Dinis Guarda
4 min readMar 7, 2016

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How Really Big Is the Bitcoin Blockchain Ecosystem?

How much do you know about Bitcoin or Blockchain its DNA technology?

How bit is its ecosystem? This article explore the size of Bitcoin and Blockchain and is based in a previous article I published with the following title in the website I found tradersdna.com: How Big Is the Bitcoin Blockchain Ecosystem?

As Reid Hoffman put it and very wise in Reid Hoffman: Why the block chain matters

At least one global cryptocurrency will achieve mass-market adoption. That cryptocurrency will either be Bitcoin or a derivative inspired by it. The chance that it will be the former is so strong that in 2014 I invested in Bitcoin startups Xapo and Blockstream. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, when one of the very smart people I know in Silicon Valley recently told me he’s a major “Bitcoin sceptic” who has not yet seen “many real use cases” for the technology, I considered it a good sign.

Why? Because in my experience, the most transformative ideas are not the ones that achieve broad consensus early on. Instead, they’re the ones that are so uniquely out there, so contrarian, that even informed observers have wildly differing opinions regarding their potential value.

So what are you doing with Bitcoin? Are you trading Bitcoin? Are you following its trends? Are you looking at Bitcoin as a commodity? Are you an activist using Bitcoin for your causes? Are you a tech geek hacker mining Bitcoin? Are you an investor looking to catch the next train of opportunities for startups exploring new innovations in blochain and fintech new currency banking processes? When it comes to Bitcoin there is no easy and simple way?

The Bitcoin ecosystem is a complex, powerful, full of dreams and conflicts — a bigger and bigger universe where technology, genius and profound finance and economic disruption flow with egos, willing to change the world, make a financial and economic revolution and surrounded by technology mavens, criminal master minds, capitalists and liberal extreme activists.

If you start querying in the data visualisation of Google Trends with the search term “bitcoin” it shows that popular interest in Bitcoin has waned despite increased media, social media continuous trending, and corporate/financial sector interest in the fast-growing fintech lovable blockchain (so-called among other things “Open Ledger Technology”).

Despite the myths and legends the bitcoin network was released initially on January 3, 2009, when the first piece of technology named block in the blockchain was launched. This event would open teh doors of massive disruption and love and hate escalation of a disruptive distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin, that was mined by its founder (real or not real) known by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Like many other technologies, that had appeared in the history of money, this one has been different. Bitcoin was created in a nest of polemics and genius announcements and had to come a long way until it reached the global reach and known widespread slowly adoption by financial companies across the world. In the meantime, such events as the closure of the Silk Road black marketplace and the collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange, negatively affected the digital currency. Following these cases, early advocates of the technology lost millions of dollars in digital currency.

However, the industry is still growing, with bitcoin being widely used for micro-transactions, international remittances, smart contracts, securities trading and machine-to-machine transactions.

With over $1 billion of venture capital invested in bitcoin startups to date Bitcoin is still in its early days. During 2015, bitcoin firms raised over $1 billion in funding, what shows that venture capital investment in the sector is rapidly growing. In comparison, last year bitcoin startups raised around $314.7 million.

Summary

The Bitcoin Blockchain ecosystem is really BIG! even with all its present challenges (and they are a lot) it will be much bigger and evolve the global digital fintech economy.

With the advent of Bitcoin / Blockchain solutions there are significant opportunities for the financial world, traders and investors. Anyone that is in the financial and technology, trading and investing needs to take it very serious. From big banks to innovative startups, worlwide organisations, payments providers, the process that Bitcoin and Blockchin brought to their operations is disruptive but very usuful and is irreversible now. The question is in what companies to look and invest as only one or two will become the global powerhouses and bring the right solutions with this new tech and financial DNA.

Another article related with Bitcoin and Blockchain I wrote that will complement some of the content and ideas I elaborated here:

10 Facts about The #Future of #Bitcoin and #Blockchain

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Dinis Guarda

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