Diffusion Theory of Bitcoin

Innovators

The first innovator of Bitcoin was Satoshi Nakamoto; people to this day are curious to know if this person is real or not and presume that I might be a pseudonym for one or more creators. In October of 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper detailing how bitcoin would be used and its existence of an early peer-to-peer network transaction system. The first bitcoin was not mined until January 2009 when Nakamoto mined the "genesis" block, and it produced the first 50 bitcoins.

Early Adopters

After Nakamoto mined the first 50 bitcoins in that January of the same year, the first ever open source bitcoin client was released to the public and hosted at SourceForge. The first-ever bitcoin investor was Hal Finney. He also received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction, which was 10 bitcoins.  The other early investors were Wei Dai and Nick Szabo.

Early Majority

The first people to use Bitcoin were not business and "regular" people; instead, they were many black market sites. It was so used because Bitcoin is not centralized and not controlled or issued by a government, so it is virtually impossible to track who is using this bitcoin, and bitcoin does not need to be laundered as well.  A black market site called Silk Road only used bitcoin for its 30 months of existence.  From 2011-2012 the price of bitcoin was very volatile similar to what it is now. It constantly rose and fell for many months; however, at the start of 2011, it was $0.30, and by the end of 2012, it was $16.41. Then it boomed, and by the end of 2013, it was $770

Late Majority 

At this point, Bitcoin has become incredibly mainstream, and with this has come government regulations. In the US, for example, since bitcoin is an independent currency and a business to a certain extent, multiple branches of the US government overlap to regulate this digital currency. So following this, the Federal Reserve regulates bitcoin only when a bank lists it as an asset, and the SEC looks at the stock market side of bitcoin since it is also a security. There is also business now that accepts bitcoin as a form of payment; for example, the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team, accepts bitcoin to buy merchandise and ticket, and even AMC, a movie theater company, accepts bitcoin to pay for movie theater tickets.

Laggards

In 2022 it can be said that really most of the world is laggards at this point; only 106 million people in the whole world own a piece of bitcoin. The reason why bitcoin has already hit the laggard stage is that bitcoin has already reached its peak marketing stage; everyone has heard about it; it is just the volatile nature of bitcoin which is making it not very sought after.  If you check the stock market, bitcoin prices have decreased over the last 6 months. While there are some highs in there, it is just so unpredictable people are not willing to take that risk with what little money they already have. A football player named Odell Beckham Junior signed with the Rams during the 2021-2022 football season for a contract worth $750,000; he decided to take the entirety of his contract in bitcoin. So when the bitcoin price plummeted in January 2022, his contract became worth $35,000. While players like Odell have already made an absurd amount of money in their careers, this massive loss of income can happen to anyone who invests in bitcoin, which is people's fear.