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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Right approach for a high-level view of potential adoption and the first touchpoint, but it doesn’t tell us much about the number of users using bitcoin for its primary purpose: decentralized peer-to-peer cash where users can store and transact value on a separate monetary network. Ideally, we want to track the growth of heavy users to reflect meaningful adoption of bitcoin. The below table aggregates some of the key bitcoin user estimates that have been published over the last six years to give you an idea of how varying these estimates can be. Looking at casually interested users, numbers from 2022 range from 200 to 800 million users. These are counts from survey samples, data from on-chain analytics and includes exchange users. All of these studies have different definitions and methodologies for calculating adoption, showing how difficult it is to compare estimates out there today. New technologies typically go through an S-curve cycle as they gain market share. Adoption by the population falls into a typical statistical bell curve. An S-curve just reflects the typical adoption path for innovative technologies over time.SourceShareMany of the classic projections for S-curve adoption use a more high-level view of the casually interested users to track bitcoin growth compared to internet adoption. Basically, these estimates track interested users of all types: those who have had any touch points with bitcoin from buying a little bit on an exchange, having a wallet with $5 worth of bitcoin to the bitcoin user storing greater than 50% of their net worth in self custody.Tracking casually interested users would give people a ballpark estimate of around the same adoption curve as the internet. However, if we’re really interested in tracking meaningful, lasting bitcoin adoption then we would argue that tracking the number of heavy users is a better measure for the current state of bitcoin adoption and emphasizes just how early in Bitcoin’s lifecycle we are. When looking at the more popular analysis comparisons that have previously circulated (included below), they paint a picture that bitcoin adoption is much further along than we calculate it to be. Upcoming Twitter Spaces: Bitcoin Magazine PRO will sit down with Croesus to discuss bitcoin adoption on Thursday, February 3 at 4:00 pm ET. Click below to set your reminder so you don’t miss out.Set ReminderIn 2020, Croseus wrote a thread that analyzes bitcoin adoption in a similar way that we set out to do in this piece. He outlined the adoption curves across four different user groups and focused on a preferred view of a similar group as our bucket of heavy users, though his category of full bitcoin adoption is even more strictly defined. He uses a creative way to categorize significant adoption by loosely calculating based on sales of “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous, Bitcoin Maximalist Twitter accounts and on-chain data. His conclusions show a similar view to our own: Significant bitcoin adoption is much lower than the estimates of 10-15% penetration or roughly 500 million users that are
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