And, I don't know how much you use Bitcoin to buy things, but Bitcoin is about 20x more useful this year than it was last year in terms of making purchases, particularly now that Apple lets you put a wallet on your iPhone. Purchasing from your smartphone is going to be the way 99%+ of people use bitcoins on a daily basis, so that change is huge.
The metrics that really need to be tracked are: What percentage of people have made a single, transaction from a wallet in the previous month, and, 2-5, 6-20, 21+ transactions a month. That will give us the best understanding of Bitcoins growth as a transaction medium.
And, of course, this all ignores other innovative uses of the Blockchain, upon which Bitcoin as a currency might have just been the Trojan horse in enabling.
[1]: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=1year
[2]: https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...
- 2013Q2: 3.0 million transactions
- 2013Q3: 3.8 million transactions
- 2013Q4: 4.8 million transactions
- 2014Q1: 5.7 million transactions
- 2014Q2: 5.7 million transactions
You can get these values from the graph at http://www.quandl.com/BCHAIN/NTRAN-Bitcoin-Number-of-Transac... (select QUARTERLY).
If you can show any metrics pointing to an increasing rate of adoption among users, I would be greatly heartened.
Instead, we seem to be reaching a wall between the early adopters and early majority. This is a well-known chasms in the technology adoption cycle, and I'm a bit concerned about Bitcoin's ability to jump it, particularly given the current "hodl" mentality of most users of the coin.
On the other hand, if there's another big jump in price (not unlikely), then there will likely be increased interest among users. So I'm not saying Bitcoin will never gain majority adoption. I'm just saying that at this point, things don't look as promising as they did a year ago.