Topic: What’s the % of BTC owners and users in the world? - Here’s my take on it! (Read 307 times)

The amount of people that are actually using bitcoin is very very small compared to the world population. I think your statistics are probably accurate and there is no more than 1% of the world's adult population(not counting children, even) are using bitcoin as an investment or to pay for stuff.

This is why I believe we are still in the early adopters phase. A lot of people are introduced to bitcoin during the 2017 pump but will not actually take any action. These people will certainly join when the early phases of mass adoption happens.

There is no reason why bitcoin can't at least achieve 20-30% adoption within a decade, and it's with that kind of increased demand but limited supply that I think there is a huge amount of upside available for bitcoin to grow into to be an effective long term investment.

Yes one of those imponderable and unknowable things!

And I’m sure the number of people who ‘own’ 0.001 BTC or more, whether they know how to access it or what to do with it or what it’s worth must be over 25 million now - while the number of BTC users like us who can quote you the current price and use a wallet and show interest in bitcoin news and forums and social media must be at least 5 million.

And that last group do get a feeling of excitement I think feeling they’re part of something new and that few other people know understand or participate in, and in a way it will be sad when understanding and use of bitcoin becomes a lot more commonplace and unremarkable - even if that does wonders for it’s value!

That’s a good point you make. Yes I agree it’s bitcoin having a limited supply and being a store of value for people with reasonable net worth that will push the price much higher eventually, although increased general adoption and ownership will help a bit as well. But there’s probably too much talk of daily use of bitcoin and taking it to the unbanked in poor parts of the world wtc.

And I can’t see general ownership and use of bitcoin being much above 10% in 10 years time. But we don’t have a world currency with 100% use, and it’s sometimes forgotten that fiat currencies are regional - for example I’m in Australia and don’t own any USD directly. But I do with retirement investments that invest worldwide and in forex, and as you say that is where a lot of money will come into bitcoin and crypto once they become investment grade for the savings of high-net worth people - long before bitcoin ever becomes a common world currency.

Interesting point to consider thank you.

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One of the most interesting questions and one of the most forever unanswerable.

These estimates of 10-20 million were being put about well over a year ago too.

Many of the biggest addresses will be exchanges and them combined must now add up to several million users alone. Cryptopia, a nothing exchange, reported having over a million users. Though I hope they're not parking everything in exchanges, many are.

I wonder how willing Bitcoin fans will be to give up their underdog status when it's clear that phase is over for good.

That is a very wrong thought, just thinking of big profits and buying back at a low price that sells a high price, no mistake if bitcoin has increased and decreased very deep because of such a turnaround, when this situation everyone feels the same in nature . indeed they are very idiots in this regard.

I agree with you that a lot of "idiots" buy bitcoin in order to hide their money. But why do you call them "idiots"? They believe in bitcoin and fill it with money. Everyone has their own interests. Than you better? The situation with cryptocurrency prices can be provoked by speculators who hunt for this money. If everyone would calm the price of bitcoin will not fall off. I know a lot of people who sold their coins. We are all guilty.

We are going in OT here,but I will only say that there are two types of people involved with cryptocurrency.First want to BTC succeed in the intention of his creator(and I believe Satoshi consider BTC first as currency) so we can avoid current financial system(banks) and that first time in history people get decentralized currency.

Second type of people have only one intention,sell at the highest price and forget that BTC has ever existed.For this to happen in the near future they need "a lot of idiots with a lot of money" to push price up,and we all see what happen last year when so-called idiots start to buy BTC-it lost more then 50% of value in few months.

If the future of BTC is in the hand of such idiots then tens years from now there will be few hundred individuals who will play with all available BTC.Even Satoshi say that in 20 years(from 2009),there will be very large transaction volume,or no volume.

Awareness of bitcoin has been growing over the last few years, however most of it has happened in developed or close to developed countries. And even if that is the case, most people that hear of bitcoin don't actively try to pursue buying it or anything like that. Also, developing countries is where a lot of the population don't even know about bitcoin.

I think your calculations are close, probably give or take 0.5% of the entire adult population.

I'd say that at the absolute maximum we are the first 1-2% adopters. There is a reason why bitcoin has been rising so much over the 10 years its been in existence, it's because more and more demand start piling up for a restricted amount of coins. And this demand is only going to continue to grow in the future, which is why I'm so confident in BTC's performance in the long run.

First of all we don't know what the true intentions of satoshi were, he talked both about currency and digital gold/store of value properties, and also it doesn't really matter what he wanted, Bitcoin is what it is and it's a store of value before it is a currency, since being censorship resistant is it's #1 feature, and if you don't care about that then well, then just use fiat.

Also anyone is free to invest or not right now, and average joes naturally will be the last guys to enter, what satoshi wanted is irrelevant to this fact.. The guys that have more money will typically be smarter and get there first. There are a lot of idiots with a lot of money out there tho.

I get your point, but on the other hand, while it may sound a bit harsh, what Satoshi designed Bitcoin for doesn't matter anymore. It's a market just like any other market, where money moves mountains. Whether we like it or not, nothing prevents wealthy individuals or central banks attempt to buy up every coin in circulation to either inflate the price for their financial gain, or to disrupt Bitcoin's progress.

At the end of the day, no one is obliged to use Bitcoin in a specific way, and I'm glad it is like that. I personally don't see it as currency at all, and never have. It may change in the future if Bitcoin actually becomes usable on a wider field as such, but till that time, I use it as store of value and to hold a large portion of my wealth outside the current governmental and banking system. Bitcoin is freedom, so you have to accept even the sort of use you personally may not like. At the end of the day, the price plays an important role for everyone here. People saying not are just hypocrites.

I do not agree with you,and I think even Satoshi Nakamoto would not agree with you.He did not invent BTC&blockchain for a few wealthy individuals,but just the opposite.If a few rich individuals invest money in BTC and with time buy all available coins, what would be the purpose of all this?Most of holders will sell coins for fiat,and then those individuals would use BTC for what?

Only that "nonsense" that you are mentioning can keep BTC succesful,in the first place BTC is actually a currency,then store of value.The way you think about it is not unknown,many people just want to price increases as soon as possible so they can sell crypto and buy some of their dreams with fiat.

You can't blatantly tell which age bracket had more Bitcoins based on the address's first transaction date. There are too many things to consider.

Here, I've found a thread that best describes every bitcoin users in the world: The Demographic of Bit Coin Users
It's simple but pretty accurate, IMO. But the Author forgot to add Scammers in the OP.

I got a reply in there too, take a look.

What most people don't get is that we don't even need mass adoption to get the price up x10, we just need the individuals with high net worth to diversify their portfolios into Bitcoin.

Most money in the world is controlled by few individuals.. so why the hell people want "mass adoption"? average joes putting their small savings into Bitcoin will do nothing, we need the big pockets to diversify their stupid stocks and bonds into Bitcoin and eventually this will happen, but people are too focused on how we need to pay coffee with Bitcoin to "go to the moon" which is nonsense.

If you think about it, it's not that complex. All you need to do in most situations is copy + paste. It's certainly a little more inconvenient than the technology we're used to, but I wouldn't say it's complex. Even a grandma who could operate a computer should be able to get the hang of sending and receiving transactions in just a few hours.

But yeah, that being said, the current generation and the succeeding ones should fare far better, and is more likely to be attracted to Bitcoin. Maybe all it really takes is time.

Very interesting research,and considering the data you have took into consideration I think your conclusion is pretty realistic.Of course it is almost impossible to be completely accurate,but margin of error in this case can not be more then 0.2% in my opinion.

I have small site/faucet list for 2+ years and for now I have visitors from 203 countries of the world.It may not be the best benchmark for your research,but top country is Russia and Ukraine followed by USA,India and Brazil.So we can say that people in these countries have the highest interests for cryptocurrency.Since all top 5 countries in my list are big world countries we can conclude that most users come from these countries.

I agree with you that % of BTC owners is not less then 0.5% of world population,and that is most likely not more than 1%.We are early adopters for sure,there is no doubt in that,and with time that number will surely increase.

Yes thank you for your reaction to my stab at giving a figure for this very difficult to quantify statistic. Your point is well taken that using wallet addresses may significantly overestimate BTC owners/users, as longer term users may have ten or more of those 21.5 million wallet addresses with 0.001 BTC - which as you say is dust only worth ~$7 at the current BTC price. I note replies above though, querying if I’ve underestimated because of people exchanging altcoins on exchanges for some BTC which they them keep in the exchange wallet without a private key - and I’m sure there are many people like that, and if we added up the active users on say the biggest 25 exchanges including the 15 million users on Coinbase we may well come up with a figure of 40 million people at least half of whom prolly own some BTC.

A real issue also alluded to in the good comments above on my post is how do we define a bitcoin ‘owner’ or ‘user’ - do we call someone got 0.001 BTC from playing a faucet and who now has it sitting in a wallet with no idea what to do with it an owner or user? - probably the former, but not the latter like we would with someone who understands blockchain technology and private wallets and keys and who has bought and traded bitcoin and who shows interest in forums like this (that I believe has 1.5 Mil members?) or Reddit bitcoin and crypto channels (which have about 1 Mil users I’d say) to further their knowledge of bitcoin and crypto.

And like you my gut reaction was that bitcoin ownership and use was rare, but I think it’s human nature with rare things to underestimate the incidence. It reminds me a bit of the same problem knowing the real incidence of an uncommon medical condition I suffer called narcolepsy, which is ironic as I’m a retired senior sleep physician. Diagnosing and treating narcolepsy requires the sleep doctor to be interested in it and looking for it and to send the patient for specialised daytime sleep testing that is usually not available in most sleep labs they run - so it’s felt that a lot of people with this debilitating and treatable condition go undiagnosed. The incidence in the population is usually given in the literature as 0.05 to 0.1%, but as Wikipedia notes - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcolepsy - some studies show an incidence up to 0.5% - which is that same figure I came up with for BTC ownership. I’m sure the 0.1% figure that’s usually bandied around is too low from my own experience as a sleep doctor where I naturally had an interest in narcolepsy and looked for it in my patients especially young very sleepy ones who were unlikely to have the far more common sleep apnoea we mostly diagnosed and treated and my sleep labs could test for it and I had about 150 patients on effective treatment for it after ten years - whereas other highly regarded sleep physicians who were friends of mine had no patients diagnosed for it as they didn’t seem interested in looking for what was a fairly new condition and they couldn’t test for it. I would definitely say that 0.5% incidence figure is correct, rather than 0.1% figure because a lot of patients are unfortunately never diagnosed.

So the point I’m making I suppose is that perhaps 0.1% ownership of bitcoin by adults in the world is a more conservative estimate, if we assume each owner has an average of 5 wallets with 0.001 BTC or more - which would be 4.3 million people, and that would tie in with the say at least 3 million people I’d estimate are active on crypto forums and sites like this and Reddit and Facebook and telegram and twitter and medium and steemit and discord. But just looking at ownership of $7 of bitcoin or more active or inactive, I wouldn’t be surprised if BTC ownership is up to that figure of  0.5% of the adult population if we include all the inactive owners with bitcoin in exchange wallets from those 15 million Coinbase users and probably 40 million users with the top 25 exchanges - which gives 21.5 million people from the 4.3 billion adults in the world, which ironically is the same number as the private wallets in the world containing $7 of bitcoin or more! Don’t think it could be any more than that, and the true figure for ownership of bitcoin by adults in the world probably lies somewhere between 0.1 and 0.5% I think. Interested in whether you agree we’re in the ballpark or not?

I found your estimates for wrong and the real number should be significantly lower.

For example, I have over 10 BTC wallets with some dust and little over 0.001 left from different payments, mixing, gambling and so on. I'm sure that everyone who's dealing with crypto currencies from few years have few like those.

So I think the real crypto users are just a few millions. The technology is still too complex for ordinary users and mass adoption. You grandma could use a CC, but crypto? Or even your parents?

I'm not sure if I should be happy or be sad. Does that mean that we are included in the "early adopters" phase or are we bagholding coins in of a "dying" payment system.

good job.
i just want to add that the problem with calculations like this is always the fact that they neglect a lot of things while overestimate a lot of others.
the things that are neglected here are the fact that there are a lot of other exchanges that people use which are nearly as big a Coinbase. localbitcoins alone might as well be so much bigger than it. not to mention bitfinex, bitstamp, kraken, etc.
and the overestimation is that these are exchanges you can never trust the stats they are releasing and also many do a one time "trade" not purchase and that doesn't change anything about number of bitcoin owners/users.

in any case i think 0.5% is the closest estimate that can anyone come up with.

Good work! I am sure we are in the first 1% (less, actually), but my intuition finds it difficult to believe that one in 200 adults in this world has some bitcoins. Because that would mean that in some thirld-world countries, like Somalia, is less than that, and in some developed ones, like my country, is more than that.

Bitcoin is not so popular in my country. I don’t see, at all, like 1 in 150 adults owning bitcoin. That would mean 200.000 people and forums would have a lot more participation.

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.html

We 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.html
shows 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!’