Thread by @ziggamon

1/ For Bitcoin’s birthday tomorrow, I wish for crypto Twitter to look outside. Outside, Bitcoin has MASSIVE mindshare. NONE of the other concepts we discuss here come close. Google Trends is a good tool for gaging outside interest, so buckle up and follow me down the rabbit hole.

2/ First the big one: Bitcoin is 5-10x bigger than ANY of “blockchain”, "ethereum", "tokens", "crypto", “ico”, "ripple", even "fintech”.

3/ Really. Try it yourself. The MOST steelmanned view I dug up - The U.S. during the crypto bubble peak - shows “bitcoin” at 4x “ethereum” and ”crypto”, the closest runner-ups.

4/ It may not seem like it here on Twitter where we have the ETH camp, the XRP camp, the token camp, the carnivores, the bigblockers, “blockchain”, and so on. It’s easy to be gaslighted and think that the proportions here are representative. They aren’t.

5/ For a while last year Bitcoin was bigger than Jesus! g.co/trends/88s5Q

(The world map is quite interesting too)

6/ So it can’t be that “bitcoin” is a subset of “blockchain” in the eyes of the world. The opposite, however, is likely the case. Blockchain is after all broadly defined as the technology used in Bitcoin. It’s still often referred to with a “the”.

7/ Ethereum - is a challenger to become a “better bitcoin”. Tokens - are little bitcoins for specific things. Stablecoins - you guessed it. Stable (unlike bitcoin), but coin (like bitcoin). Without bitcoin that naming makes zero sense.

8/ If we look at usage, say, people looking to buy stuff. “with bitcoin”, “with ethereum”, “with litecoin” and so on. Charts look quite similar albeit much smaller:
g.co/trends/qwL35

9/ This rhymes well with the numbers we’ve seen on @Bitrefill (attached), and somewhat well with the numbers on @livingroomofsatoshi: livingroomofsatoshi.com/graphs

10/ Searches for buying "with Lightning", have gone from fewer than Dogecoin 1y ago to roughly same size as Ethereum today. (!)
g.co/trends/torZx

11/ I don’t know why I found this interesting: Coinbase and Ethereum are of a similar magnitude, but have different trends. trends.google.com/trends/explore…

Fin/ Just as reddit r/bitcoin in its’ day never represented the whole of Bitcoin, Twitter doesn’t represent the whole of it today. That’s ok. Smart people say smart things here and we all learn. Just let’s remember the big picture.