Good metrics for Bitcoin adoption?
2696 sats \ 11 comments \ @phaedrus 26 Nov 2023 bitcoin
When I see all the progress, all the projects being developed, I feel the progress is so fast.
Then I look at number of users on Stacker.news, Geyser (~50k), or even entire Nostr (~500k) and compare to Instagram, Facebook (billion plus, at least 4 orders of magnitude more) and I see what my friends mean when they say Bitcoin needs adoption.
Where are we? What proxy metrics would you use to get a sense where on the global adoption Bitcoin is?
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675 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 26 Nov 2023
I feel the progress is so fast.
Yes, I have the same feeling that the developers are building solutions too many and too fast and merchants / users cannot keep up with them.
The best adoption metrics I think is the merchant adoption. Without merchants, users can just shit on their shiny bitcoins in cold storage. If people cannot and will not use Bitcoin as money, we can consider it a failure.
Look at https://btcmap.org - that is the most important metric.
  • Not how many UTXO with >1BTC we have holding
  • not how many BTC/LN nodes exist in the network (BTW that metric is misleading because is not containing the private LN nodes)
  • Not how many BTC are in LN channels
  • Not how many institutions and Saylors are buying BTC
  • Not how many ETFs are coming
  • Not how many politicians are talking about Bitcoin.
  • Not how much is the BTC price on the exchanges...
And one of the most important aspect is this one:
As I explained in this guide: https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/how-bitcoin-will-save-the-world
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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coinosphere 27 Nov 2023
I have a problem with using merchant adoption as a metric.
If you'll recall my story I've told here somewhere before, I created one of the 1st bitcoin merchant directories and scraped the web for something like 25 thousand merchants who accepted bitcoin on their website... In 2013. By fall 2014, 99% of those listings had no mention of bitcoin on them anymore.
Sadly, bitcoin acceptance was seen, during every bull market, as a new way to attract customers without taking the time to learn about bitcoin itself. Even after multiple cycles now I'd be willing to bet that 20k of those original 25k vendors don't accept it right now because they don't see bitcoin as being in a hype-crazed bullrun yet. -But they probably will again next year, if they're still in business.
To use this data as a real metric for overall adoption we're going to have to weed out all of these 'fair weather merchants.' Maybe some kind of requirement of keeping the 'bitcoin accepted here' sign on your website/kiosk for over a year would be a good start.
There's no way my scrapebot could have been tweaked to do that, however. It would need a manual process, especially for the IRL merchants.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 27 Nov 2023
Yeah, some kind of what are doing the guys from CoinOs. Watch the Citadel Dispatch with CoinOS guys. They explain joe they are doing merchant adoption.
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 27 Nov 2023
The number of people that accept Bitcoin as payment basically.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @911 27 Nov 2023
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @030e0dca83 27 Nov 2023
There were times when people didn't hear about Bitcoin, then we had times when some people heard about Bitcoin. Now we're living in times when almost everyone have heard about Bitcoin and someone who have heard already acquired sats. Next phase will be when everyone will try to acquire or work for Bitcoin.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @phygit 27 Nov 2023
That's precisely one of the main problem right now. The ONLY metrics everyone is focusing on, especially the media, is BTC price — and it's the LEAST important one. It's purely absurd.
The BTC price is irrelevant to Bitcoin success. Only the number of real users matters.
The evolution of on-chain addresses holding 1, 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001 BTC gives interesting metrics but ofc don't give the full picture.
Coulc be useful to get live metrics from payment processors (BTCPay Server, Bitpay and such) but I guess some would be reluctant to make them public...
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 27 Nov 2023
Lolololololol, the price is very obviously by far the single most important adoption metric, but if you insist, I will grant you the inverse metric of morons who think it isn't. 🤡
Another inverse metrics: how many idiots still think medium of exchange is of great importance. 🤡🤡🤡
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 26 Nov 2023
Looking at social media will not be the best indicator to see the adoption of bitcoin. The best way to analyze is using on-chain analysis.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coinosphere 27 Nov 2023
No amount of on-chain analysis can tell you how many unique humans are using it. Not even close. 1 exchange could be generating a new address for every transaction from every user, while another is sharing only one outgoing address for all of it's users!
It's amazing to me that chainalysis ever gets anything right. I bet they're wrong more often.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 27 Nov 2023
I agree that with the available data, it is impossible to know how many people use Bitcoin. However, there are other data that are no less important that can be analyzed, and these data are on-chain.
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