According to MtGox.com's traffic estimation chart for only U.S. web access:
Going from 5k unique visitors per month (UV) to over 25k UV in shows that the future looks bright indeed for both Bitcoin and mtgox. We would see even greater growth from international web access graphs. The majority of Bitcoin users are coming on board from outside the U.S.
Opportunities being seized and presented to the market place include:
1. Physical forms for Bitcoins with bitbills, Cassascius, and others.2. A myriad of applications for Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows, and the tech favorite, Linux.
aCurrency, an Andorid app for currency conversion now links to Bitcoins. Bitcoin Wallet for Android and many others allow Bitcoins to be used almost like a credit or debit card, from our phone. Either we scan in our Bitcoin address and wallet information from a generated QR code, beam it, email it, or go through a web interface (plus other types of withdrawals not yet fully functional).
3. Merchant services from bitpay, OkPay, MtGox, Dwolla, etc. are making it easier for merchants to accept and cash out their BTC's.
4. Trading platforms are springing up to relieve Mtgox of its dominant role. Mtgox is not universally approved of because it has stopped trading at the most critical points, and often has lower prices.
5. There are also a host of competitors on the horizon. Ripple is the biggest and best financed so far.
Produced by a company called OpenCoin Inc., Ripple is based on similar concepts to Bitcoin. Ripple is open source and distributed around a network exactly like Bitcoin. One of the key differences is that there are already about 100 billion ripples in existence, but they are fed into the system on a controlled basis.
Read More: How to Become A Bitcoin Miner and Earn Bitcoin
It also uses something called social capital for backing financial capital. Plus, it has trust features for selecting networks to use for payments or transfers. What has the Bitcoin world suspicious though, is that OpenCoin Inc. is backed by large Wall Street venture capital firms.
Ripple has betamax stamped all over it. Bitcoin is working, out of the gate sooner, belongs completely to a voluntary community, and is not affiliated with Wall Street interests.
Other digital only competitors include Litecoin, Lucre, OpenMoney, OpenCoinage, Voucher-Safe, and many more.
Entrenched competitors that are not seeing the growth, but do have tangible assets - gold and silver - backing them include:
- Pecunix
- GoldMoney
- BullionVault
- PerfectMoney
- LibertyReserve
- Tecnocash
- C-gold
- Formerly available e-gold
- Global Digital Pay
These gold or silver backed currencies are not widely used, traded, or accepted. They do have the advantage of being backed and convertible into physical precious metals. Without wide market acceptance, however, their future is limited.
6. Most critically, there are efforts for backing Bitcoins with gold or silver. This is a critical step that will cement BTC's as a functional form of money. There are reasons for not taking this step, as it decentralizes the network if there must be storage for the gold. However, a de facto backing by gold would mean that the value of a BTC is respected enough that it can be tendered for gold.
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