Bitcoin At 12: How Far We Have Come

over 3 years ago

Regular readers will know that I am a fan of looking back to get a barometer of where we are.

We now are at the point of celebrating 12 years of Bitcoin. It was a decade plus 2 ago that Satoshi Nakamoto released the White Paper for what is now known as Bitcoin. It was an event that changed the world.

Obviously, it was not an instant revolution. In fact, for the first 5 years, Bitcoin was basically ignored. Very few people were aware of it and even less could understand it. Like most revolutions, this was certainly evolutionary in nature.

As we sit here in 2020, it is easy to get lost in what is taking place. Institutions are starting to put their reserves in BTC. Cryptocurrency institutions are receiving banking licenses in the United States. Thousands of cryptocurrencies exist with more being developed on a daily basis.

That said, it was not always that way.

In fact, a little more than a half a decade ago, there was very little to this industry. We had no Ethereum, Steem, Hive, EOS, Cardano, or Bitcoin Cash. During that first half decade of Bitcoin's existence, a few other blockchains emerged. Litecoin forked seeking to be Bitcoin's silver. Dan Larimer launched his first project, Bitshares. A few other things were floating around, yet without much impact.

Since the introduction of Ethereum, things exploded. We could say that 2015 marked a second point in this industry's evolution.

This, articulated, shows how things pick up steam as time goes by. In fact, for all the progress of the last 5 years, much of it came about in the last 2. Thus, we have the epitome of an exponential curve.

Graphically, as most are aware, it looks something like this.

Source.

While this is exciting, it is vital to remember this is not the end of the chart. What looks like tremendous growth in the early stages ends up being minor in comparison at later stages.

In this industry, it makes a great deal of sense. Two year from now, there will be many more tokens, applications, exchanges, users, and great value in the entire industry as compared to today. It is likely there will be a multitude of what we see today.

Even with pricing, we can see how the growth is. Here is the Bitcoin chart.

This only shows one perspective. If we switch for linear to logarithmic, we can see how the pace has been.

Not surprisingly, if we charted the total market cap of the entire cryptocurrency industry, it is very similar.

All prices charts from coingecko.com.

Estimates are that roughly 100 million people use or have used cryptocurrency. Again, if we look at it from a larger perspective, this means that most people still are not involved. There are 7 billion people on the planet, with more than 4.5 billion of them online. Yet only 100 million are involved.

Here is where we can see how the exponential charts can get another kick higher in the coming years. As more people enter the space, we will see accelerated growth. This applies to both developers and users. We even got news that Verizon is going to use the Ethereum blockchain to post their news stories.

Today there are likely tens of thousands of projects underway in the crypto space, varying in size and degree. We are seeing a lot of innovation and experimentation. Over time, we determine what works, which is used as a foundation to build something else of greater magnitude. Each new breakthrough is copied, to some degree, and then expanded upon.

While it is easy to focus upon the financial aspect of things, the important criteria is the overall growth and acceptance. What started out as a fringe industry is now mainstream, at least in terms of financial institutions. We will likely see this expand into areas such social media, journalism, gaming, and charitable endeavors. After all, there are hundreds of trillions of dollars in industries that is locked up in non-liquid form, just screaming to be tokenized.

A dozen years ago, it all started with a White Paper released by some anonymous individual or group. Today, we are no closer to determining who is behind Bitcoin. However, what is clear is the impact it is having upon the world.

As far as things came in the last dozen years, it is really mind-boggling to consider how far we will likely go in the next dozen.

Nevertheless, it is fun to look at how far we have come.

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gif by @doze