Topic: Back to basics: How many people have bitcoins? (Read 8302 times)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/distribution-of-bitcoin-wealth-by-owner-316297

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I know this is an old topic, but I was talking to someone recently and guestimated at around 100,000 Bitcoin users worldwide. I then did a search and this August 2013 came up.

Does anyone else have any differing ideas?

Lots of people know about Bitcoins, very few people actually own them I've noticed.

I'd say 50k sounds about right.

I think this just indicates that the current $1b valuation is in keeping with its user-base. The difference is that the US$ or euro are not going to double their users anytime soon, if ever. Whereas Bitcoin has massive potential upside in user-base terms. It could increase its users 10x which would increase its valuation similarly.

Intriguing coinicidence that the number of addresses used on the blockchain, 11.4m, is close to the number of coins created at 11.5m.

Seems plausible, let's go with the 500k amount of bitcoin users/owners.

The next question would be, is $1 billion market cap too high, or too low?

$1 billion divided by 500k users is $2000 per user/owner. Meaning each user/owner values bitcoin for $2000 on average (is that correctly said?)


If we compare this with fiat currency, that has $30 trillion market cap if I remember correctly for 6 billion people. That's $5000 per person.

Or looking at the USA, base money supply (balance fed) of $3 trillion, amount of people 316 million. That's $10,000 per person.

Or looking at Eurozone, base money supply (balance ECB) of €2.4 trillion, amount of people 332 million. That's €7000 per person, or $10,000 per person too.


From this I would conclude that if indeed there are 500k bitcoin users/owners than the current valuation of $1 billion, or $2000 per person, is certainly not excessive, in fact it's undervalued compared to fiat. Or maybe not considering bitcoin is still used much less than fiat, even by the bitcoin users/owners. But it does not look overvalued.


However if there are only 100k users/owners than it seems overvalued as this would mean each bitcoin user values bitcoin for $10,000 on average, the same as his fiat, eventhough he uses it much less.

And inversely if there would be say 2 million users/owners it seems undervalued as each user is valuing bitcoin for only $500 and his fiat for $10,000.

you don't even have to sell enough to retire, just enough to live on. If we assume a doubling of price every year, then you can spend up to half your coins each year and retire. but a doubling every year is too much to assume to retire on

A few people own a lot of the coins. The process of the last year has been testing their hands to part with a % of those holdings. If you held 50k bitcoins then selling enough to retire is pretty much a no brainer. 

I think 1-2M people own less than few (1-5) BTC each then few thousands of speculators own other 4-10M BTC together. Just feeling. ... I'm speculator(long term investor) :-)

Every time a transaction corresponds to bitcoin coming *into* the exchange, or *leaving* the exchange, sure.

But a huge part of the everyday trading, I'm sure, consists of BTC and USD just trading back and forth. And for those trades, to my knowledge, the exchanges don't creat new transactions -- they just move around the traded bitcoins between their customers in their internal balance sheets, but the actual btc are held in a combination of a 'hot' wallet and 'cold' wallet of the exchange. Others can correct me if I'm wrong about that.


Yes. I wanted to give a range that I feel comfortable is really inclusive of the actual number, so I picked a rather low and a rather high number.

Still, I'm not completely sure if 1 million is really so completely off target. Sourceforge registered ~3.5 M client downloads since the beginning of time.

Sure, quite a few of them are duplicate downloads, and not everyone who downloaded the client actually owns bitcoin. Then again, that inflation of the target would be countered by those who hold btc but use an alternative client, or those who own btc without ever having downloaded a client.

If I had to pick a single number, I would probably say around 500k people hold bitcoin worth more than 1 USD.

No its only satoshi, artforz, vladimir and a bunch of suckers.

Interesting, it all depends if addresses on exchanges are really off blockchain?

Because if not then indeed 250k unique addresses with more than 0.1btc is very low considering on average one holds say 3 addresses, so that would be 100k users maximum.

Thanks Jake and niothor for the valuable information.

Thanks for your appreciation oda.

Very good point mtgox etc represent also many users but is that really off blockchain because whenever you transfer btc to an exchange you do create a btc address that you also send to. Confused here about that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, 50k seems too low for me too. 1 million is possible though that would be already a serious penetration considering that's 1 in 6000 people in the world that own bitcoins. I don't think that's the case for Africa or South America or Asia. It could be the case for North America and Europe but it should in fact be 1 in 1000 in North America and Europe just to balance out the rest of the world. That seems possible though.   

There are only about 20 hoarders with 99% of Bitcoins.

Evil early adopters and gambling sites.

^this was my ballpark deduction. I agree with your range oda

Very interesting question. Could be useful to try to find an answer, even given the inherent uncertainty in our estimations. Thanks OP.


Does this number include *all* addresses ever created and used for transactions? I guess it does... any address holding any btc must have been used in a transaction, and those must show up at some point, when the transaction is confirmed, right?


Good point. But I find the > 1 btc cutoff a bit too drastic. 0.1 btc is still a lot more than "3-4 satoshi", so I would add at least the next lower group, 0.1-1. So we get around 250k addresses.

* * *

Here's a more general consideration though: there are ways to hold btc and *not* be associated with your own address. Take for example all the speculators/investors on mtgox, bitstamp that never moved their btc around. Their coins are stored for them by the exchange. They are certainly people that own btc, but they're missing from our estimation.

completely based on intuition and half-arsed guessing, I would put the total number of owners between 50,000 and maybe a million. (that's a pretty big range, I know.)

I find it hard to believe it could be much less than 50k, given the total amount of money that entered the exchanges at the height of the bubble, and the total number of (non-bot) trades on a given day. Also, given the media attention, subscribers to r/bitcoin and this forum, I simply don't think it's possibly there are only 10,000 or so owners worldwide.

On the other hand, I don't believe it can be much more than about a million, because of the limitation of how to get btc in the first place -- total number of owners = total number of miners + total number of people that are registered on the big exchanges. I'm discarding all less significant ways to get coins that way, of course.

Any comments on my estimation?

Well , according to that stats ,around 175k with +1 bitcoin.
If we start counting all the bitcoins mined in the dark ages that were never moved, and the fact that people tend to keep bitcoins in multiple places .. I doubt there are more than 50k real users , not people owning 3-4 satoshi.

About 3000 seems right to me!!!

with only 21m transactions in the blockchain i find it hard to believe that there are 40 mil adresses.

Visually it looks to average 40,000 per day over the last 3 years or 1,000 days. Just a rough estimate until someone can pull the numbers out.