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Although bitcoin has already existed for over a decade and grown to be one of the largest assets by market capitalization, new data reaffirms the narrative that it’s still early in its adoption phase. However, it expands fast as the number of users on the BTC network 12 years after its launch coincides with what the Internet used to be… in 1997.
Bitcoin Vs. The Internet: Userbase Edition
The vast global network that connects computers worldwide, known as the Internet, is among the most notable and valuable inventions of the 20th century. Although most people started utilizing it during the 21st century, it was actually invented somewhere in the 1960s.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a world without an Internet connection nowadays. However, its adoption had a challenging and sluggish start as it took about three decades before the number of users grew to about 120 million.
Recent data compiled by the popular crypto analyst Willy Woo shows that this is roughly BTC’s current user base as well. He combined data from Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance and Glassnode and presented the most conservative estimation (135 million).
The difference is that it took the primary cryptocurrency significantly less time than the Internet – about twelve years.
Consequently, Woo concluded that bitcoin’s adoption, already still early, is growing faster. He projected that if BTC remains on this path, it will reach its first billion-user milestone in 2025.
Interestingly, the Internet did so in 2005 – about four decades after its creation, while BTC can do it in less than two if Woo’s prediction materializes.
Bitcoin Is Still Early
Although the user base, the network activity, and the price of the asset has multiplied many times since BTC’s inception, the main narrative within the cryptocurrency field is that “we are still early.”
From a value perspective, bitcoin’s market cap of over $600 billion is still far behind the world’s most valuable companies and trails even more to gold, M2 money stock, or global institutional-grade real estate.
CryptoPotato recently wrote about the assumed bubble cryptocurrency insiders live in and supported the “still early” narrative. It was exemplified by one of the most comprehensive polls concerning the industry. Less than half of the 641,288 participants in the survey answered that they held bitcoin or any other digital asset.
Tyler Winklevoss, the co-founder of the crypto exchange Gemini, said last year that the bitcoin game is still at the “bottom of the first inning.”
However, that inning could be ending soon as numerous institutional investors already had a slice of the BTC pie.
Even one-time doubter Elon Musk highlighted this recently, expressed his regret that he hadn’t purchased any years ago, and predicted that prominent representatives of the traditional financial space are about to adopt the first-ever cryptocurrency.
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