Quote from: Lorenzo on April 04, 2015, 03:42:29 AM

Quote from: Minerjoe on April 01, 2015, 06:58:04 PM

After quite turbulent events during the last few years, I somehow feel BTC economy s been slowing down a bit. Maybe people are losing interest after not seeing those price jumps/decreases which we witnessed in the past. I know statistics ll probably dispute my claims but this is just my feeling. How do you feel about it, are people still into BTC?

Bitcoin tends to have short bursts of highly rapid growth surrounded by long phases of slow, zero, or slight negative growth. If you look at the history of BTC adoption as well as historical price charts, you will see that there was very little growth or activity happening in the BTC scene between January 2009 and January 2010. In the beginning of 2009, the network difficulty was 1.0. On January 2010, the network difficulty was 1.18. One month after Satoshi launched Bitcoin, the network hashrate was 5 MH/s. Ten months later, it was 6 MH/s. Much of this hashrate could be attributed to Satoshi himself as well as a few extremely early adopters such as Hal Finney mining on their home computers.

In 2010, Bitcoin adoption grew at a slow but steady pace. The first significant spike in terms of activity didn't really happen until early to mid 2011. That was during the June bubble which pulled a lot of mainstream users into the BTC community. The price went from cents to $33 before crashing back down to $3 later in the year. A lot of miners joined in resulting in the hashrate exploding from 100 GH/s to 10,000 GH/s. Many businesses started accepting Bitcoin too. Silk Road and BitPay were both also established in this year.

(Keep in mind that before mid 2011, Bitcoin was almost completely unknown to the outside world. Those few months constitute a very special and significant event in Bitcoin's history.)

Compared to 2011 however, 2012 was another lackluster year for Bitcoin similar to 2010. Bitcoin's price started off at $7 in the beginning of the year and only grew to $13 by the year's end. Bitcoin was still growing, new companies were still entering the scene, and new Bitcoin startups were still being created although most of this happened behind the scenes.

Then came 2013 which was another repeat of 2011 except now there were two bubbles this time. The first happened when the price shot up from $13 to $266 by April before collapsing. Then it repeated itself later in the year when the price reached over $1,200 before collapsing again. This of course created huge publicity which brought Bitcoin back onto television screens and the mainstream media. Tons of people started entering the Bitcoin community.

Since the last bubble happened so quickly and was almost completely sustained by hype, naturally the price fell afterwards as the hype failed to materialize.

2014 was mostly about dealing with the after effects that this massive bubble created. You now had a lot more people involved in the Bitcoin scene than previously but the increase in price was still way out of proportion to the increased demand. People realized this and so money began leaving the scene. Then as prices dropped further, more people cashed in their coins and left.

TL:DR; Price goes up and people rush in = increased activity. Price doesn't go to the moon so people lose interest and start to leave = decreased activity.

Hah, interesting analysis. So if this all true, when do you foresee the next phase of highly rapid growth?