Bitcoin will reach 1 billion active users in the next 3 years, predicts Willy Woo
According to the predictions of the famous analyst Willy Woo, Bitcoin is expected to reach 1 billion users in the next three years. This prediction is based on the similarity between the development of the Bitcoin user network and the growth of the internet in the 1990s.
Willy Woo is a well-known pioneer of on-chain analysis and is a Bitcoin evangelist. His Twitter profile is tracked by 1 million followers, who receive regular updates on the Bitcoin network, cryptocurrencies and the widespread use of blockchain technology.
On Wednesday chirping, he again addressed the latter topic and made another attempt to estimate the rate of future growth of BTC adoption. His calculations are an extrapolation of several numbers:
- In the first six months, the number of users reached 1,000
- After five years it was 1 million
- Currently, 13.8 years after its inception, the Bitcoin network has more than 300 million users
The latter number represents 4% of the world’s population. According to Woo, if this growth rate is maintained, the number of users will reach 1 billion within the next three years. This will represent 12% of the world’s population.
Diffusion of innovations since 1990
The idea of adoption curves articulates how new technologies have been developed and popularized in broad societies. For example, the chart below shows how new technologies have spread in the United States from 1900 to the present.
We can see that the development of most technologies follows an S-shaped curve. Sometimes it is greatly stretched – mainly in the first half of the 20th century. Sometimes it is narrow and looks more like the letter “I” – especially in the last three decades.
In any case, the recurring pattern is based on the idea of diffusion of innovations, according to which the slow adoption of a new technology accelerates after a certain critical point is reached. This point marks the phase of assimilation of the innovation by an increasingly large circle of society.
By contrast, there is a decline at the end, with the technology gradually penetrating the last bastions of late adopters and laggards.
The Bitcoin adoption curve follows the Internet
According to some analysts, BTC has already completed the periods of innovation (2.5% of the population) and early adopters (13.5%) and is now entering the early majority phase (34%). For example user @liquidity tweeted a graph of Bitcoin’s adoption curve, marking its current stage of development.
If this estimate is correct, the BTC network is indeed on the threshold of exponential growth. Then Willy Woo’s prediction that 12% of the population will use Bitcoin in three years may come true.
Also, blockchain technology and Bitcoin have an excellent benchmark against the internet, which is decades older. It turns out that the development curves of these two technologies overlap very well.
In the chart below tweeted by @Issherai, we see that the two graphs of total internet users (green) and crypto users (blue) are almost identical. The only difference lies in the different dates of their dispersal.
The widespread use of the internet began in the 1990s (upper X-axis), while the adoption of cryptocurrencies has continued from 2014 to the present (lower X-axis). If this growth rate is maintained, we can actually expect 1 billion cryptocurrency users around 2025-26.
For Be[In]Crypto’s Latest Bitcoin (BTC) Analysis, click here.
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