by force.

maaku 14y ago
Bitcoin has no ideology. It's a protocol. Satoshi and many of the early adopters appear to share your philosophy, and Bitcoin is especially applicable to the needs of anarcho-capitalists. But it is not married to that ideology.
- snitko 14y ago
  That's why I said it "backed" the ideology. And that's why I also said Bitcoin users don't have to share or even know it in order for it to work. I agree with you completely that it's just a protocol, but if you look at it in the context of politics, it is obvious governments wouldn't be exactly happy if more people started using it.
  - maaku 14y ago
    Sorry, I somehow read "backs the ideology" as "backed by the ideology", which obviously has opposite meaning. One of my main beefs with Bitcoin right now is that the most vocal people advocating it are extremist, non-mainstream ideologues. Although I'm not of the Austrian-school, I do consider myself a libertarian-anarchist which is probably just another word for your anarcho-capitalism. However it's not doing my/our cause any good to have Bitcoin move more and more out of the mainstream and the Bitcoin user community become more insular.
    - snitko 14y ago
      That's my bad, I'm sorry. I should have said it is "backed" by the ideology. My initial comment was not exactly clear.

jacquesm 14y ago

Bitcoin transaction volume is up tremendously but that is in large part due to 'satoshidice.com'. The reason why they're so large is because you can't really do all that much with bitcoins (yet, this is improving though), so people will gamble their bitcoins away. As an experiment I put a bitcoin donation link on reocities.com customer pages to see if anybody would donate but the counter is solidly stuck at '0'. I figured if the general public starts to see bitcoin as viable then I'll see some donations there, there have been offers enough of people that want to donate money, bandwidth or server capacity to the project in the past. The bitcoin ecosystem is tremendously interesting, both from a game-theory perspective as well as an economical one (and technical too). Within a short time we've seen CPU, GPU and FPGA miners to go to insane hashrates with a generation of ASIC based hashers about to turn the previous generation of FPGA/GPU units into expensive doorstops. The guys behind bitcoin (who I think are related to Michael Peirce and Donal O'Mahony somehow [1]) have done their homework very well and the fact that bitcoin has survived relatively unscathed over the first couple of years has definitely made me shift from 'fad' to 'possible'. This likely won't be our last crypto currency but it definitely has life and merits serious scrutiny. The bitcoin economy is now already very substantial and it will likely grow enormously in the coming year. [1] http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/ http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/

mrb 14y ago
Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gold"(!): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html He also seems to have tried to postdate his blog post (URL says 2005, but date in the post says 2008) to perhaps hide the fact he was the first one to come up with these concepts :D He was even a contractor for Digicash back in 1994-95.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.

Argote 14y ago

While a nice idea, there's still nothing I want that can be purchased with BitCoin.

stuhood 14y ago
Are you certain? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

perlpimp 14y ago

google trends geographics of search queries for bitcoin. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_nHZ-VCYAAzZN-.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A_nHZ-VCYAAzZN-.png:large

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]