We often like to say that people who are involved with cryptocurrency are "early adopters". But how early is it?
This is a question that plagues many people. I recall talking about cryptocurrency to a guy I worked for and he said "I feel it is too late". He was referring to the last bull run which was providing him FOMO.
It appears that we are so early in the game, that it is hard to describe.
A writer on Bitcoinist decided to do a bit of experimentation on her travels to see how well known Bitcoin is. Being involved in cryptocurrency tends to lead us to believe that everyone is knowledgeable about this. Naturally, after an announcement from the likes of Facebook, who most everyone knows, surely cryptocurrency has to be on everyone's tongue.
When we look at the numbers to figure out how many are involved, we see how small this pond truly is. With Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the more popular chains, leading the way, the number of wallets is still only a fraction of the world population.
But with only around 34 million Bitcoin wallets and roughly 50 million users worldwide, that’s still less than 1% of the population using it. And from my own experiences off the beaten path, it can’t be much more than that who have actually heard of it.
Moving passed the wallets, this writer did an informal survey in Spain, Portugal, Indonesia, Singapore, and Indonesia. This is a rather interesting cross-section.
Based upon her discussions with different people, she found that very few even heard of Bitcoin. What is compelling is that each of these countries made had reasons for making strides with Bitcoin acceptance. Nevertheless, the results state that few are it even exists.
https://bitcoinist.com/knowledge-bitcoin-around-the-world/
Naturally, this is informal and it could simply be a case of where in those countries she was located. Perhaps the results would be different in larger cities. Then again, perhaps not.
Either way, this does affirm what many of us thought. The fact that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50M people globally who are involved shows how early this is. There are over 3.5B who have access to the Internet. All of them are candidates for cryptocurrency usage. Yet we are touching a very small percentage of that total.
If Bitcoin, which has the most name recognition, is drawing a blank across the globe with many people, how do you think something like Steem fares? The reality is that, after Bitcoin, name recognition plummets for all alt-coins. Ethereum carries a little, that is it. Even Tron and EOS are not too well known outside of our "crypto circle".
That is okay. We are in the very early stages. The Internet was not well known in 1993 either. Few people even heard about it let alone understood it. The same was not true 5 years later. Internet companies were all the rage by the end of that decade, enhanced by the wild speculation in the stock market.
I see a similar path with this. We are watching the foundation for Web 3.0 being laid. It is not an overnight process. Those who are in early are having to deal with an unpolished system. That is the price of early technology. Of course, over time, things get radically better, thus attracting the masses.
We are a long way from mass adoption.
Ultimately, it will be the applications that attract people to cryptocurrency. The key idea is to get it in their wallets. When people are being rewarded for doing things online, many will start to research a bit to understand. This is where the growth will come from.
In the meantime, we keep doing like Google in the late 1990s. It was not a household name at that time. In fact, it was one that flew a bit under the radar compared to some of the other names that were pumped. Through it all, Google kept developing and expanding their offering. They created a free email system that quickly jumped Hotmail and Yahoo. At the same time, their search not only took out the Altavistas of the world, but also Yahoo.
Reading the article that I linked should excite everyone. The prospects in the future are great. When most of the world is unaware of what is taking place, that is a huge opportunity. Over the next few years, as development makes our applications more attractive, there is a tremendous market that will open up. Billions will be exposed to what we are involving ourselves in today.
At some point, the floodgates will open. Looking at the growth rates of some of the early Internet companies, we can see how quickly the path can grow. I recall seeing some videos about the growth rates of companies like AOL. They were experiencing 8%-10% growth A MONTH.
Technology is often a test in patience. There is an adoption curve that held fair constant throughout each new wave.
I would make the case that not only are we in the early adopter stage on the chart, we on the left hand side of it. We are not far removed from the innovator stage.
While blockchains are gaining some age, the applications being built upon them are still rather new. On a platform like Steem, most are under two years old. This is true across the entire blockchain space. Heck, even a blockchain like EOS is barely a year old let alone the applications.
We are talking about major infancy here.
This means we are going to have some bumps in the road. Technology will take a while to smooth this out. We also are nowhere near the exhaustion of potential people to attract. When more than 99% of the world has no idea an entire industry exists, that is an opportunity for some enormous growth.
Especially when it is as powerful as this one is.
There are still billions of people who are unaware of what is taking place. This is something that will be to our advantage over the next few years.
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