Chamath Palihapitiya Predicts 7.3 Million Bitcoin Wallet Downloads in 2014

Former Facebook and AOL executive Chamath Palihapitiya has updated his projection on wallet downloads in 2014.

In January, Palihapitiya, who is one of the largest individual owners of bitcoin, had predicted 11.5 million wallet downloads, but after the bitcoin price stabilised below $500 in the first quarter of the year, he has readjusted his forecast to 7.3 million.

He shared this information via a tweet last night:

If you are wondering why USD/BTC is depressed, here is our internal projection of wallets thru EOY 2014... pic.twitter.com/Fh23kFBolw

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) April 14, 2014

The data is based on Coinbase, Blockchain and MultiBit wallets, all three of which passed their one-millionth-download milestone at the start of this year: Blockchain.info at the beginning of 2014, Coinbase in February and MultiBit just last month.

On March 29th, there were 3.9 million wallet downloads for the year, as per the Source+Capital graph tweeted out by Palihapitiya.

The Social+Capital Partnership

is a Palo Alto-based VC fund made up of philanthropists and technologists. Palihapitiya is its founder and managing director, prior to which he was the longest tenured member of Facebook’s senior executive team and held leading roles at The Mayfield Fund, AIM and ICQ, and Winamp.

Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, Palihapitiya is also the owner of Golden State Warriors NBA team, which ‘maybe’ accepting bitcoin soon.

One of the responses following Palihapitiya tweets questioned what was driving the significant slowdown in wallet growth rate.

His response was:

@polemitis probably because we still haven't seen the killer idea that will be a "sink" to get BTC flowing and attract new buyers...

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) April 14, 2014

Vinny Lingham, CEO of Gyft, also pointed out that number of wallets is not the same as number of users. In a separate post, he argued that consumer adoption was slower than merchant adoption.

Palihapitiya responded to that saying:

@VinnyLingham agreed. wallets > consumers, so the story is even worse i guess!

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) April 14, 2014