Every quarter I check to see how many people actually use the virtual currency Bitcoin as money, and for Q4 2016, not much has changed: around 150,000-250,000 daily transactions. Meaning at most, some 100,000 unique Bitcoin users, give or take, in the entire world. Meaning that Linden Dollars, with its 400,000 people regular users in Second Life (as insiders tell me), is still larger than Bitcoin.
For Bitcoin zealots -- and there are many, or at least, active enough to seem like many -- the trends look even worse when you look at this quarter compared not to the last twelve months, but since the time Bitcoin first virtually existed, in 2009:
In that case, you got fairly strong (if modest in absolute terms) growth in 2015, and then in 2016, the hockey stick sharply breaks. And this despite the fact Bitcoin-oriented startups got over $1 billion in investments last year. That's right: At this point, way more US dollars have been spent on Bitcoin than Bitcoin has been spent Bitcoin on Bitcoin. (So to speak.)
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So what's actually happened is that there's a cap in the protocol about how many transactions you can have per second (or to be technically precise, the size of the block containing those transactions), and we basically hit that cap at the end of 2015. Rather than just raising that cap the bitcoin community had a huge factional religious parameter war, and it hasn't been raised in 2016, so the number of transactions hasn't changed.
Demand to send transactions still seems to be going up, so the cost of sending a transaction has been increasing. I think (although I'm not confident) the amount of value in each transaction has been tending to increase, so effectively low-value transactions are getting priced out, and it's being used for progressively higher ones.
The upshot is that bitcoin is becoming progressively less useful as money, and being used increasingly as a "store of value" (or phrased less charitably, an enormous ponzi scheme). The optimistic view for how bitcoin continues to be money is that in future people will use systems that transact in bitcoins but don't normally need to send transactions to the actual blockchain. There are some quite clever designs where you can send signed transactions around off the chain and don't normally need to send a transaction to the network unless someone tries to cheat you, but at this stage they're in the realm of "clever design" rather than "practically usable system", and opinions vary whether they'll ever get from one to the other.
You could have added that the big pre-existing "off-chain" system, ChangeTip, closed in 2016, so as transactional currency I think it's fair to say that bitcoin actually declined in 2016.
Posted by: Edmund Edgar | Monday, December 26, 2016 at 08:50 PM