The number of Bitcoin users continues to rise, and its market value has surpassed that of many countries' fiat currencies

Bitcoin’s user base and market value have surpassed the fiat currencies of some countries in Central America, Africa, and Europe. The next step for Bitcoin is to surpass the market value of reserve currencies and become the preferred international currency for mainstream users and ordinary consumers.

However, the fact is that Bitcoin as a technology is not yet able to surpass reserve currencies in terms of value or user base. The scalability issue is still unresolved and solutions must be deployed as soon as possible. Bitcoin Core's Segregated Witness (SegWit) is one such solution. If Bitcoin's on-chain capacity and second-layer solutions can be expanded and improved, it will be able to compete with mainstream fiat currencies and reserve currencies.

However, the market value and user base of Bitcoin are still growing at a relatively fast pace. Most notably, according to statistics from Bitcoin wallet platform Blockchain, the number of new users on the platform has exceeded 6 million in the past year. Other wallet platforms such as Coinbase have also seen good user growth, and currently this wallet platform serves more than 6 million users.

The number of users of the two wallet platforms Coinbase and Blockchain alone has reached nearly 2000万. In addition to these regular users, there are also a large number of investors in Bitcoin exchanges and trading platforms such as BitFlyer, Bitfinex and Bitstamp, who regard Bitcoin as an investment product.

According to an infographic provided by Bitcoin online community users, Bitcoin’s user base has surpassed many countries such as Norway and Finland. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is greater than most of the world’s legal currencies, which come from the following countries:

Mongolia, Bolivia, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Laos, Sudan, Senegal, Nigeria, etc. For complete information, please see the figure below.

The importance of Bitcoin going mainstream

The first version of the white paper released by Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned that Bitcoin was operated as a P2P point cash system. However, due to its high handling fees and relatively long confirmation time, Bitcoin began to exist in the form of digital gold since 2015. In order for Bitcoin to gain the favor of ordinary people, it must be able to process small payments safely and quickly, and ensure low costs. In other words, if Bitcoin wants to surpass the value of reserve currencies and gain a broad user base, it must follow the Bitcoin development path envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Technically, Bitcoin is not there yet. The Bitcoin open source development community is working to add a settlement layer so that it can exist as both digital gold and a settlement network. Segregated Witness, Lightning Network, and Tumblebit are all deployed in Bitcoin's second-layer protocol architecture to process small payments for regular users.

In some ways, there is no comparison between digital currencies like Bitcoin and the fiat or reserve currencies used in daily life. However, if Bitcoin develops in the future to meet Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of a digital cash system in 2009, then this comparison will become more meaningful.