Quote:
Originally Posted by fizzwont
There are ~15,000 nodes - but many people use bitcoin without running their own node. I have personally given bitcoins to others that just keep them in a mybitcoin account without ever running a node. Some are using instawallet now too. So it's not transparent.
I'd say 20,000 people currently, but if you look at the node chart, it was 5,000 only a couple months ago. How can that not be growth?
So I've answered a bunch of your questions, how bout answering mine - what date/price did you first come across bitcoin? How much time did it take from first finding it until you actually understood how it works? How much self-loathing do you have for not getting some btc right away instead of nit-picking yourself with 'zomg, it's already gone up enough' or 'nobody is using it' or 'it will be shut down'?
Ok, cool I was wondering if there was a way to know number of nodes. Number of nodes is going to be a super useful stat for trying to figure out value.
First I saw it was this thread. From understanding it, maybe 2-3 days. Obviously don't know everything and still a lot to learn. After that, I made an effort to get coins (bought 20 on the ClearCoin site for $1.05 or something ridiculously low)
It has nothing to do with self-loathing, it has to do with not being a moron like most Linux geeks who cannot understand anything outside of their world. I bought more at $7, so there is a definite upside. There are a few niche areas I think it has huge potential, and if there is any adoption, it should go up. If it doesn't, it might fall a little. I'm holding off buying any more unless I see a real value potential, but I'm not interested in long term gambling with any more than I already have in the game.
I do loathe a lot of the Kool-aid drinkers on the forum. I wish I was able to pull the trigged earlier when I wanted to dump some money in, but oh well. Got a bank account set up *just for* depositing easily to Bitcoin, looked at some possible business ideas off of it, but none look like spectacularly great ideas. I think the commerce angle is far overrated, and the price is being held up very much by speculation. People are not buying with Bitcoins because it's a good idea. They are doing so for political motives, or they have some they got for free and are too dumb to figure out how to sell in Mt. Gox. There is literally no reason as a buyer to use Bitcoin to buy anything besides using it for Silk Road or other illegal transactions.
That doesn't mean there is no reason to use it in the future. There are just a *lot* of pieces that need to be built. It's so far from ready for use by mainstream, and there's no incentive to make it ready to use for mainstream. It's cool and I wish it was in mainstream use, but I can't detach myself that far from reality.
But here's how I know you are detached from reality. You think that there are 20,000 users. Fine, I buy that (I would have guessed 10,000, but whatever). You think $800k in transactions is happening EVERY DAY. $40/day in transactions PER USER? There's no way that's even close to commerce of that level. I'd like to see how much commerce PayPal has per user per day. Probably are numbers, but I haven't looked. But I'd wager it's at least an order of a magnitude less than $40/day/user.