1375 sats \ 7 replies \ @sn OP 29 Sep 2023 \ on: Stacker News Roundtable #1 - Building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Culture, and More bitcoin
Question #4: In your view, which entity (person, company, or idea) has onboarded the most new Bitcoin users (holders count as users) in the last year?
Adoption is important, isn't it!
My answer is... Coinbase.
Sure we all love to hate Coinbase, But "the rich get richer" as they say. A big company, with a big brand, and a big twitter account -- they advertise, they lobby in Congress. While everyone is out there tawking about nothing. Coinbase is making money. So every year my answer would probably be Coinbase.
If it isn't Coinbase, it would be one of those companies I see when I land in the Swiss Airport. Anyone who advertises. Those people are serious about adoption, and the rest of us are just larping. This is the tragedy of losing BitPay during the blocksize war -- getting that little Sticker on every payment terminal would have been Bitcoin's #1 biggest win. Instead that plan lies in shambles.
Clearly, the ordinals people gave us a big bump in actual node-running users. So they deserve special mention since node-runners are the truest Users of Bitcoin.
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I think bitcoiners (specifically bitcoin twitter) overestimate their onboarding powers. Typically, those most responsible for onboarding people en masse into bitcoin are not bitcoiners themselves, they're reckless central bankers, political censors, over zealous regulators, corrupt politicians, misguided central planners and general zeitgeists.
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I think easily ordinals and BRC-20s attracted the most new bitcoiners this year? We’ve seen A TON of attention from people in the greater crypto ecosystems who jumped onto bitcoin through ordinals, something that didn’t happen in bitcoin for quite a while.
But to be fair, the overall market has been slow this year, and I have no doubt that in previous years, many other efforts have attracted way more bitcoiners than ordinals did this year
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I think I'd question whether these people really are "new" to bitcoin. Aren't ordinals just redirecting activity to bitcoin that would have been directed towards other chains?
I suspect the majority of people trading NFTs also already held bitcoin. Do you have any data to support the idea that they are net new?
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I don’t have cold hard data but I’ve spent many many hours this year talking directly to hundreds of those people (there are many, many more of them that I didn’t have the time to chat with directly) and my impression is that some of them are OG bitcoiners, some of them are NFT people etc who did have some bitcoin already, but also many of them have never paid attention to bitcoin before at all.
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On the surface level of visible, internet-plugged in populations, definitely the inscription/BRC-20 project.
In terms of quieter, long-tail of adoption, I do think the current global economic situation with high interest rates has been sparking a kind of quiet revolution.
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I personally agree with @udiWeitheimer among other SN members.
Launched in March, the BRC-20 market cap has already reached $1 billion.
Yet, the inventor of Bitcoin Ordinals is proposing a new Bitcoin-based fungible token protocol as a potential alternative to the BRC-20 token standard.
Will Runes actually lead to sustainable protocol development, or will the frogs make a mess again?
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