How Fast Is Bitcoin Growing?
An updated view from mid 2021
Back in June 2020 I wrote an article looking at the latest research (at the time) at how fast Bitcoin adoption was happening.
The article gained tens of thousands of views and is still regularly picked up a full 12 months later, presumably because the title fits nicely into a very commonly phrased question that many put to Google.
I should point out this this was entirely by accident rather than by design, but, in my defense, it was also one that I had typed myself at that time in an attempt to find a straightforward answer to what, surely, is a simple question.
Of course, it isn’t that straightforward, as my own research confirmed.
There are complexities over on and off chain transactions, the fact that users can have multiple wallets and addresses and the very definition of “user” in the first place.
For example, does someone who once owned bitcoin but doesn’t any more count as a “user” if they are no longer active but still have a wallet address? What about if they bought some in 2015 and lost the private key? What if all their bitcoin is used or stored on “half-way house” systems like Paypal? All good questions — and there are many more — with no firmly agreed answers.
