While we understand everyones frustration with the current sell off we look at this as a temporary set back. If we were able to control the price, DigiByte would not be an open source, decentralized worldwide digital currency. We would be a central bank.
There are undoubtedly multiple groups that go from alt coin to alt coin buying the "rumor" and "selling" the news when it comes to wallet upgrades and hard forks. We have watched this cycle rinse and repeat for several years now with a multitude of coins (most of which are dead now). Just look at what happened with the recent Ethereum & Bitshares releases. The good news is there is a consolidation occurring in the market place with people turning to older coins with a proven track record.
We estimate the active alt coin trading community to be roughly 20,000 - 30,000 people at most (Poloneix has roughly 42,000 users signed up, Cryptsy claims 270K signups but they are the oldest exchange). Bitcoin itself only has maybe a few hundred thousand active participants with a max of 2-3 million wallets created since 2009. This is a drop in the bucket compared to a current world population of 7+ billion people. If you do the math on that 7,000,000,000 / 3,000,000 that gives you 0.00042% of the worlds population that has ever participated in a digital currency. There is a tremendous growth potential here over the next few years.
When you look at main stream financial research such as this
Bank of America Report you clearly begin to see all research points to the "millennial" consumer (born between 1980 - 2000) that will adopt digital currency in mass first. This trend has been pointed out in reports issued by Wells Fargo, Bank of England and many more.
Right now, we have only been actively marketing DigiByte Gaming for less than a week since leaving the testing phase. As of today we have 1200 active users on the platform. Most of these people are not only brand new to DigiByte, but to the whole concept of digital cryptocurrency. We are shooting for 100,000 users by March 1st of 2016. We are targeting a game with 500 million worldwide players... and they are all millennials. What better way to reach out to real world consumers to encourage mass adoption. But we look at this as only the first step. Once we have a thriving, healthy user base of a few million users we can begin leveraging and working our way into traditional financial services. But that is no where near as exciting as the potential we have to begin disrupting industries such as legal services, security services and more by securing other data in the DigiByte blockchain (distributed hash tables, not full data files).
There has been some concern the DigiByte blockchain will become "bloated" right away with DigiSpeed. This is far from the truth. We have taken multiple steps to ensure this does not happen. Given the current size of our blockchain at 2 GB and the average new video game now being 15-20 gb we are well within a reasonable size even with a doubling or tripling.
We have development on all platforms planned throughout 2016. By mid 2016 we aim to have made several improvements to the core wallet to encourage user adoption and network security and to make it easier to use. These changes include block pruning, headers first syncing, a massive user interface overhaul and additional in wallet services.
As stated many, many times we are here for the long haul. We are dedicated to the vision of DigiByte and truly inspired by the opportunity and possibilities we have before us.
Cheers,
Jared
