The % of active bitcoin owners and users in the world is a figure that’s difficult to find information on, because it’s impossible to be sure of. Buts let’s try to give a best estimate!
This bitinfochart page shows the number of wallet addresses with more than 0.001 BTC is currently 21.65 million -
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.htmlWe can’t take this raw number to represent the number of individual bitcoin users in the world, as people may have several active wallet addresses making it an overestimate - and countering this there are many users who buy bitcoin and leave it on exchange addresses so that’s it’s not in a personal wallet causing an underestimate.
People can buy and own bitcoin in a hundred ways, but the most popular way in the Western world is through Coinbase, so what’s their user numbers. They reported having 13.3 Mil individual users at the end of Nov 17, after adding 300K accounts the week before
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/27/bitcoin-exchange-coinbase-has-more-users-than-stock-brokerage-schwab.html - and with the madness then of December’s speculative run-up of BTC from 10K to 19K it’s fair to say the number now would be at least 15 Mil individual account users, most of whom would have bought some BTC. But Coinbase doesn’t service China, South Korea, Japan, South America or Africa, where there are also large numbers of people buying and owning bitcoin - so I think it’s fair to add another 10 million BTC users in these countries, giving us 25 million users who’ve bought bitcoin.
So taking the 21.65 million active BTC wallets and my estimate of 25 million users who’ve bought bitcoin and either held or sold it, let’s say there’s ~20 million bitcoin owners in the world now - which is exactly the figure estimated in this Bitcoin Market Journal article in January this year that my assessments based on
https://www.bitcoinmarketjournal.com/how-many-people-use-bitcoin/The adult world population side of things is easier to work out. This World Demographics Profile page
https://www.indexmundi.com/world/demographics_profile.htmlshows a world population of 7.4 billion at July 2017, with 57.25% aged 15-54 - which gives us 4.24 billion adults and young adults. The population growth rate is 1.06%, so let’s say the number of adults and young adults is now 4.3 billion.
So 20 million current bitcoin owners/users, out of a potential 4.3 billion people in the world is a 0.47% bitcoin adoption rate amongst adults in the world.
If my estimates and maths are correct, then we owners and users of bitcoin here are among the first 1% early adopters of bitcoin and blockchain technology and the DApps to emerge that I truly believe will cause a 3rd world technology revolution over the next 10-15 years across most industries and with the emergence of the decentralised Internet 3.0 - that we’ll all be getting in on the ground floor of!
So do people agree with my estimate of 0.5% current bitcoin use and ownership among the adult world population? And do you think that use/ownership figure will rise to a 10-20% adoption of bitcoin and other crypto by the world population in the next 10-15 years, with our fortunes rising along with it - as long as we’re smart and invest wisely, which good advice and ideas in this forum will hopefully allow us to do?
A little long-term optimism perhaps for believers in bitcoin and blockchain technology long term, to counter the current short-term FUD! ‘You ain’t seen nothin yet!’