To date, around 25 million people are likely using Bitcoin.
The same number of people who had an email when Hotmail was launched in 1996. Due to limited information and unable to accurately determine the actual number of global BTC users, this is the number that results from combining multiple data together, considering that many people have multiple portfolios and that according to some research about 5% of Americans hold a Bitcoin.
I decided to start from these infographics and to compare the evolution of emails with the evolution of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, through some historical phases.
The starting point of my reflection is as follows: once to send letters it took days, if not months, with the email we spent a few seconds. The same is happening with payments and transactions, from months to milliseconds.
So let's cross data.
"Email first entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to others who used the same computer, and some early email systems even required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, similar to instant messaging. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email, as in 1971 he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s this had taken the form now recognized as email."
1.From the 70s to the 90s.
Email had a progressive development accompanied by an increase in terms of users, from just over 50 to 25 million at the birth of Hotmail, which thanks to the technological innovations of the time and the reduction of costs for surfing the internet has quickly become the most used Email system.
Can Hotmail be compared to a current Coinbase, used by more than 13 million users?
2.From 2007 to 2010
The great boom reached almost 3 billion users.
All this thanks to two very important events: the birth and launch of Gmail by the giant Google, which over time becomes the search engine that has almost monopolized the Internet, and the launch of the Iphone by Apple, an essential step of the mobile phone revolution.
Can the development of blockchain and 5g have a similar scope? Surely global broadband internet service must cover the whole world.
I think it's still early, but in a few years, yes, only if we can include Africa and developing countries in this change. Surely these technologies will have to be much more developed than we can imagine today.
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3.And what about today?
The birth of social media and instant messaging applications, such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram or WeChat (widely used in China) have again changed and influenced our habits.
"As of 2010, the number of Americans visiting email web sites had fallen 6 percent after peaking in November 2009. For persons 12 to 17, the number was down 18 percent. Young people preferred instant messaging, texting and social media. Technology writer Matt Richtel said in The New York Times that email was like the VCR, vinyl records and film cameras—no longer cool and something older people do.A 2015 survey of Android users showed that persons 13 to 24 used messaging apps 3.5 times as much as those over 45, and were far less likely to use email."
4.Final Reflections
With the current speed of technological innovation, it is time to think exponentially, no longer linear.
I think the same will happen with Bitcoin, like all technologies there will come a time when it will become obsolete.
Yes, Bitcoin may be the great turning point of the Internet of Values, but one day it will vanish, perhaps long after the last halving in 2040, replaced by something better, faster, more flexible, more secure (think about post-quantum cryptography).
Or it will become a reference meter, and it will truly be digital gold, but it will not be the most used service, but the most considered.
We cannot know how the world will evolve, but it is very likely that cryptocurrencies are one of the right ways to change and to digitalized this physical and crazy world.
“It is in changing that we find purpose.”
― Heraclitus
Stay Safe and learn about future.
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