Bitcoin Forum

So there are over 11,000,000 bitcoins in the world.  How many unique bitcoin owners are there?

That is an impossible metric to measure accurately since one user (merchants) may use hundreds of addresses. There is no way to associate addresses to unique users and there is no other information stored in the blockchain to identify users.

Isn't this kind of why Bitcoin exists? To keep secret how many people are using bitcoins (and/or for what purposes)?

Kudos on the intellectual curiosity, but as others mentioned, it's a question not to be answered for many reasons..

you could possibly work out how many is the average amount of wallets or addresses people have but amount of coin. People like to keep quiet on that.

You might be able to achieve a rough estimate if you do some cluster analysis on transactions, looking for which transactions from separate addresses eventually collide into a single address or group of addresses that are closely related. This might give you some indication of which addresses are grouped in a wallet or controlled by the same entity.

In the (not too?) distant future, I expect law enforcement will seek these kinds of tools for criminal transaction analysis. Can you imagine a time when they present a blockchain analysis to a judge to secure a signed warrant? You know... assuming we in the United States have any sort of Fourth Amendment rights at that point.

I've been wondering about how they got the warrant to seize bitcoins in this case:

http://www.dailydot.com/business/11-bitcoins-seized-government-dea/

Apparently they already have something compelling enough for a seizure?

I'm sure there was no warrant for the seizure is just as the article said, a honeypot on Silk Road or the computer itself was seized and there happened to be bitcoins on it and the news media twisted it to say the coins had been seized

I am going to agree with this.

I asked the same question some 6 months back or so.

I came to the conclusion that it must be somewhere around 100k. 1 million was seriously overestimated I thought.

This conclusion is based on what? there is 150K members in this forum (I am aware that this is not a good indicator but it gives an idea). Also, this does not include all the people using other platforms such as reddit, facebook, twitter, google+ and so on. Also, there is a lot of people using bitcoin without engaging social interaction in any of those media. My guess is that the number of bitcoin users is more in the range of 500K - 1M around the world.

When I discovered BTC, I tried every software I could find, and every faucets as well. I still own 4 wallets with dust which would barely pay the fee to move them to my main wallet. So those wallets just sit, and I'm sure there are thousands like that. It would probably be more useful to look for the number of unique addresses used per day.

No need to jump on me.

It was based on several indicators, unique addresses in use, but other interesting calculations also.

By now it may have doubled but that's still just 200k in my rough estimate.

It's in my post history. If you are interested look it up yourself.

I didn't noticed I was replying to an old post of yours. I'm not jumping on you, I was just curious about what indicator you have used to come up with your estimation.

Here's the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=267708.0