Bitcoin struggles to gain mainstream consumer traction
The rate of growth in the number of bitcoin-accepting merchants continued to taper off this quarter (Slide 47). Discussions around the slowdown of merchant adoption suggest the fundamental problem is not a lack of merchant interest in bitcoin, but rather the lack of consumer adoption.
There were 1 million new bitcoin wallets created in Q1, representing 14% growth quarter-over-quarter. The total number of Blockchain wallets passed three million in February.
The pace of wallet growth is almost constant over the past year, leading to some concern about the credibility of these numbers and questions about how many wallets are actively used for bona fide transactions.
CoinDesk is forecasting 12 million total bitcoin wallets by the end of 2015 (Slide 53).
Interesting comment:
That’s it, the price HAS to be rigged. I used to think people claiming this was just whining because they made bad investments. But think about it. Investments up, more man-hours put to improve the ecosystem, merchant adoption increase albeit slower, awareness continue upwards. Virtually all markers except price indicate Bitcoin is doing well. That coupled with the fact that central banks are trying to out-print each others, that almost all experts predict that an epic crach in the financial system is eminent, many say this year. Plus it’s now basically common knowledge that gold and silver prices are rigged.There’s no denying it, the question is: how do they do it and how long can they keep it up? For gold and silver we know they do it by issuing naked shorts and unbacked paper gold/silver. But there isn’t that much paper-bitcoin floating around, is there? What do you guys think?
