Earlier this month, a meme began circulating around the cryptocurrency Twitter pointing out that the number of active users of Bitcoin has reached the number of active users of the Internet in 1997. But the reality is even more interesting.
Bitcoin probably has far more users today than the Internet did in the year Amazon hit Wall Street. This means Bitcoin investors may be running out of time to take advantage of the impressive market returns provided by increased user adoption.
Our sources: 70 million internet users, 1997 | 435 million BTC users 2024
The economics of this transaction note that even if 1 billion or 5 billion more people adopt Bitcoin, there will never be more than 21 million BTC on the original Satoshi blockchain. It is attractive and promising for investors.
It may have something to do with the significant increase in the market value of digital assets.
Bitcoin 2024 vs. Internet 1997
In January, cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com reported that there are 580 million crypto users worldwide.
Security.org’s annual survey of cryptocurrency owners consistently reports that more than three-quarters of owners own Bitcoin. This means that by 2024, there could be 435 million Bitcoin users.
Meanwhile, the number of Internet users in 1997 was actually much lower than 140 million. However, in the year Miami’s Marlins won the World Series, he had 70 million online users. 1997 was a significant year for the Internet for many reasons. One of them was Amazon’s IPO at $18.
If you had invested $4,000 to buy Amazon stock during the Internet.com boom in 1997, it would have been worth about $7.3 million by last year.
But if Warren Buffett had invested in the S&P 500 as he recommended, he could have offered $20,800 last year. He also warned investors to stay away from Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and stick to S&P 500 ETFs, which will significantly erode their gains.
This is another thing he would advise you to stay away from in favor of his favorite internet and computer businesses, AMZN and APPL stocks.
Internet Computer (ICP) 2024 vs. Amazon 1997
Internet Computer most recently topped $17 per network token on Friday, March 29th. With a market capitalization of more than $8.5 billion on Tuesday, the distributed cloud of Internet computers is a rival to Amazon’s $1.8 trillion cloud computing business.
As reported by CNBC, “Analysts say Marketplace could bring in between $1 billion and $2 billion in revenue, representing 3% of AWS’s total revenue in 2020.” Internet Computer hosts cloud services on its own network of devices built on various ICP blockchain standards.
