Bitcoin Forum

Dear community,

I am doing some research for grad school about Bitcoin and I have been unable to find accurate figures about the evolution of the number of users of Bitcoin.

In this paper http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf it is mentioned that in Mar 2012 there were over 4,000,000 accounts but that doesn't equal to the number of users. In Sourceforge.net it can be seen that the Bitcoin client has been downloaded by over 160,000 people (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/), however many more users can have downloaded the app from other sources or are using other clients.

Therefore, I wonder if the community has come with some approach to analyze the number of actual users that own or make transactions in Bitcoins. This information would be very valuable to explain the validity of the cryptocurrency as a means of payment in the global economy.

Thanks in advance!

I would estimate it's around 1 million or so users globally.

I'm no expert, but I think it's very difficult to find out the number.

Nobody can say if a user downloaded a client more than 1 time, also there are online wallets to use. Maybe you could still get very very rough estimates with the overall client downloads and user accs at online wallets (but those are a lot).

By design.

Best you'll probably get is an educated guess. I'd wager bitcoin user base is followed fairly closely by the the price chart, with a price jump shortly after a big news hit that increases the number of users. So, if you just draw a best fit line on the 2009-current price chart, you'll have a pretty good guess at the user base.

A digital currency with user-defined anonymity will cause any estimates to simply be guesstimates.    Trends up and down, and to what degree up or down might be easier determined, especially from sampling, but coming up with an estimate of aggregate total number of users (defined as people holding bitcoins ?) is simply not possible.    There are other areas where studies have attempted to quantify a population and simply concluded there is no reliable way to come up with the number so rather than provide misinformation there simply is no estimate made.

The upper bounds can be known but the likelihood of the real number of users being anywhere near those bounds is extremely low.   For instance, there were several million Instawallets created.  However one is created for each HTTP request which didn't already specify a wallet -- so spiders and random visits got a new wallet without there actually being an intent that it is funded.  Even wallets that had been funded are spent and abandoned so even a metric for "wallets ever funded", if that metric were provided, would be much too high.

I've seen the "half million" estimate for total users put out there.  I've got a feeling that is too optomistic yet but then again every reddit user that gets a microtip has a bitcoin E-wallet, every person that has received a fraction of a bitcoin from those free bitcoin websites has either an E-wallet account or a local client, etc.  So I guess if there is no threshold as far as minimum purchasing power to be considered a user, maybe the half million is way to low even.      If the metric is to include anyone that has ever sent or received a bitcoin transaction of any size, if that isn't a half million yet I'ld bet it will be very soon.

Address counts in the block-chain are completely un-reliable, its know that some people have created hundreds if not thousands.

Your examination of the number of client downloads is probably the best method I've heard so far as everyone must get at least that to be a user.  Look a bit deeper into that and see if you can isolate the latest version as well as identifying other possible download locations then total them up.  See if their is some division by time to see if you can pick up a change in the rate of download particularly during the bubble.

Another avenue is to look at the user accounts on major service providers such as Mt.Gox, at current difficulty levels any new users must buy coins on these exchanges so their user counts and particularly new user account numbers would give a very good indication of how many people actually joined BTC recently.  Unfortunately Mt.Gox is held in rather low regard and their figures may simply be hype.

Also beware of any estimates people here give they are quite biased, a million is rather absurd to me.

I also do not know a reliable way of estimating the number of users, but the number of addresses in the blockchain has now risen to over 12 million (extracted from the blockchain through bitcoin-abe). This is the same variable than the 3.7 million mentioned by Ron/Shamir 11 months ago except a more accurate data gathering method was used.

I have been trying to get similar information.

-downloads of the cliente are unreliable. One user can male multiples downloads, many users can download it just for curiosity and abandon it after waiting a few hours for the chainblock to load
-number of addresses is not indicative as some one explained before me

I want count effective users: Users that have downloaded the client and got 0.001BTC  from the bitcoin faucet are not real users, they are just testing or are curious.
I am interested in users that have, let's say, al least a bitcoin.

Given the ridiculously small information that I have found till know, this is my approach:

1) Count users at entry points to the bitcoin economy:  exchanges.  Mtgox had 72% of the total trading volume till this month were it has go down to 64%. If we knew the number of accounts signed each month we could make an extrapolation of total users. It would be inexact because the volume of trade per user can vary between exchanges wildly, but then I think that users moving more volume are "higher quality" users for my purpose, that is to measure effective use of the currency.  Till now I have not found this info, only specific data commented by Mtgox for the last two months

2) Use other stats to estimate rate of growth in number of users, like downloads of client, blockchain.info charts on new users of their e-wallets, this kind of info

About 1) the only inf I have is the published data by MtGox: "The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days
of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day."
Combining this 60K data point with 2) you are able to guess-estimate the maximum number of accounts created.

3) Count or estimate other effective users born inside the bitcoin economy: miners, traders, goods sellers, users that bough bitcoins directly from other users.

I have only made a rough calculation that I intend to make more precise but my numbers give a MAXIMUM number of effective users of 1,200,000

Download counts do give some sense of RELATIVE RATES of new people who try out the software, though as you say they cant be considered raw numbers of active users.

Examining the download history shows that in the July 2011 bubble the peak download rate was comparable to the current bubbles peak download rate (assuming the current bubble is over).  This would tend to indicate that the same number of suckers got reached by and pulled into the second bubble.

Now between the two bubbles you do see a consistent stable download rate and its higher then the very low rate that preceded the first bubble.  In fact you can basically see a direct correlation between the download rate and the markets, but that should come as no surprise.

Email exchangers and ask them. The worst you'll get is no response or a no. But any responses you do get will give you something to work from.

Also keep in mind that people also likely come to bitcoinia without going through any exchange - download a wallet, find a seller.

If you try to keep getting numbers for a set period of time, say, 1-4 weeks (I'd suggest at least a few weeks) then you might be able to get a bit of an 'average' users.

Bar chart over 3-4 weeks with top/low of your 'guess' from whatever information you can get from exchangers and similar, then draw a nice 'average line' (median/mode/mean) of the 3-4 weeks.

Curious myself, feel free to share your findings.