S-curve is very applicable to Bitcoin's adoption as a payment technology "use as a currency".
That is not why people are buying it. That purpose is not what is driving the emotional need to buy before it is too late.
The nature of currency is precisely that it doesn't matter when you buy it.Don't everyone think that the "store-of-value" aspect was a little overextended when the average bitcoin stash per owner was $12,000 a week ago?
(If not, then just scale it to the adult population of the world and we get $54 trillion bitcoin market cap when all are in (9 times that of gold). Sounds like what we've been dreaming, ergo must be true.)
It is either overextended and we come back to some rational adoption S-curve for use as a currency, or I am correct that the driving force is the notion of hyperinflation has begun and there is a mad spiraling race to see who can dump fiat the fastest and get into BTC before it is too late.
We should be able to watch the price and
observe which mode we are in estimate the exponential function best approximating the price rise, but this can do nothing to tell us about the shape of the subsequent (looming) waterfall crash except we can estimate when the expected portion of the world's net worth will be in already.
It is impossible for the purchases ("adoption") to be rational w.r.t. to performance of the currency platform aspect. It can tell us nothing about the potential as a currency. We must first go through an exponential speculative rise and crash. The remaining question is what is the exponential curve of the price action. It can't be an S-curve, because of the nature of the price action is the antithesis of currency adoption. The exponential rate of price appreciation dwarfs any one buying it ONLY to use it as a currency. I am extremely confident that you can do any survey you want and it will confirm my assertion.
I don't think all people will succumb to that mania, so I think the limiting headroom is far below the net worth of the world.
If we want to measure the currency adoption, we need to use different metrics other than the price. And even transactions growth is overstated, because people are using a multitude of transactions to make themselves anonymous via coin mixers and trading back and forth between altcoins. Not to mention the speculative trading transactions, the SatoshiDice dust (useless/abuse) transactions, etc.
There may be significant currency adoption but it can't be significant compared the capital pouring in for the price appreciation.
What program did you use to make that graph? I'm interested in performing some bitcoin and litecoin trend analysis and I'm trying to find more tools to look at the data with. Send me a PM or respond in the thread please.
I think the graph in OP is made with Excel. I posted an updated graph created with
R including its source code.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3821474Where is the math? What fitting curve are you employing?