So just how BIG is Bitcoin as we approach 2014

So yesterday I was at a family dinner (true story) and somehow we started talking about Bitcoin. Amazingly enough about a 33% of my family (my expanded family which included uncles and cousins) knew what Bitcoin is. What kind of annoyed me was the type of arguments they made against it. Somewhat similar to what I wrote about the Bitcoin Skeptic in a previous post they made uneducated arguments which boiled down to “Bitcoin is a bubble and it won’t last long”.

This got me thinking, mainly about the fact that although I know that Bitcoin is BIG I don’t have enough actual facts about how big it is today. So I set you to find some interesting Bitcoin facts that would help me out in my next family dinner (not really). Here they are before you:

The Market Cap for November 2nd 2013 is $2.532 Billion

This means that if we take all the Bitcoins in existence and multiply them by this date’s exchange rate that is the number we will get. If we where to compare this to existing companies for example then Bitcoin would be the Air B&B of currencies. This is the second time this year that Bitcoin reaches such a market cap, the first time was on April 10th this year when the Bitcoin price soared to $266.

On average 55,000 Bitcoin transactions are done per day

When Bitcoin just stated out there were around a 100 transactions per day. In the past year since Bitcoin became more mainstream that number has increased substantially. This sums up to around $80 million dollars per week. For reference Paypal processes 8 million transactions per day. So although Bitcoin is growing fast it still has a long way to go.

The largest Bitcoin transaction made on November 2nd 2013 was of 7,368BTC

Since all Bitcoin transactions are open to the public you can easily search for the largest Bitcoin transactions that were made. A transaction in such a scale is worth at the time of writing this post around $1.576 million.

The largest currency being traded for Bitcoins after the USD is the CNY

Around 62% of all currency traded for Bitcoins is USD, next up is CNY (the Yuan which is the official currency of the republic of china) with 24%. The Chinese adoption rate of Bitcoin was boosted not long ago when Baidu (“The Google of China”) started accepting Bitcoins as a payment for their website protection service Jiasule.

56% of all Bitcoins have been mined

This is out of a total of 21 million Bitcoins that will ever be in existance, meaning we’ve mined around 11.9 million Bitcoins. The current electricity cost to mine Bitcoins worldwide exceeds the revenues gained from mining almost 9 folds!  A quick look at this graph shows you that miner profits are plummeting as Bitcoin mining difficulty increases over time.

The term “Bitcoin” is searched over 1 million times per month on Google.

A year ago today the search volume was 246,000 worldwide. The leading countries that are searching for Bitcoins on Google are Finland, Estonia and the United States. This is the equivalent of people looking for the search term “Ford Mustang”.

Bitcoin.Org the official Bitcoin website is ranked 8,042 worldwide

According to Alexa. This is an estimate of this site’s popularity. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and page views on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked #1 (Google). The site has around 41,000 unique visitors per month.

So to conclude, Bitcoin is definitely growing. On most parameters I’ve mentioned here Bitcoin has more than doubled itself in the past year and hopefully will continue to grow exponentially as it reaches a critical mass user-base. But we still have a long way to go…