Bitcoin Forum

I know there's been a lot of talk/polls about the spread of bitcoin wealth. I thought it would be appropriate to refresh that understanding (since there are a lot of newer members here) and overlay that distribution of bitcoin wealth with geographic location.

Please select the option that aligns with your bitcoin wealth and geographic location.

Please don't put your answer in a comment/reply, only share your comments to discuss the outcomes, findings, or theories on the data.

Thanks...

EDIT: If you've previously voted for a "UK & Europe" choice, and live in the UK, I encourage you to revote for the new UK-only categories.

Nice poll. I always wanted to know how BTC's distribution is spread across the world, unfortunately it's impossible to know. You should post this on reddit to get as much traffic as possible so we can get some decent guesstimate. A lot of people in reddit that don't visit this forum and reddit has 170.000+ users on the bitcoin reddit.

At least from this poll we will know where are the majority amount of bitcoin is been. Though this poll is just source from this forum member

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll set it up on Reddit and then post a link here so people here can also contribute to that poll. Thanks for your compliments. Understanding the wealth distribution would be really valuable for researchers, bitcoin business marketers, and the general curious cats (like myself)!

Post 2013 this would probably be Asia, with China being the wealthiest Bitcoin country right now judging by their minting presses and high volume exchanges. 

Chinese owns the majority of bitcoin miners as of now. But it is actually unknown if every bitcoin mined there stays in chinese hands, thus exchange volume.
They could be mining and selling at the same time to the rest of the world. It's actually really hard to determine ownership of the bitcoins. In poll like this we could only reach a tip of an iceberg.

Yes, it's a valid point... I often wonder how much of mined BTC China actually keeps.

Great poll, thanks for starting it. I always wondered where the most Bitcoins are located at geographically. I am looking forward seeing the results.

For those that enjoy a poll like this, please promote it by sharing the link with other forum members you talk to or posting it in appropriate threads.

The more people that participate the better our results will be and many of the long-time members don't frequent the Bitcoin discussion because the talk can be so general sometimes.

Thanks.

The thing with this is, I expect a lot of the BTC to reside in china because major big mining companies are around there, so we would need the Chinese posters to be aware of this and vote too..

If you know of Chinese members that don't frequent the Bitcoin discussion, please feel free to share the link to this thread with those members or perhaps post it in the local forum.

The more participants we have the more better the analysis will be!

Chinese Yuan is most traded fiat currency with BTC, following by Dollar! I cannot understand why do you put India and Asia together. The most Chinese users normally go to 8btc.com, pupular Chines crypto community, due to the blocked access to bitcointalk.org. Probably we need to refer this poll to there.

Because I had a hunch that India wouldn't have many votes and I wanted to minimize the number of choices...as it stands there are 37 choices. Another 4 seemed like too many, had to draw the line somewhere. I also could have separated Western and Eastern Europe.

it turns out the people of Europe a lot of which exceeds its nominal bitcoin 10 -_-
we are living in Asia alone can not achieve 1,
maybe you can share advice on how you can get more than 10 ;D

Good poll but I think that there it will not be an accurate result from it. To many people which have bitcoins are not at all members at this forum. Then, even those who are members must find this poll in the hundred threads that are in bitcointalk. And at the end they must be convicted to vote.

Anyhow I think that the result will be better if this thread can be stick at the top of the main thread. Try to do this....

Made my vote, though I'm constantly dipping in and out of Bitcoin holdings, right now I have zero but usually between 10 and 50 :)

I think this has to do only with the purchasing power. People in Europe and the US are making more money and have higher salaries so they can spend easier 10% of their income on Bitcoin each month.

Pretty much wealthy getting even wealthier! :)

I would have opted for a Poll not linked to any forum. Now people would need to register at a forum to take part. Lots of people would not do that, and would be excluded from this.
Do what the other people on this forum do, and use a free online Poll / Survey site. You can then link that to this forum and reddit and other forums and social media, without people having to signup for it, to take part. 

That is nice survey pool to know about how many people involved now into this revolutionary crypto currency from different regions around the globe, i also submitted my vote there.

Nice poll! Good idea! For the "forum users" vote a poll like this.

This type of data can be "derived" from the distribution of bitcoin core ip, or " following " transaction in the block chain, seeing the "miner" address…
Probably a mixer can invalidate this type of calculation, or software like tor, vpn etc…
A big wallet, or user with big amount also can create an outliers in this type of database…it's a statistic difficult to analyze in scientifically way….
(my 2 cents... about this… )

that is interesting way to collect the data from different regions so it would be helpful to make advertising policy about the specific regions, a lot of investors can know from what regions most people are in into that most advanced crypto currency.

No one from Russia has replied yet...

nice poll, i will follow this thread since i am interested to know the final result . it can show us where is all the bitcoin users come from and how much do they own , ofcource to some extent .

also i guess people from other places (that don't speak english) are not going to participate or will have a low number here.

which is strange, seeing how they are involved in many ponzi, unless they scam each other

but the pool isn't a good indicator yet, because few people have voted so far

I come from Indonesia and not speaking english but i have participated on this poll..because i also want to know the result of this poll

This is a great poll, thanks for doing this.

Once you get a concentration of votes it would be great to get more details on the subsets of groupings.

OK, the first interesting insight from the first 43 voters:

• The UK is dominating almost all wealth categories, and
• I'm surprised we only have 44 voters, we need to be in the Thousands!

THOUSANDS!

Spread the word. Share this link in other posts, lets's get it done!

People don't care about this man!

Bump.

This is a great poll, I second the idea to post it on reddit it. I'll also try to spread the word around the forum. Looking forward to get a wider variety of people to complete it, thanks.

This is a cool poll i should imagine the hodlers will be USA, UK & europe. China atm seem to dump more vs hold but will probably help buy up the next bubble when they get back in so its all good.

You've got my answer. You may consider advertising your poll on all local boards (in other languages), if you haven't done so yet.
I hope you'll get many answers, but I know by experience how hard it is to convince people to participate in a poll. Regarding the poll, there could be more logic in the order you've listed the different regions.


No! Not the UK. The UK and Europe. Very substantial difference.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I had to strike a balance between geographies and number of choices. We don't have many India/China responses yet so maybe I made the right decision. And by the way Any Bitcoin ownership is great, keep collecting/earning/buying and don't let the comparisons to other people get you down. Some people got in early, others didn't..

Thanks to those following the thread, tell people about it so we can get more respondents. Share this poll on local boards!

Most of the people who mine Bitcoin are from China.
Why are so much less votes for India and China.

66 voters so far dont represent thousands user here, so this poll havent stated the wealth of bitcoin yet in the world. But atleast your poll have given a good overview about bitcoin  :D

Falconer, you're exactly correct! Help us get more people to complete the poll, share the link with your friends in the forum! Share the link in the boards you make posts on...we can get to the hundreds (at least!)

But we need your help.

And by "us" and "we" I mean all of us, the community of people that would find this information valuable.

Thanks.

Well I will. You have 89 voters so far, not bad actually. If you have account in other forum website, you could make one there too. Hope your "research" can be a reference for bitcoin growth.

Nice poll to recognize bitcoin wealth spread by region, but i think Asia is bit too wide as it is a big region.

How would you split up Asia?

It seems I should have split up UK and Europe, but it's done now. It would be silly to restart the poll with a slightly different cut, but if people want to dive into the regions...feel free to discuss it.

In better news, we've passed 100 votes!!!

Let's keep it going! Spread the word, share the link with the people you associate with here. Thanks!

Interesting poll. Hope to see the final breakdown in a pie chart at some point. It is a poll in English though, so it kind of cuts out all those who don't speak/write English often. In other words, the poll itself will probably skew toward the native English speaking countries.

Western countries got the most bitcoins and MiddleEast is at the bottom as i predicted. No Surprises!

Richers gonna rich, Poors gonna poor.

Well this is not surprising in the case of Bitcoin which is pure technology and for which you have to had technology to put your hands on it in 2009 and 2010 for Bitcoin mining etc.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it can afford same services to poor and to the rich for the same price. Now yes, the most will be hoarded in the western countries.

I voted "</= 1 : India & Asia"

there's no doubt about it. but even if some people have a sizable amount of bitcoin, how would they compare it to others when they don't even know who is who and how many bitcoin they have in their possession?

why compare it? The point of this poll is just to gather information on wealth spread of bitcoin. There is no reason to compare one person and another

I heard somewhere that 80% of Africa use bitcoin. I don't know if there is any truth in this but it looks like Africa did quite well they came third for more than 50

Looks like most of the bitcoiners are from UK  :o

This poll doesn't prove that most bitcoiners are from UK.
This poll indicates that UK is more Bitcoin wealthier than any other region.

I don't know where did you hear that? This seems too good to be true!

I like that you said "UK & Europe".

This doesn't make sense to me, but to put your concern at ease - a person can only vote once but can change their vote any time they want.

People can lie, but what's the point in that? And if so, that person can only influence one false vote, not many.

The real influence that makes this poll "directional" at best when it comes to real research or results is that 1) we're relying on the population of people that use this Forum, and 2) we don't know what the geographic make up of this Forum is and if we knew that we could normalize the results. E.g., if 80% of Forum members are from the UK & Europe we could reduce the weight of those votes, to account for the higher population.

(P.S. Theymos, if you're reading...any chance you can share those stats with me?!)

This poll may have more insight on the regions that have no respondents - Africa, Aus & South Pacific, Russia - these areas perhaps have the lowest penetration of bitcoin use and discussion, at least significantly less than other regions who've matured so far as to participate in a Forum like this.

Nearly 120 votes, great work...who's going to vote next that hasn't already? Thanks for your participation!

Frankly, that wasn't needed. Writing only Europe would have been preferable. I guess it shows that OP's British.
Quite surprising that no Russian has participated. I used to think there were plenty of Russians in here.

Yeah, unfortunately, this polling place is limited because it's mostly just English speaking westerners.  But it's still a worthwhile endeavor to build data.  If you could find various equivalencies to this board in other countries it would be useful to continue building data.

I think we have equivalencies in this Forum, there are several foreign language boards here on Bitcointalk. Do you know a foreign language? Can you help me translate this poll for the benefit of our non-english speaking friends.

Thanks for participating.

I'm sure just a several people who fill the poll.

Most of the bitcoiners are from UK & Europe is rich people.


I ever see people in Africa mostly start to use bitcoin and there are some people who develop bitcoin project, but i don't know how many percent.

I'm missing [>1000]
You should split Europe in € and non-€ countries.

If you have read some bitcoin articles, you can find there are many people who try to develop bitcoin in Africa, even Bill Gates through his foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. With many economic problem in Africa, its a nice step to make people there be interested with bitcoin.

Haha, >1000...if you're joking, it's a great joke. If you're serious, well done and congratulations. I should add a "on the moon and waiting for the BTC price to catch up!" because with 1000 bitcoin in wallet, you're doing quite well!

Yeah, I now think separating out UK and Europe would have been wise. I didn't realize how much volume of forum members were located in that region compared to other regions.

Maybe I can edit this...

I voted for North America. Main reason is this is where I live. It really is hard to tell where has the most bitcoin wealth. We truly never can really know.

There's been several smart comments, requests about breaking out the UK and Europe. I've decided to make that edit to see if we can get more accurate data (I realize how that sounds as I manipulate the choices midway through an open poll), and to this I'll need your help with the following:

• If you've voted for UK & Europe, you can now change your vote
• If you know of anyone else who voted for UK & Europe, please ask them to change their vote

You'll find the new UK-specific choices at the bottom of the poll and I've tracked the UK & Europe totals (at this point in time) so we'll have a record of what was and how it changes going forward.

Voting levels as of 31 July, 2015 - before the breakout of UK & Europe:
</= 1 : UK & Europe   - 11 (8.7%)
10 > 1 : UK & Europe   - 18 (14.3%)
50 > 10 : UK & Europe   - 16 (12.7%)
> 50 : UK & Europe   - 18 (14.3%)

Any questions?

Thanks!

But hasn't bitcoin been  banned in Russia? I was answering a question for this forum and I read something which made me curious to know how many countries have banned bitcoin. I researched a little and found countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc. I also found Russia made into the list, so I don't really expect to find a lot of Russians in this poll. Sure, some people fake their identity but in reality there are very less bitcoin users from Russia.

Well, I know at least 5 ...

Really curious how many countries that ban bitcoin? Read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country
Bitcoin banning by government wont stop people to use bitcoin, there are many ways to get into it.
Wanna see how many Russians here? Maybe you can check their local section https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=10.0

Must be China

Maybe it means the Russian's here are smart about not disclosing any information that indicates how much they have and where they are from. You have to remember that those that have the largest balances were probably in on Bitcoin as earlier adopters (we're all early adopters) and may have a greater propensity to understand the underlying value in what Bitcoin was providing. I wouldn't want to spoil that if Government was knocking on doors trying to "empty the change" from peoples pockets.

Just a thought.

Thanks for the votes, keep spreading the word!