Actually a "death spiral" is basically built-in to bitcoin.
If the value stays at this level for a while and the hashpower increases so that miners rely on this level of income, a drop of say 30% could mean that almost all miners are running in the red (except those with free electricity). The resulting long block times could cause the price to crash more, discouraging even more miners, until a block is just never produced again. The difficulty adjustment requires 2016 blocks to be mined.
It will inevitably be forked to try and save it, but that might not take off...
BTC will die eventually--albeit slowly. $26 transaction fees are insane and unsustainable imho. My money is on proof of stake like Ardor.
I'd like to see something with GBI built in, and maybe less deflationary. Not completely, as it's nice when saving money makes it worth more, but the only reason to have btc now is to hodl and make more ... till it's worth shit... and you can't sell it at all.
I mean really you can't even really use it for utility any more... Say I wanted to buy hosting with bitcoin... I pay $15 a month for hosting, so that's 15 in btc, PLUS $26 to send the btc? well fuck that.. nvm.. guess I'll just hodl like everyone else...
Actually Google AdWords says that you have an average of 40k searches per month for "bitcoin" in Nigeria and more than 1 mio. searches/month in the US.
Right but the map seems to present the data in a way that implies those searches for bitcoin in Nigeria are more popular than other searches for their given country.
That only indicates demand for botcoin, not the reason for demand. Though emerging markets adopting it might explain the growth. It doesn't help assess bitcoin's value except to indicate it might have additional stability as a currency in some small nations.
To get these returns, BTC would have to appreciate 100x in value and you would still need those 200k$. While it has done this before, past returns are no guarantee of future returns.
If you want to finance the 200k$ with debts... well... the percentage can kill you, or require you to or in a sizable chunk of income to pay it off. (Mortgages in some cheaper places in US are this size. )
Agree in totality. This is the same concept as buying South African Rand because the value moved significantly in the past year or two with respect to your current. These aren't assets, these are mediums of exchange. Plus, in a world where all we use is Bitcoin, the price change with respect to dollars becomes irrelevant.
I was about to write the same thing. Here in Sweden you often see adverts for telcos where they offer free data for Facebook usage and stuff like that. We're not a developing country and you'll get a fair bit of data at a reasonable cost here, so it's perhaps not as obvious how this skews things in favour of the big players, but it's there alright, and it's sad.
That's it. I'm running my own dedicated servers for my business and had zero (ZERO!) downtime in the last three years. How much downtime had the big cloud players?
Me too. I've been renting servers for over 10 years. By the way is fairly common DCs with very high uptime (between 99.999% - 100% over 5 years or more), especially in cities with high connectivity like Ashburn/VA or Dallas/TX. Failures on servers with less than 4 years of use is _really_ unusual.
A. Becoming more computer-literate and going straight to sites as opposed to always Googling it before clicking, even once familiar with the URL, which won't correlate to usage
B. Visiting the site enough for AutoFill to take effect, which is ever-so-slightly inverse in correlation in terms of search popularity to site popularity
[facebook] was the most common search query when I was at Google (roughly the period covered by this graph), and [facebook login] would alternate between #2 and #3. Neither of your options seem likely at all to me - over the time I was there, I witnessed people becoming more likely to navigate to sites via Googling them rather than clicking, not less. The trend is even more pronounced with mobile, where basically nobody types in a URL, they use voice search and speak the name of the site.
I would bet on the Facebook mobile app being a major cause, though. Instead of hitting the web version at all, they're opening the mobile app.
Do people really voice search for things like that? Aside from drivers going hands-free, I have never seen a colleague or friend use voice commands where it wasn't just for the novelty.
IME, the first people in my friend group who started doing it were the ones who weren't insecure about looking "uncool" (so a combination of unapologetic techies and people without low self-esteem). Afaict, that's the main reason that people don't use a feature that would otherwise save tons of time.
I'm not afraid of being seen as an uncool geeky, but I would never use it as I don't like to broadcast what I am looking for to all my neighbors, even when I am alone I prefer silence, typing now requires basically the same amount of time.
I still won't use "OK Google", because it's the new Bluetooth headset, only douchebags use it in public. Come on Google, how much do you lose by allowing custom phrases?
More than one would be good, but it's probably hard to explain to layman how to choose a phrase for which they can create an accurate model that's so cheap it can run continuously.
Also consider that people are less likely to use voice search if they are around others. So that might explain why you haven't seen friends/colleagues do it.
With the native iOS app being released in 2012, the timeline would be perfect for that, yeah.
Does the mobile app take away that much usage from the web? I can see how it'll increase overall usage as people will use FB when they otherwise couldn't, but I imagine anyone who could be using it on a computer will still use the web version over a mobile app (web seems more functional, especially so with the recent Facebook/Messenger division).
A lot of workplace usage has shifted to mobile. Many workplaces will monitor all your Internet usage, and so once mobile became available, many people decided that rather than letting their employers know how much time they waste during the day, they'd use their own private Internet connection for that.
We saw a similar effect at Google with porn queries, particularly during the day. As soon as image search came to mobile Google, many porn queries moved to mobile; as of 2013 porn queries were twice as likely on mobile search as desktop.
80% of facebooks revenue comes from mobile, so i wouldnt be surprised if that contributed a lot.
however, i dont see how facebook being #2 and #3 among searches means anything against the fact that most people either dont close facebook or as soon as they type 'f' facebook.com is autocomplete. unless you get to see how many autocompleted hits they are getting, you are experiencing a selection bias
I never type in URLs directly. It is either a single click on the menu bar/blank tab, or else I go via a search engine to reduce the risk of landing on a typo squatter.
In theory the reason for this is that Facebook is "stickier" than Google or Amazon. If Google search isn't working for you, you can switch to something else in a heartbeat. If Facebook isn't working for you, you have to get all your friends to switch to something else before you can.
The problem is this is also going to be Facebook's downfall at some indeterminate future date. Because if some other social network ever becomes more popular than Facebook, Facebook is over.
I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not sure my significant other would know where to go if Google was down. DDG or even Bing are not top of mind. What else is there?
bing is actually pretty good. sometimes google's selection bias to what it knows about me prevents me from getting to the results I want so i either search in incognito mode or search in bing.
It was a social network; just an inferior one to Facebook. They lost to Facebook because Facebook was a more pleasant site for social networking, which made it more popular.
If you were in Germany, you may not have seen this, because MySpace didn't enter Germany until 2006 or 2007. At that point, Facebook was already starting to beat them with new users. By 2008, the established user base of MySpace was fleeing in droves to Facebook. The network effects that would have created social pressure to stay actually caused it to collapse even faster.
There is nothing that would prevent this exact thing from happening to Facebook. If a better site were to come along (or if Facebook were to become vastly less competitive than they are now), the social pressure could actually cause them to collapse just as fast as MySpace did.
Amazon has a radically higher multiple than Facebook. About six times higher, being charitable with Amazon's flaky net income.
Facebook will hit $13 or $14 billion in net income for fiscal 2017. Explain to me how a 27 or 28 pe ratio is unsupportable when you're growing net income at 30% or higher.
Meanwhile Google is growing its net income at 18% with a PE of 30. A far more lopsided ratio than Facebook has now, and one that is going to get much worse in just the next four quarters.
So you're wrong on both counts. Facebook has the superior value proposition based on valuation to net income + factoring growth rate.
I knew those people where out there, but there are almost as many people googling "google" as "youtube". Why? How many just want to get to google, and how many or doing something intelligent?
I used to think this was dumb as well, until I realized that if you type "google" into the address bar of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (possibly IE too, I haven't used it since IE6), it runs a Google search. Nobody ever bothers with the .com anymore; why should they, when just typing the name of the site in will get to it? So a sizable number of people who go to Google Search get there by running a Google Search.
Also, a surprisingly large fraction of users cannot touch-type. They've been trained to go to Google to search, so they type in g-o-o-g-l-e-ENTER and get where they intended, and never notice the autocomplete suggestions showing up in the Omnibox or the fact that they could just type their whole query in and get answers.
What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.
Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.
No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).
That graph looks scary for Facebook. Yet the share prices have not corrected to reflect it.
1
Tunisia 100
2
Turkey 95
3
Venezuela 95
4
Ecuador 87
5
Peru 86
6
Algeria 84
7
El Salvador 81
8
Serbia 77
9
Colombia 75
10
Dominican Republic
Notice that none of the developed economies are showing up in the top 10. The dollar per user must be falling as users are increasingly coming from smaller economies which means less amount of ad revenue dollars.
It makes sense why Zuckerberg is crazy for China. Without another spurt of user base growth, Facebook's share price will not be sustainable.
Mobile, mobile, mobile. In 2010 everybody would hit Facebook multiple times a day from their workplace. In 2017 nobody in the developed world uses their work computer to access Facebook, they pop open the Facebook app on their phone or have it open 24/7 on their home computer. The people left doing the Google -> Facebook routine are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones.
If they could make an official Facebook app less resource hogging, more user-friendly and usable on older mobile phones, they would be back in the game. But their app is probably the worst app you can have on your phone. It's terrible, slow and a joke. I would expect such an app from Verizon or GoDaddy, not from Facebook.
Nope, not even close. That just shows that people started accessing Facebook through Smartphone apps, where the decline starts is where mobile use exploded.
Why would it be dead? There are needs it services better than any other current product, with no serious replacement in sight (except for alternative cryptocurrencies).
And at least the black market use case of bitcoin is really hard to replace with a better product. Not because Bitcoin is so great, but because it's politically and legally hard to develop a good product that works in a black market environment.
Bitcoin went from the "hype" stage to the "adoption" (although of the niche kind) stage with a couple of hyped spin-offs such as "blockchain everywhere" so it's less of a hyped up novelty more of a "fact of life" type thing now.
Adoption is still niche, there are technical issues to be taken care of and there are "existential" threats based on the uncertain legal implications but by and large both Bitcoin as "currency" and bitcoin as "p2p network" are doing ok as far as I'm concerned.
