The State Of Bitcoin: A Summary

This week Coinbase released a great little summary of Bitcoin metrics as at July 2015. Overall, it’s an interesting overview of some of the more important Bitcoin metrics. Here’s a quick TL;DR of the piece.

• Understanding bitcoin price movement is a function of the period taken. The year to date, bitcoin is down 9% – but is up 213% over a 2 year timeframe (as most bitcoiners will be only too happy to tell you).
• Coinbase currently has 2.4M users and 3.1M wallets on their platform. This would definitely make them one of the biggest wallet providers in the world.
• Over the last year there has been a 94% increase in monthly transactions on the Bitcoin network (worth noting that this stat controls for the recent spikes due to load testing and spam on the network).
• Overall, 47% of Coinbase wallet holders are now from countries outside the US. With Hong Kong leading the adoption charge with 283% user growth.
• Aligned with other reports, a large portion of users are actually over 30. More specifically, 34% of Coinbase users are over 35.
• In what I think is one of the more interesting stats to come out of the report, Coinbase now has more than 7,000 applications built by developers on top of the Coinbase platform. This likely makes Coinbase one of the biggest Bitcoin application platforms out there.
• What I personally think is the most important measure to keep an eye on with respect to Bitcoin growth; the Github repo reference count, is currently at 6,109. Interestingly, the article notes that by comparison, there were only 2,318 repositories referencing Paypal. Although, I don’t think this necessarily means too much, it is an interesting comparison.

Overall (unsurprisingly), the piece paints a positive picture of where Bitcoin is at. It’ll be interesting to see where the price (and general sentiment) heads in the next few months with Greece, China, BIP-66 and the ever looming hard fork… but these are all probably topics for another Friday ?