Bitcoin adoption — The Internet Analogy

I’m a Bitcoiner and want Bitcoin to succeed, but I’m also a firm believer in being realistic, rather than riding the hopium. This way we can accept pain points and work on them to really increase adoption.

The reality is Bitcoin adoption at any great scale is still years away — this is talking from my experience of founding and running a Bitcoin company on the front line for the last 8 years. That doesn’t mean it’s not being used today in real world use cases, it definitely is, we have many clients doing exactly that, but not at scale just yet.

What people often don’t appreciate though is that the adoption of anything takes time, unfortunately we as people are inpatient, we’re slowly becoming used to having everything quicker and quicker, we want adoption now.

The Internet

People often compare Bitcoin adoption to the internet, but at a simplistic level of just comparing “user numbers” like the chart below.

However I want to keep things away from the high level numbers and focus on how the adoption actually happens.

Internet adoption happened for many reasons, useful products, word of mouth, technological breakthroughs and services built on top slowly over time, bringing in new waves of users with every innovation.

Brief Internet History

Pre mainstream

1969 — Arpanet — first real network running on packet switching
1971 — 1st Email client
1974 — TCP/IP
1977 — PC Modem — sold mainly to hobbyists
1978 — Bulletin Board (forum)
1979 — MUD (1st online multiplayer game)
1981 — IBM introduce the “personal computer”
1982 — Emoticons— The 1st smiley face emoticon
1983 — Arpanet computers switch to TCP/IP — A few hundred computers were affected by the switch.
1984 — DNS— Human friendly domains such as Google.com rather than 142.251.32.46
1988 — IRC— Internet Relay Chat (IRC) paved the way for real-time chat and instant messaging

Mainstream foundations

1990 — Commerical dial-up ISP — the 1st dial-up internet provider
1990 — World Wide Web protocol finished — Tim Berners-Lee completed his proposal with standards for HTML, HTTP and URLs.
1990–1st search engine, Archie Index
1990–1st photo shared on the internet — Tim Berners-Lee again making history
1991–1st web page created
1991 — MP3 becomes a standard
1991 — The 1st webcam
1993–1st graphical web browser for the public — Mosaic
1994–1st eCommerce transaction — a Sting CD sold on NetMarket
1995 — eBay and Amazon were founded beginning commercialising the internet
1996–1st web based email service — Hotmail
1996 — Creation of social media — Six Degrees
1997 — Wi-Fi
1998 — The 1st news story to be broken online rather than traditional media — The Drudge Report
1998 — Google / Napster
2000 — Dot com bubble bursts

Mainstream begins

2001 — Wikipedia
2003 — VoiP — Skype is released
2003 — MySpace
2004 — “Social Media” officially coined with Digg launching, followed by Facebook
2005 — Videos — Youtube
2006 — Twitter
2007 — TV shows and movies — Hulu
2007 — Enter smartphones, the iPhone is released
2008 — Bitcoin
2010 — 1st Bitcoin eCommerce transaction — 2x Pizzas from Papa Johns
2010 — Two factor authentication, Google Authenticator released
2010 — Cloud Hosting — Microsoft Azure launches
2011 — Uber launches
2011 — “Internet of things”, Nest thermostat is an early product emerging in this area
2012 — iPad released
2013 — Google glasses released
2014 — Deepfakes
2014 — Amazon Alexa
2015 — Apple watch released
2016 — VR becomes a reality with the release of Oculus Rift
2019 — Disney+ streaming service

Looking back over 50 years you can see how the internet evolved and how innovations throughout that time introduced new users to the “internet”, and more recently even without users realising.

As you can see adoption with a new technology takes time, the internet became a generational mindset change. Many kids in western society now don’t know a world without access to the internet.

Bitcoin is similar, it’s a new technology and money rolled into one, which putting technical infrastructure aside, will still require a mindset change for many people in how we operate today.

As with the timeline above, we will see new products, companies, innovations, technical breakthroughs and word of mouth helping drive new users over time.

Each new wave of users will be driven by new products such as “Send Globally” which a group of Bitcoin companies begun introducing recently, the equivalent of todays remittance offerings but on Bitcoin Lightning, quicker, cheaper, more interoperable and 24/7/365.

Once users begin using and trusting “Send Globally” they will become exposed and familiar with Bitcoin, which will then make them more comfortable to use other products built on and around Bitcoin, which in turn creates recurring users and strong word of mouth.

Bold moves like El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender introduces Bitcoin to millions of people, even if they aren’t using it on a daily basis just yet, they have had the introduction and awareness. This will eventually lead to a use case they will find useful, then confidence using Bitcoin will ensue, followed by word of mouth to their peers and adoption starts to take shape.

In my mind we are still in the “innovators” stage of Bitcoins adoption and we have many years of work ahead of us to get to where we are with the internet today.

For me still being early in the adoption cycle is not disappointing, this is exciting, history is being made almost daily, we are the ones shaping the future monetary system for generations to come.

Embrace this once in a lifetime opportunity.

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