Bitcoin Forum

Recently, a comprehensive cyrpto currency study was conducted by the university of cambridge.Although,it has revealed various aspects of bitcoin such as total number of wallets used,number of unique users of crypto currency wallets,but finally they have said that it is impossible to know precisely how many people use crypto currency.What do you think? Can we atleast get an approximate number of  total Bitcoin users world wide?

In my opinion, the the most accurate (almost) number that we can get is from exchange that asks for ID and probably ATMs (whether the ones that require phone verification or ID).
Blockchain.info claim that they have 10 million users but that's far from being accurate since bots should be taken from consideration, people who lost their wallets and made other accounts etc...

Yes it's impossible to know precisely the total number of people that using bitcoin in the world. If only for approximate, then it's possible but it will needs a deep research since different people have different ways not to show their real one. For example, a 1000 bitcoin address can be owned by a one person or something example like that.

Agree that we can tally the real users to those web exchanges that requires verification but for their whole users, it's impossible that we can track if what numbers are unique one.

Yes we can but i don't think this approximate number will be anywhere near the real number of users.

There are few things that make it quite difficult to calculate real numbers:

1. One person can have thousands of bitcoin address so we can't find this out with the number of bitcoin users exist.

2. One person can have bitcoin wallets in multiple web wallets so their number of users can't give real calculation.

3. Everyday new people are starting to use bitcoin which makes calculation even harder.

You can drop the idea of getting any approximate or true number of bitcoin users because it is not possible to calculate in any ways. You can imagine any numbers you like as total number of bitcoin users and i think number is well above 10 million.

I doubt there are even 10 million users overall.

That duo that claimed Bitcoin could realistically reach $500,000 by 2030 also said that there were 6.7 million users.  Who knows how they got that statistic, but I don't think collections of people who had their ID verified would be accurate at all as huge amounts of Bitcoin users like to stay anonymous and not be accounted for.

The only thing you could really look at is transaction volume, but we don't particularly know how many transactions each person who we regard to be a "user" makes or receives in a week.

You could do polls stratified by anonymity, age, gender etc of how often each "Bitcoin user" makes transactions each day.  It wouldn't be entirely accurate but would help us get a better picture if you divided total transaction volume per week by the median average user's personal transaction volume.

It´s hard no know the approximate number of bitcoin users since any user can have more than one wallet that can have many addresses but the more important thing is the known that bitcoin is, if it´s used in daily life, where is used, if people know about it, if it´s in the regular conversations, in a word , if it´s more or less popular.

Still impossible dude because there are a lot of people with multiple wallets too. Just an approximation based in the number of wallets might do by it won't hold any credibility until the actual number is found somehow.

the only way to get an inkling would be counting separate verified accounts at places like coinbase and localbitcoins, and even then you'd still be guessing the rest.

wallet openings is irrelevant. transaction levels are irrelevant. i think that study guessed 3-6 million? for some reason that feels about right to me.

Nowadays, it will be very hard to determine to track the latest actual numbers of bitcoin users. Aside from that, getting transaction in the blockchain is good enough to find out the accurate count of the bitcoin users.

I do not think that we can get the average number of Bitcoin usesr through used Bitcoin address or wallets since a single person can own more than one Bitcoin wallet.  I agree that the most accurate would be getting the users of exchanges that needs ID's  since a person cannot create another valid account using the same name.  But exchange does not represent the total Bitcoin use either.  So I guess it will be hard to know the total Bitcoin users.

As of now I think its hard to get the precise number of bitcoin users. As we can observe bitcoin is being popular nowadays, people attract to it to use bitcoin. Even in the exchange its kinda impossible to get the accurate numbers of users.

No, We can't get the approximate number of total bitcoin users that are available as of now because we need to consider the multiple wallets that is created by almost all of us bitcoin users and also there is a lot of bitcoin web wallet sites that can make the countings be more complicated and unsure. But the only thing we can be sure about is the number of bitcoin users are already reached at least 5 million.

Any source to back this ? I doubt we're even close to 5 million users and you mentioned that people could create multiple wallets. Who knows there might be one person that could own hundred thousands of wallets.

Not simply just that. If I open a few wallets, each wallet gives me maybe a new address every few weeks. And each site I use seems to give me different address every week also. So if I use 10 sites, and most people use more. We get maybe 30 address every month. So maybe real users from 5 million is much less.

It is impossible to know about the number of bitcoin user because one person can have more than one wallet.

Wallet is not the best source to determine number of bitcoin users.As a matter of fact,there is no precise fool proof way to know exact number of bitcoin users.

The specific no. of users of bitcoin is not measurable due to its private transaction and issues regarding on there is no really device that monitor the people who used bitcoin. But in statistical speaking we all know that the price of bitcoin is inclined on the no. of the support of people. So when the demand get high the price increased and when the community chooses to hold that is the time there may be a dump. But for me there is no need to know the no. of bitcoin users as long as we try to continue our support and advertisement to it. Because through this it will make more people to used bitcoin on a daily basis.

We have 200k transactions a day in the blockchain.
This would be the number to start with it.

If we consider 5  million users it would mean each user would only have a transaction every 25 days. It hardly labels him as a "user".
Of course transactions have two users (sender receiver) and there could be multiple receivers in a transactions but there also a lot of transactions that are just money being moved from the right pocket to the left one.

I doubt the 5 million mark , probably close to 1 or 2 max.

As many users before me have already said, there is no way to even estimate the number of bitcoin ( or cryptocurrency ) users, because of many things.
First of all, we cannot do some kind of a list of transactions, where we would have every transaction assigned to blockchain user, cuz every user can make many transactions.

Same thing about assigning wallet to user, there is no limit in making wallets for yourself, you can even have 1,000 of them.
Other reason is that you may have option of varying addresses to one wallet- you can change the deposit address of your wallet every moment, even blockchain.info changes the address for a wallet created there.

The most useful data in my opinion is volume, because it may really determine how big market is, and it doesnt matter how many users we have in the blockchain- it matters how much money is invested into this technology, am i right?

Bitcoin is a free virtual currency, we do not have any statistics on the number of current users, the number of daily transactions is the only thing we can know. However, 5 million users is a huge number, I do not believe it is true. In my opinion, only up to 3 million bitcoin users around the world, although it is growing rapidly.

They said it themselves. It is impossible to get the accurate number of crypto currency users. They can get an approximate number of users but it will stay as approximate. They cannot even state the accurate percentage of margin to the approximated number. In short, it is very impossible to know the exact value. Well unless bitcoin will be converted to a complete centralized crypto currency.

How did you able to say about 5 million users? I don't think so maybe it would be less considering the percentage on overall worldwide population.Its really hard to trace it up on the exact number of users since people can always make lots of wallet addresses which means probability that users would be less on the ratio of btc addresses.

Yes, It's really hard to say the exact number of users. Yet, didn't found accurate users of this industry,  those are we introduced mostly just an imagination number.

I assume that there aren't many people around the world that have bitcoins. There are probably even fewer that actually use them. I'm sure lots of people are just getting bitcoins and holding them.

For me it is impossible to pin down the number of unique users of Bitcoin in the world, why even what would you call users? Who uses it every week? Who has used it once? Another thing, people change their wallets as they change their clothes, so it's tricky to make that connection.

I thinks ! No body know Number of Bitcoin users.

We do not really need to know the specific number of people who uses bitcoin as long as we continue supporting it. We all know that value or price of bitcoin is inclined to its demand. Meaning to say if the demand of bitcoin increased there is big possiblity that its lrice also changed and increased so if we will going to monitor on a scaleof statistic we can conclude if there is more user on a specific day. And if we are going to count or monitor the number of users it is going to be per country. Becuase there is limitation on some country for usage and legality of bitcoin.

Well, they're right. It's impossible to know how many users there or of Bitcoin in the world and everything relating to it is essentially just speculation.

I'd say one of the few ways you can get a rough approximation is take online wallets, count # of users, assume 15%-20% (probably more) overlap, look at wallet downloads, assume 33% overlap, and then you might get a rough number for the lower end of the spectrum. That's not a good method, but it might be decent enough for approximations.

Chances are we're looking at >500,000 daily users, maybe >2m total users (who use it once a year). Might be bigger than that, idk.

Impossible to tell, we can never know exactly how many people use bitcoin, but you would be able to see that the transaction volume only goes up over time, which means more people are using it.

Yeah agreed, it is difficult to know for sure how the number of people using bitcoin today. Even until whenever, it will be difficult to find out. I think the volume of transactions could not be identifying if bitcoin users is growing. Because everyone can do a lot of transactions. Nevertheless, I believe people using bitcoin from year to year is increasing. Thank you

Somebody could just send coins back and forwards between addresses they own to generate 'fake' volume. Instead I think a more accurate accurate metric is Bitcoin days destroyed (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/845/what-are-bitcoin-days-destroyed).

The numbers of Bitcoin users cannot be ascertain because there are plenty wallets and there is no computations to know the number of users, people can create more than one wallets make transactions on all, I don't think it is even necessary to know the number of users as far as there is no fraud involved.

Due to the nature of bitcoin it's kind of impossible to know how many people use it.

Of course it is very impossible. No formula nor basis will exist on how to know the exact number of bitcoin users. Even if an organization will go around the world and ask everyone if they use bitcoin, they will not get the exact number. This is due to denial. Bitcoin users would not even say that they are using bitcoin, unless you are dumb enough to say that to a stranger. The users are smart enough and will have the essence of anonymity and will not admit that they are bitcoiners.

Personally I will go for like 4 million active users, I have close to 10 wallet, trying to hedge myself from any unforeseen scenerio. Do anyone have the actual number of users on Bitcointalk.org

There is no need of an university to know that it is not possible to know the actual and realistic number of people using bitcoin. Any villager would tell you the same. From people using more than one wallet to people using exchanges as their only wallet. What can be used to determine an accurate estimation. Using the daily transactions going is not usefull either.


The forum has actually +900k members https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats but thousands of accounts are abandonned or used by farmers/scammers ect. It should not be used to even just give an idea on anything

these days the bitcoin more and more, but there are still many people who are not familiar with bitcoin,, was originally the eyes of the virtual sound very strange TPI if we know the use of virtual currency is a lot of functions, especially for the needs of sale or can be used to invest. increasingly fore bitcoin users will increase rapidly. I believe it.

Does not owning a single satoshi disqualify one from been regarded a bitcoin user in this scenario
 

Most likely we have few active bitcoin users
Its probably even difficult to get the right estimate of the number of users generally using the crypto through the  forums registered members because of farmed a/cs and the alike, others use it totally anonymous to avoid unnecessary attention.

Aside number of transactions, people do roughly estimate the total number of bitcoin addresses to approximately find out total number of bitcoin users. I believe the accurate information on total number of bitcoin users will never be possible as bitcoin itself supporting pseudo-anonymous feature.

All the above, the total number of bitcoin users keep on increasing which means we could never have one constant number so working on this seems not a good idea.

yeah its really impossible to count the user of bitcoin because bitcoin is very much popular currency around the world and bitcoin user is belong to different countries so we can not count the member of bitcoin.

I think the only way we will know for sure is if it becomes fully regulated and users are verified and then tied to an address.

That would be a sad day for bitcoin, for now we'll just have to look at all the different "studies" and work out a mean.

I would like to know that, too, but I am afraid that we will never get the exact number of people using it. I also wonder what percent of the members are actually alts. The only way to know the number would be some kind of listing or something.

you are right it very difficult to know that how much people are using bitcoin because bitcoin users is very much high and its very popular around the world a huge number of people are using bitcoin.

yes there is no such open mechanism through which we can count the actual users of bitcoin. but we can only conclude that bitcoin is becoming more and more popular and that can be the reason that bitcoin users will be increasing from time to time.

And as always this type of research is not 100% accurate and this topic is vast to be measured accurately.

There is no way to determine how many users bitcoin has by studying wallets. How exactly are you gonna do this?
When you can download software wallet, copy it multiple times, install on multiple machines and use it that way.
Counting number of online wallets accounts is not gonna prove anything. Blockchain.info alone has over 12 million of accounts.

It's impossible to get the right figure because an individual can have as many bitcoin wallet as he wants and and there are a lot of anonymous wallet and wallet mixer also,we can only estimate but the best parameters are those verified by exchangers but then again sone users can verify their account on three or four exchangers.

maybe some users to wonder how big the actual total bitcoin user. but to count total users it will not be possible to do dude?

As stated it is not able to have clear data on the number of bitcoin users around the world though every new bitcoin address and all the associated transaction gets updated. To my view, may be we might be having around 5% of bitcoin users around the world and around 10%  might be aware but still haven't started using it for some reasons.

We know there are currently 12.5 million bitcoins. We know that there are dozens of whales like the winkledouches, Roger Ver, Loaded, and so on that own 100,000 or more bitcoins. We know Chinese investors are buying and hording btc. Based on all the user data you can get on this forum about lost btc and scammed btc I would reduce the total number of btc in circulation to under 7-8 million. Divide the supposed 10 million users by the number of coin left means the remaining people can only have $900 in btc at once. That means no major spending, no paying of major bills, each person couldn't even afford a small bag of marijuana. Combine that knowledge with the known daily transaction data of 350k and you realize there are far fewer people using btc than you think. If you consider "users" to mean people actively buying and spending btc like people spend fiat then it's very likely the number of users worldwide is below 500k.

Yes, but the delay of the transaction for me is good, because it means that the transaction is over flowing it means that there are many bitcoin users are making transaction and many are learning how to use bitcoin so the community of bitcoin is expanding that's why there are delay transactions. So the user of it is expanding too everyday.

It is very hard to get the precise actual number of bitcoin users all over the world. The only probable was to do a random sampling such as getting the number of bitcoin users in every hosted web wallets and exchanges and the forums. If we can get the data from those sites then at least we can get a much closer projection to the number of total bitcoin users around the world.

But it can make the bitcoin users have a negative experience with crypto currency and stop using it as the expectatives weren't matched. The first impression is usually what counts, and in this case it's not a good first impression.
The number of users should increase, but the bitcoin problems should be solved too soon as possible.

We can not count how many bitcoin users are using bitcoin but we can see very many transactions released every second so it proves that the demand of bitcoin users  is very huge in the world. Just only talking about chinese, indian people using bitcoins then it can hit over 100 million bitcoin users and how about the other countries?

Taking into consideration wallet its insane to trace the total number of bitcoin users, since a single person can have unlimited blockchain accounts, what i can say is we are growing all days, and we atleast around 1 milion to 3 milion bitcoin users, above those i dont know at all how close we can be the total size of the community, only if all become regulated.

you can reseach about bitcoin user with calculation choose one exchanger every one country
example china choose huobi/okcoin, USA choose coinbase and total calculation member in bitcoin exchanger is same total bitcoin user

No not at all it is impossible to count and give hypothesis in how many bitcoins users are there in the globe.If you will base on number of online wallets its still imposbile to count since there are no limits on how many wallets does a person can create so everyone can create multiple wallets.But one thing is sure we are millions of people who is using bitcoins by this time

That's the wrong-est thing I've ever read. There's no such thing as a bitcoin account. Stop using fiat terms where you need blockchain terms. If you assume any given person uses an average of 2 or 3 wallets (not addresses, wallets) then you can get a fairly accurate answer.

I wish OP had linked the study. I can't find it.

I guess the game gambling game is bitcoin excels in online gambling because it is easy to use and in play olehkarena that many are using both the beginner to legendary so users Players gambling bitcoin increased up to approximately 4 million all over the world. perhaps more because of the bitcoin is a free virtual currency may be a lot of demand to play the game so the daily gambling. increased user gambling bitcoin

I think the number of bitcoin user is about a million now, But in case of bitcoin address numbers,  Its going to 30 million because of everyday making new bitcoin addresses of users. In my opinion is Like an average of 20,000 bitcoin address created everyday? Just like my case I have 3 bitcoin addresses but different sites holding my bitcoins.

The mass generation of bitcoin addresses is because many sites are generating an address for one-time payment. There's no way to prove the exact amount of bitcoin users and if there is, I suppose it will be hard and need many people to calculate due to the unrevealed identity of every bitcoin's owner. Just never expect the amount of bitcoin users to be really calculated soon or later.

It does not really matter how many bitcoin users there are in the world, I think that due to the fact that bitcoin supply is limited all we need to know is how much bitcoin there is left to mine.

At this point there are over 16+ million bitcoins circulating in the internet and the supply is limited to 21 million for 100 years and we already got more than half of it in less than 10 years, so imagine the more users who will come in how thing will change.

The number of bitcoin users is always insignificant, what really matters is how many bitcoins you hold. Go for it right away !

I'd say at least 1 million.

This is based on the estimation of bitcointalk users, I know it's not 100% accurate because of people creating multiple profiles in this forum, but then if you take away the repeating profiles and add the people who do not use bitcointalk but still uses bitcoin, which I know a lot of, then you'll roughly get around the same amount of UIDs on this forum, if not more.

There is really no way to get an accurate estimate though, because bitcoin is pseudoanonymous and you can create as many addresses as you want.

I will not count ATM because there are just some one. Most of region / cities doesn't have any ATM.
Best way is to count user from service like bitstamp/coinbase etc where a lot of people access every day for exchange fiat/crypto.
There is also a wallet count (blockchain.info) but give just a number of wallets and anything related to users.

We can estimate the number of bitcoin users in the world using information bitcoin site's user and bitcoin wallet user's etc.
But we are still not sure about it bitcoin is anonymous so probably there are many user's that is anonymous but probably bitcoin users in this days is almost a billion when your mining bitcoin the more people mining in a pool the harder the difficulty to mined bitcoin as today it's almost impossible to mined   bitcoin without a high end harddrive bitcoin there are so many bitcoin miners's.
So probably a billion bitcoin users around the world.

Actually much more cities doesn`t have ATM then there is citis with ATM. Many people do not exchange bitcoins, and some do that more often then others, so I wouldn`t say that that is the best way for counting bitcoin users also. Many users have couple wallets minimum, so Blockchain is far from accurate.
There is no way for us to calculate how much bitcoin users there are, we can just guess this number, and add on that new members that appear almost every day.

Maybe we cant find the exact number  of it cause i think that in some areas that internet is prohibited we can say that they are illegally surfing on the internet. so they are simply hiding when they are earning it.

That is possible for bitcoin users to still do transaction or earn bitcoin even the bitcoin is banned in their places but the most reasonable thing for bitcoin users to not be exactly counted is a lot of duplicates of bitcoin wallet and a lot of same bitcoin wallet all over the internet so it is hard for a person that doing a survey to completely get the exact number.

I believe that until now, the bitcoin users continues to grow. Well, maybe everyone already knows what it is bitcoin, but there are many among them who have not used it. so, when they already know the advantages bitcoin, I am so sure, they will try to find bitcoin, and bitcoin make users increases.

Well although I don't really get the point of trying to find the total number of bitcoins holders/users , I have something to say.

YOU CAN'T.
You simply can't. Why ? Well, for a lot of reasons.

1- Nearly each and every person has more than one address and since there is no limit on addresses you can have it's UNLIMITED. and I'm just talking about normal individuals.

2- BOTS. Casinos and many other companies have a lot of codes/bots which generate addresses for one-time purchases/deposits. So that's just thousands and thousands of addresses generated. How are you going to determine which is whose ? Exactly...

3- I really can't think of number 3 :D

I think this pretty much explains it.

It doesn't matter how many members are using bitcoin, the value of bitcoin matter because once members are increasing the value of bitcoin will increase always. It is very hard to calculate based on their address because many people are using more than 1 address, so it is very hard to predict.

I think you are wrong the value will not decide on members, the value will be diced based on how many transactions were done. But the bitcoin price is the main source to attract more new people to get in this bitcoin world. Yes, we can not predict exactly how many members are using Bitcoin.

I would disagree with that, the value is nothing when the adopters are not growing, that would mean it is manipulated
and anytime that value will disappear. What we want to see is the increase value due to the real demand of bitcoins.

For me i do not think there is a device that can compute the actual number of bitcoin users, because there is no basis on how to know how many people using bitcoin.

You're contradicting yourself in just one phrase.

If you say that the value of bitcoin matters only because of the members (i guess you should say users) it's clearly you can't say "It doesn't matter how many members are using bitcoin".
It's nothing about prediction.

It's pure statistics.
And the number of addresses is I agree , a no go.
I already have used hundreds and god knows how many the services I've bought for have used for this purpose.

The number of transactions should be far more reliable in doing the math.

Maybe to some normal users of bitcoin, knowing the exact number of bitcoin users is irrelevant. What will happen if they managed to know how many uses bitcoin? Nothing, so some just don't care. However, to some users that monitors the progress of bitcoin, knowing the exact number of bitcoin users is somewhat important to them. Knowing the exact statistics helps to know how popular bitcoin became and even how the mass adapted bitcoin during its existence.

Absolutely,its very difficult to calculate the exact number of bitcoin users.The reason is one user may have one bitcoin and the other may have 10 bitcoins.More over,one person may have more than one bitcoin wallet.So,generally we can say that number of bitcoin users is rapidly increasing.

Yes, I think there's no way to count how many people that are using bitcoin from now because every time passes the bitcoin users continous to grow.
However, in my estimation there's a million of people who are using bitcoin. I can say that because as you can see there are many accounts in this forum even though every each one of us has other account.

You read the "mined to date" number of bitcoins without subtracting the non circulating bitcoins from that total. You do realize that Satoshi has over a million btc that never moved even once? Now you're at 15 million. Take the MtGox loss and the known burned coins and you're at 14 million. Take all the large long term investors that are holding coins out of circulation and it's at 13 million. I read a well written article that calculated the true number of bitcoins in circulation at between 11.2 and 12.5 million. It's very possible for all of the bitcoins to be mined into existence and only have half of the designed 21 million in the end.

There isn't that much people involved with Bitcoin as we like to think. Bitcoin has a huge amount of users within the technology niche' while most of them revolve around Computers they don't usually have Bitcoin on their Computers for some reason.
I think that most of the citizen's of the world see Bitcoin on the news yet they are just watching to see if the price will go up or down. Look at how much Bitcoin Wallets there is, it isn't much compared to the users.

If you already mentioned burned coins.
This is with the assumption nothing will change in the way bitcoin transactions are done.

We have to problems.
Coins will be lost, and this is nothing that can be done about. Lost drives, lost phones, forgotten place where you buried your cat bitcoin pkey

Second is dust.
Dust is created all the time. And with the current fee for a transactions it makes dust recovery nearly impossible.

Now, if nothing will ever change, we could safely assume there will be far less coins in circulation 10 years from now on.

It will be very hard to trace the actual number of bitcoin users, even there is a record history in the blockchain everyday with different wallet adrresess. And beside, perhaps it doesn't necessary if how many the actual total but most significant is the price value of bitcoin is continously in progress nowadays.

You're right, but people never look at the real number of coins in circulation. They just spout nonsense like Bitcoin running the whole world, the number of users has to be a billion by now and everyone should buy coffee with bitcoin. What amazing stupidity.

A little known fact is that Starbucks sells 60 million cups of coffee a week and that's just one coffee shop chain. Add all the other hundreds of coffee shop chains and individual shops worldwide and you're in the realm of billions of cups of coffee sold a week. Bitcoin couldn't even handle the coffee market if that was the only thing it did. No one ever logically thinks about Bitcoin and it's limitations. Pfft, 60 thousand unconfirmed transactions - try 60 million unconfirmed transactions.

Impossible is nothing, easy to say it impossible as to get it become reality ; a lot of effort and cooperate are required from all of users.
Approximately? Maybe not, but at least almost true. To calculate bitcoin users all over the world, we need an anonymous poll. I mean, an online poll which every person could vote, start from a country to another, cooperate with exchanges to achieve that. Not impossible but not easy to do, in the end ; who wants to do that? There's no point to look after the approximate number maybe.

Yup, its not speculated correct by anyone as now. If you try to calculate the number users its possible. Many of the people are using multiple alt accounts in the forum. Therefore, we are unable to read correct number in that. I hope you just focus only on price rise only.
you need not worry about it, price will be the sky rocket value in end of this year for sure.

That's a good point. As long as we can’t trace the creator’s of addresses which is the whole theory of Bitcoin and the blockchain, we will not be able to find out what the total number of users are. Also, yes sites like cloudbet for example generate a new address every time you deposit there which makes it impossible to know if the address is a real user or just a temporary payment method.

to me i think it is not possible to find out the actual number of bitcoin users, i think we even cannot speculate about the users of bitcoin, in fact there is not such mechanism through which we can find out the actual number of bitcoin users. therefore i think it is just a useless effort to find out the actual number of bitcoin users.

And how do you think you can implement that? How do you even know that all bitcoin users would answer your anonymous poll? Is there a certainty that they will answer honestly? How about multiple voting, can that anonymous poll identify if that particular user voted already? Your idea seems to be very difficult. There are many possibilities and factors to consider before implementing such anonymous poll. That approach will not also give the exact number of users, even not near to the exact number.

I agree with your point that what ever OP want is not possible because in every way we cannot get the details about the users as their are so many users who are using multiple wallet and they itself dont know how many they wallets they are holding.

No we can't approximate users of bitcoin because some people use many wallets and addresses due to anonmity of bitcoin they cannot trace who is that owner of that address and how many wallet he/she has that's why it's impossible. The only way is we have use a poll to determmine atleast estimated people in the world who use bitcoin.

It will be able to find only if the exchanges and all the wallets start to collect the documents of their users but I do not think it will benefit the bitcoin because it is against its feature anonymity so I do not think with any other way we will find the actual number of its users.

For now its impossible to collect documents or identity of each people who are using bitcoin so numbers of users still impossible to know how many people are actually using bitcoin now a days..
But we can give some estimate in my own i think we are thousands of users we are still not in millions of users..  this is just my own estimation maybe more of that. because many people are using also alternate wallets..

but to me i think it is impossible to find out the actual number of bitcoin users. as we do not have any kind of information or mechanism through which we can find out the actual number of bitcoin users.

yes that is very right that it is not possible to find out the actual number of bitcoin, actually there is no way out through which we can find out the actual number of bitcoin users.

All possible basis in counting how many bitcoin users are there in the world cannot help us to count and will be still impossible to count and give exact or even estimated numbers of bitcoins users.this is like counting our own hair.

Its totally uncountable.Just like you were counting grains of sand around the world.Even the number of people who is living now in the world we cant even give an exact number into it.We cannot count numbers of bitcoins users in all aspects like transactions count everyday,bitcoin wallets online,and accounts here in bitcointalk because all users may use multiple account and transaction

The number of users of bitcoin is uncountable, because we don't have a specific data to enroll each and every user. It is possible to calculate only through the number of wallets generated. Here too it's not possible to have a exact calculation, because users will be having number of wallets based on requirement.

I am assuming that there are more actual users now compared to a year ago, making it even harder to find out what the total number of bitcoin users there is right now. Wallets can be easily created which makes it all the more difficult to come up with even a rough estimate. But right now, I am more concerned with the market cap and the transaction fees than the actual number of users.

There's just no way to actually calculate the number of users in bitcoin
Because of it's anonymous feature but you could take some surveys to Bitcoin wallet provider on how many users they've got.
But even you've confirmed for example that they have 5 million users
Those users could be just bots and others made multiple accounts.

I guess we will not be able to get the exact number of how many users Bitcoin, even if we count from the address that is generated but still does not describe the truth, because one user can use many addresses, but we can know that Bitcoin users increasingly.

It is possible to get the precise number of bitcoin users if ever all the users are using a bitcoin wallet services that are collecting some personal information from a certain user for verification purposes such as IDs or bank account or whatsoever but this case wouldn't be in favor of the users .

the impossibility to know how many users there are go together, with the enhanced privacy that bitcoin give over fiat, this prove the pseudo anonimity already

i remember that not long time ago the numbers was estimated around 3 million, based on lost coin and other factors related to exchange and identification, right now i believe it's much higher due to india, japan joining in heavily

That'll never happen.  Online wallets aren't Bitcoin wallets in the conventional sense, they're someone else's Bitcoin wallet.

That is not a good concept to find the actual number and we cannot find actual number through this method. we know a single bitcoin user has a multiple wallet at the same time and through this we can't find the actual number. even i have 4 different wallets at different places so, according to me it is very difficult to find the actual number of its users and i think we can only assume the amount by different surveys and analysing the different sources of earning.

You cannot really get the precise number of bitcoin users.
Like how can you start on to count? Where will you start on? It is so impossible on, it is decentralized money, it cannot manage like what we have in fiat. I guess only those developers can really say that. But then, developers remain silent to this thing, and for sure they going to just keep this secret, so that no one can manipulate it. I guess knowing the volume of users can make some studies and manipulate the flow of the money and coins.

Yes true, honestly right now I've been using more than 5 online wallet, if the calculated data of course will feature 5 user whereas only 1 person, I think the best way is of the user data that comes from the provider the provider wallet, surely more accurate.

Really? I guess not, it is impossible to see the exact volume of users of bitcoin in the way you are suggesting. There are a lot of bitcoin wallet out there and some uses off line wallet which is not I guess counted on what you are suggesting.

I agree with you there is a lot of things to consider before looking for the exact number of bitcoin users because it needs a lot of time and effort in order to know the exact number because we will need a lot on information from the different kind of wallets online and to those hardware wallets sellers and a lot more, so it is impossible to know the exact number and we don't need to look for the exact numbers of bitcoin users because we already know that it is increasing every day.

Yes, It's completely impossible task. Is there any gadget to calculate the accurate Bitcoin user or it's near? No, I have no idea about regarding the issue. How many people use/hold bitcoin right now or the last year, some calculation just come to different idea, not use any method.

And for sure an individual can make a multiple bitcoin wallet account so how can you get precise number there? Its almost an impossible query to sort out as we are highly unlike to get the accurate results.

perhaps until now there is no certainty that explains how many active users and the number of bitcoin holdings scattered in various countries

Yes its impossible to predict the exact number of users using bitcoins as most of the users have multiple wallets to store their bitcoins so in that case it will be very hard to find the exact percentage of users involved in bitcoins.

I have a doubt. Should we call someone getting BTC0.001 or BTC0.0001 once in a while from various faucets and tips as a Bitcoin user? Where are we going to put the line?

That's a valid Q indeed.

Exactly! Given the nature of the Bitcoin transactions,  it's going to be a mirage knowing the total number of its users. For instance, I as a single individual have three Bitcoin wallets and have done over 20 transactions on all three on different addresses. So, how those one determine that all is from one person? It's really impossible.

Yes, there are allot of people even here who just get some Satoshi once in a while from signature campaigns, and convert it to fiat as soon as possible. Are they Bitcoin users?
And we can't find an accurate number of Bitcoin users using the wallets or transactions.

People who receive several Satoshi sometimes do not even understand what Bitcoin is and why it is needed. I do not consider them bitcoin users.
Real users are consciously aware of bitcoin and are aware of its advantages

Of course it is impossible because of the issue of having a lot of multiple wallets and the capability to create wallet more than on in just one IP and that is what makes this survey very hard to finish because of those conflicts, if bitcoin has only one wallet and one wallet per one IP then it will be possible for us to know the exact number of bitcoin users.

That is a good point in this discussion, I have many friends who have been using faucets, and different wallet services ( for example, Xapo ) to send them later, but the part of them have made more than one wallet, without even sending any money in there, because faucet was way too boring for them!
It made me kind of laugh, because i've been advising this people to not touch this boring activity, but after I have recommended them going on bitcointalk.org, they have got persuaded to start with faucet sites, looks like many people are actually advising newbies to stick only to faucets.

So yes, people that have made themselves a bitcoin wallet does not have to be a bitcoin users too. They could have just get irritated with the whole knowledge, what caused them to not touch  their satoshis anymore.

Yes, they do not understand all the advantages of this currency, because they simply do not have it. You can not earn something for a few satoshs.

In my opinion, no one knows exactly how many people use BTC! But perhaps the number is not small at the moment

I do not know how many users bitcoin in my world approximately 50 million.

As mentioned we're now growing in number regularly compared to the past days of bitcoin. Right now we are a very small number than the fiat used all around. This will change as adoption of bitcoin increases with relation to the acceptance and implementation of blockchain technology on different sectors and bitcoin for varied requirements.

I agree with you. These are not bitcoin users. These are random people.
Real users understand what bitcoin is and how it can be earned. Not from the faucets - it's not serious.

I hope you're just as stoked as I am for bitcoin being integrated into day to day living for first and third world countries. We just cannot allow bitcoin to become regulated or it will be a sorry day for us all indeed.

you are right that the number of users of bitcoin is very large as compare to past because people are getting more awareness about bitcoin and rapidly adopting it. Friends are introducing each other to bitcoin and using bitcoin in a large scale.

Then the number will be greatly reduced. Even some of the users that are active here in the forum do not fully understand what bitcoin is. Sometimes you can see some posts that suggests they use bitcoin as payment method but not really knowing what bitcoin is.

Well it's a payment system for me, bitcoin has no value if without fiat so it simply mean that we are just using its system to make a
fast transaction. That is the benefits you get when you are using bitcoin and since more people are satisfied, it is getting more valuable now.

Day by day the number of bitcoin users are keep on growing even bigger than the usual growth percentage of user of bitcoin. In my opinion, i think it is because of the good progress of bitcoin because there are few big countries that accepting bitcoin as their another type of payment system and soon bitcoin will be big and its users will surpass the number of users of paypal and other more.

Its really hard to speculate how many bitcoin users are out there. But I will put a guesstimate, around 100-300K only. Not even in millions. I say this because bitcoin is not even adopted by many people and the world are still fiat dominated. We hope that a lot of people are going to use bitcoin in the future, but volatile price and other issues keeps them away and using fiat as best option.

This is true that to calculate the accurately that how many unique users are using bitcoin wallet and altcoin or other same type coins  , is about impossible.
But here if the blockchain can give Thier data that how many wallets are created and Currently live to use by the users then surely we can make direct approximation that how many numbers of the people are involved in this .
And in case of altcoin it is really simple to calculate but it is mendetory that the altcoin owner tell us that how many users are using Thier coin and then making average of the user we can determine how many people are involved.

My guess would be that the number of users is still under five millions.
Evereybody has to start with bitcoin somewhere, and I bet that at least 20 percent of the users start here at bitcointalk.
This forum has slightly under one million accounts. So combined that would give me 5 million users.
And when you include the possibility that some people have two or more accounts, the number of real users would decrease. At least im my theory.