> On chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users.
I assume anyone who owns crypto but hasn't made any on-chain trasaction to not be a real user but just a speculator. Ergo, immaterial if you're talking about the viability of the network to scale.
I meant it was useless in the sense that we can't accurately determine the number of users from looking at on-chain data. As you've also explained in earlier comments, there is the issue of "multiple addresses - one user" and there is the issue of "single address - multiple users". If we ignore the latter issue, we can put an upper bound at ~1 billion users for Bitcoin due to the unique address count but that's just an upper bound, the actual number is lower but we can't know how much lower.
We're on the same page but we're looking at different metrics. I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.
The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
> I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.
That's incorrect. The number of daily active addresses for Bitcoin is around 1 million[0].
> The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
To me, that's super impressive given that many people on HN initially dismissed. I personally never thought it would grow beyond the initial group of cryptography/p2p nerds. I was super shocked when Bitcoin was mentioned on TV for the first time. Has any non-governmental money ever made it that far? I don't think so. It's come a long way, but I understand the numbers are a bit disappointing to those who were expecting Bitcoin to completely displace fiat. And in the end, it's a matter of perspective and there's no right or wrong answer.
I assume anyone who owns crypto but hasn't made any on-chain trasaction to not be a real user but just a speculator. Ergo, immaterial if you're talking about the viability of the network to scale.