How many Bitcoiners are there? - page 2.

I have tried to produce estimates for the number of Bitcoiners using three means of estimation. However, these means disagree significantly. Hence I am asking fellow BitcoinTalk users for feedback.

Methodology 1: Naive Count

This method involves counting the number of users who use each popular form of wallet.

From https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/, we learn that 7533 run full nodes.
From https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users, we learn that there are 1600766 MyWallet users.
From http://blog.coinbase.com/post/78016535692/a-major-coinbase-milestone-1-million-consumer-wallets, we learn there are 1000000+ consumer wallets on CoinBase.

Total: 2608299 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

This approach counts directly instead of extrapolating from a correlated metric.

Weaknesses:

Many smaller wallet providers are not enumerated. (Net undercoverage)
Partial nodes are not counted. (Net undercoverage)
The number of full nodes is a lower bound; many full nodes cannot be found and enumerated. (Net undercoverage)
Many Bitcoiners have more than one wallet provider, so are double or even triple-counted. (Net overcoverage)
Many accounts on wallet providers belong to former Bitcoiner users who are now disinterested or deceased. (Net overcoverage)

Methodology 2: Coinmap.org Extrapolation

This method uses http://www.just-style.com/store/samples/wrdas_samples.pdf and http://coinmap.org as sources. From the first source, there are approximately 5000 retail stores per million inhabitants (as an average of the developed world). From the second source, there are 4333 retail outlets that accept Bitcoin. A trivial calculation yields:

Total: 866600 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

This approach successfully discounts inactive Bitcoiners, as they do not generate retail demand.

Weaknesses:

Many stores are not listed on CoinMap. (Net undercoverage)
Many stores listed on CoinMap are not retail outlets. (Net overcoverage)
Many stores listed on CoinMap have since ceased to accept Bitcoin. (Net overcoverage)
There is no evidence that the retail-to-population ratio will hold for Bitcoin. (Unknown effect)

Methodology 3: Address counting

The method employed here is simply to count the number of non-empty or non-trivial addresses. These are addresses with over 1 mBTC. http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address?atblock=300000 provides such a list, giving:

Total: 1456865 Bitcoiners

Strengths:

This approach is relatively complete: even MyWallet and CoinBase users often have at least one non-empty address (though with shared wallets it is sometimes complicated.)

Weaknesses:

Some shared wallets may pool addresses of clients together, making most empty. (Net undercoverage)
Many people have more than one non-trivial address; some may have hundreds. (Net overcoverage)
Many addresses probably hold coins whose keys have since been destroyed. (Net overcoverage)

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