OP why don't you start thinking for yourself. What is Bitcoin worth to you?
In my opinion Bitcoin is like mobile phones. It will take some years to develop the infrastructure and get people to use it.
We are here
No. That's a Nokia 3310, and the mobile market was already enormous by the time that model was launched. Hundreds of millions of people owned mobile phones back then. Bitcoin is a whopping six years old now, and has only managed to attract a couple of hundred thousand people -- mostly nerds, libertarians, cultists, bulltards, scammers and criminals. The Average Joe immediately saw utility in mobile phones, and those same Joes have rejected Bitcoin, since Bitcoin has zero utility compared to things like fiat, gold and credit cards.
Bitcoin adoption is falling, a fact proven by the steadily declining price. It's just a simple matter of supply and demand. Nothing more.
I'm always surprised by people who think that six years is a long time in the timeline of a technology. Motorola and Bell launched the first commercial radio telephone service in 1946. Some interesting insight into the adoption of the early services can be found in the fact the first British radio telephone service was launched in Manchester by the General Post Office in 1959 and after four years it had just 86 users.
But I'll be generous, and not count these early technologies. I won't even count from the first cellular system (launched in Japan in 1979). I'll be
really generous and start counting from 1991, the year of the first digital cellular networks - even though by this point mobile phones had been widely available in most Western countries for quite a number of years. Fast forward six years from 1991 and that would take us to 1997, which is still three years before the pictured phone was launched.
Let's think back to 1997. In 1997 mobile phones were just starting to get significant mainstream adoption in some geographic areas, but private use was still hampered in North America by the relatively high airtime charges for incoming calls (which meant most people tended to leave them switched off, and only use them for emergencies). Phones were still used mainly for making and receiving voice calls, although texting was starting to gain popularity in areas where it was available. Texting, though, was still largely limited to GSM networks - and in countries outside GSM-land texting was often limited to only communicating with people on the same network (where it was available at all).
GPRS wasn't widespread - data back then was generally CSD, which was basically dial-up Internet. But even if you could afford the per-minute charges for Internet access, there's not much you could do with it except tether a laptop using a special serial cable (which was challenging enough to set up that it would have been limited to geeks and to professionals with IT departments to set it up for them). There wasn't much else you could do with your network access - not only did mobile phones not have web browsers back then but we'd have to wait another year before we even had phones with WAP browsers (remember WAP?).
Possibly the first forerunner to the modern smartphone could be said to be the Nokia Communicator. The first model, the positively huge Nokia 9000 (pictured left) had just launched the previous year in 1996. This was again clearly the preserve of geeks, early adopters and IT professionals
It would be another ten years before the first iPhone would be launch, heralding the start of the modern smartphone era - a full 16 years after modern digital cellular services first launched, and a full 61 after the first ever commercial mobile phone service. I know we're all impatient to see how Bitcoin will develop, but six years is
not a long time.
roy
