Quote from: sjefdeklerk on April 01, 2018, 04:56:00 PM

Quote from: Cryptodaddy05 on April 01, 2018, 06:26:39 AM

But I honestly cant see that happening, with increasing use and ownership of bitcoin worldwide

Interestingly when I ask for proof of that, nobody has it. Bitcoin usage is dropping. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/bitcoin-acceptance-among-retailers-is-low-and-getting-lower

Its hard to find hard information on this because hard statistics are difficult to measure - but I certainly dont believe the evidence shows the number of bitcoin uses in the world is dropping, and anecdotally you just have to look at the millions of passionate and dedicated bitcoin and crypto users on this forum and Twitter and Facebook and Telegram and on the reddit bitcoin and crypto forums to think this isnt just a fad thats going to go away.

But looking for hard evidence your comment did inspire me to make a post looking at the best estimate possible for bitcoin ownership and use in the world - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3238611.new#new - and the figure I came up with was indeed 0.5% of the adult world population using and owning bitcoin.

Is that figure growing? Well Statistas figures for wallet addresses in the world holding BTC were 5.5 Mil at end 2016 and 11 Mil at end 2016 and 21.5 Mil now - https://www.statista.com/statistics/647374/worldwide-blockchain-wallet-users/#0 - and thats certainly healthy growth!

And will that figure of 0.5% of adults worldwide owning BTC grow. These are figures from a Statista survey last year showing that 40% of Americans were open to the idea of using bitcoin for transaction purposes, and that 40% of Americans aged 24 to 39 plan to invest in bitcoin as an asset for the future - https://imgur.com/gallery/pRBNG

And sure some large retailers and other businesses did stop accepting bitcoin late last year, due to high transaction costs and slowness of the network with the large increase in transactions daily from the December madness. But the mempool is now empty and transactions are fast and cheap again, and there are 200+ top developers working on six projects to get bitcoin ready to cope with the next stage of its growth - and as weve seen theres a population primed and ready to own and use bitcoin and crypto, and I have no doubt that 0.5% active user figure will increase to 10% active users over the next 5 to 10 years with bitcoin close to or worth over 100 K in five years time.

And in relation to businesses accepting bitcoin heres another Statista survey last year, that showed 3% of Americans businesses plan to accept crypto including BTC as payment within 12 months and that 12% plan to do so within 1-3 years https://www.statista.com/statistics/384921/digital-payment-methods-retail-america/

I hope this guides you to some of the hard information out there about bitcoins growth and potential, but as always DY0R.