The people who believe it will go to the moon are not the people who can take it there. Bitcoin's userbase must constantly grow, and it does, at an exponential speed.
Do we have any data since the Mt.Gox blowup to confirm or deny whether the adoption rate was affected by the major hit on Bitcoin's reputation?
Feels to me we might be in a lull waiting for some major exchange(s) to comply with some new government monitoring of reserve ratios or something. Something that would signal to the masses that Bitcoin is safe for them.
The exponential growth in bitcoin users is just a result of people hearing about bitcoins and having enough time to think about investing in them. The paradigm might change when we hit the "chasm" at about 2.5% of the population. Currently we only have 0.1% of the population so it will grow regardless. The "masses" are not yet involved in 2014.
I think that would be correct, except the 0.1% seems too high (my guesstimate is 0.01-0.03% based on the prior analysis I did of your counting methods and also the Bitcoin market cap is not within an order-of-magnitude of that share of global net worth which is $250+ trillion). Most people coming in are investors and they will be motivated by potential gains. So the longer we are below trendline, the more rocket fuel has been loaded.
How much can the investment grow without a commensurate adoption for real commerce?
The chasm is an interesting concept. Because I was thinking that when we get to 100 million (1.5%) there should be great incentive for global (e.g. internet) merchants to cater to the large global market, so it should catapult from there. There may be a chasm (for those not coming in primarily as investors, i.e. the masses) where the 100 million or so are too spread out globally to drive merchants which tend to be more local in scope.
Thus I think the key is going to be some way of using crypto-currency in trade for something online that is very popular (because it can have global scope and the chasm won't be diluted by physical sparseness). I specifically have a business model in mind for this, w.r.t. to social networking. If I am correct to assume anonymity will be required for this, then Bitcoin isn't it. I am still evaluating this, so I am not sure about that.
Btw, Nadeem called this crash to $500 back in November and is calling for below $100 someday:
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article43420.htmlhttp://www.marketoracle.co.uk/article44455.htmlbottom line is that bitcoins never matched the hype for transactions are NOT anonymous and it IS heavily manipulated by a handful of mining pools so is not decentralised as today ordinary people cannot muster the processing power required to mine for bitcoins.
He can only be correct if we've already saturated investor adoption. I doubt it.
