⭐ Merited by Welsh (4)
I'm not even in that category, and yet sometimes I still lament what I could have had if I'd just bought and held bitcoin when it was available for $2-400. I seriously can't think about it for long without going into full despair mode.
I used to know this fact but forgot it: when did signature campaigns really kick off here? For some reason I thought it was before 2012 (I recall reading the first thread in which signature space was offered up for advertising), but if that's true then the membership count given in the OP seems really low. I'd be really interested in seeing a graph of time vs. member count with the start of sig campaigns marked on it. Probably membership exploded, but I'm not certain about that.
Anyway nice data presentation, OP. I think I'm out of sMerits, but I'll check and if so will give you some.
I used to know this fact but forgot it: when did signature campaigns really kick off here? For some reason I thought it was before 2012 (I recall reading the first thread in which signature space was offered up for advertising), but if that's true then the membership count given in the OP seems really low. I'd be really interested in seeing a graph of time vs. member count with the start of sig campaigns marked on it. Probably membership exploded, but I'm not certain about that.
Anyway nice data presentation, OP. I think I'm out of sMerits, but I'll check and if so will give you some.
Well I tried to dig out but did not find exact start date of a proper signature campaign and but one thing for sure it was way after 2012.
Some signature auctions or a limited scale campaigns you can say started in some where around 2011, referring to this post
March 10, 2011 [POST]First Signature Advertising Auction
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4342.0
June 12, 2011,[BCT] First signature campaign.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15886.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4342.0
June 12, 2011,[BCT] First signature campaign.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15886.0
But a proper campaign with designed signature, everybody is pointing to is [PrimeDice] (Staff Only) Earn Bitcoins Simply By Posting on September 10, 2013
PrimeDice was only limited to Staff at the end of the campaign when it was winding down. At first it was open to everyone. I don't believe they were the first either, but probably the one who popularised it and was certainly one of the longest running. They were also the first campaign I saw on the forum and also joined.
Yes there were quite few old bounties as early as August 2010, but those were not signature campaigns.
I found one more signature campaign earlier than PrimeDice, is this one Buying Your Signature! Up to 0.15/month on May 25, 2013
-----------
I'd be really interested in seeing a graph of time vs. member count with the start of sig campaigns marked on it. Probably membership exploded, but I'm not certain about that.
Regarding this point some data is already available on stats page from Nov 2009 to Dec 2017
Based on this table if you some up new members each month you will get a graph something like this, and lets say 2011 and 2013 are campaigns points then the graph will look like
Not that much information I guess, but still it's clear where are the big jumps
- Nov 2009 to Mar 2011, first stage few thousands user
- May 2011 to Mar 2013, second stage from few thousands to almost 100k user
- 2013 a steady growth almost double 200k user
- 2014 - 2015 big growth, half a million users
- 2015 - 2017 it exploded 1.4 million users
So after 2017, stats page is silent, but I guess I can refer back to my web.archive.org and can roughly estimate over next few years after 2017
- Dec 2017 1428794
- Jan 2018
- Oct 2019 2690123
- Sep 2020 2833343 Doubled
- Oct 2021 3384255
- Nov 2022 3500356 Today
To sum up it seems bitcoin members increased with respect to the BTC price or bitcoin's popularity, signature campaigns might have attracted quite few but not in big numbers.
Do we still need to see a graph for BTC price from 2009 to 2017? I don't think so... I'm sure now it's embedded in everyone's head forever.