Bitcoin Forum

First:

This is not about coins you might have stored in 3rd party wallets or exchanges like Mt Gox or Quadriga.  >:(
This is about coins you really own, not about promises you will have some if it's gonna be sunny tomorrow.

So lately I really got bored and growing a bit frustrated of all those articles with 10-20% of some 3rd world country population holding crypto, and one thing was like the last straw and made me start this topic, which some of you will really not like, I know it.  :D

And the culprit was this (https://hackernoon.com/south-africa-tops-the-list-of-cryptocurrency-ownership-among-global-internet-users-bxazr30ti) :

What can I say...lol?
16% of 57, let's say 45 million adults is 7 million. Let's just note this down. 7!
But there is Turkey, ..20% out of 60 million adults, another 12.
And we have also Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia with a 16% average that would be 250 million adults so 40 million more.

5 countries and we have reached 60 million so-called crypto users and owners
If we cut altcoin since the article clams bitcoin is the most popular we have 40 million at least.
So no EU, no US, no China-Japan-South Korea.
Just by adding China and India we would go close to 150 million.

On the other part, I don't have polls and interviews.
I have something far more reliable than this, something in which we all put out trust, or at least we should.
THE BLOCKCHAIN!

And the blockchain tells us this:
https://i.imgur.com/KKdjCFv.png

20 million addresses with over 1$, 7 million with over 100$.
Yet based on the article...the polls...the blogs...the...NO!

The chain shows 450 million transactions (https://www.blockchain.com/ro/charts/n-transactions-total) since the first block to claim that 5% of the population or even 1% uses bitcoin is ridiculous.


BUT!
Somewhat like a conclusion, is it bad?
No, I think it is great that we have reached such awareness levels and such price with so little actual usage.
It might actually be the case of really aiming for the moon once we reach for real those numbers in the articles.

The only bad thing is that people forget the main advantage of cryptos and more and more hold their coins on exchanges in order to be the first to sell high and buy low when there are ups and downs or just because of convenience.
Probably before real mass adoption, I would love to see a real change of trend here.

No wonder. The smallest part of the world's population owns most of the world's funds

Unfortunately, Bitcoin currently can't handle that: With 328,284 (https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts) transactions per day, 20 million people could each make only 6 transactions per year. A large increase in user numbers is only possible if an off-chain solution, side-chain or custodial wallet reaches mass-adoption.

Big change would represent the verified exchange-traded funds (or ETF's). Those would be almost certainly structured with BTC. This would push the demand for crypto investments with providing a safer or reliable investment for those less familiar with the system behind crypto. I think the number will go far beyond 0.3%

What makes things worse is that even if you purchase something it doesn't mean a single transaction is done.
I always check for fun how my coins travel while I wait for the order to complete and sometimes I see them making like 3-4 hops before reaching what I guess is an exchange. So the actual capacity of the network might be a lot lower even with batching.

But if usage might not be possible on-chain, storing your coins should be.

11-2017 Addresses richer than 1 USD ...14,813,458   *with btc at 7000$.
Now:      Addresses richer than 1 USD....20,330,265   

I would call this at least disappointing...

hear, hear stompix.

And it's not just about these kinds of stats about developing economies (I come from one and I smell the bullshit out of almost every other statistic ever produced about my country). Little nuance, deliberately avoiding context.

It's also about the so-called wealthy investors. You know all those Xapo mountain vaults storing is it $10 billion(?) in bitcoin? Those rich dudes don't realise they don't own shit. Not a single cent.

And all these guys, even people I know? They've paid for contracts. As worthless as the printed promise on paper money they also don't understand. They'll never see a Bitcoin address, much less sign a transaction or broadcast.

Love Bitcoin and all that but no. I'm sorry. It's not really reached the levels of distribution and ownership we'd love to tell ourselves. And with growing interest in custodial services?

There is one great phrase that explains the crypto trend today. It sounds 'Money makes the world go round'. That's why people just hold coins to sell expensive and forget about the true purpose of cryptography. I am afraid that this trend will not kill the main mission of cryptography - freedom

That's true from my view, there is always a possibility for the price to get recovered to the point from which it fell low. The main mission of cryptography won't get disturbed, but the money that got into cryptographic technology is the one that has made it popular. If it happened just as a technology this could have never been this successful by this time.

Nice calculation, and I'm not even surprised at the numbers, I always knew that the actual adoption is pretty low, and that crypto news sites are full of shit and only write what people want to hear - in this case, some bullish news. I don't even expect Bitcoin's adoption to reach any high numbers like 20% or more, even 3-5% would be good numbers in my book.

I don't think we'll get an actual block size increase at all. I'm not being overly negative here, but just look at where we are going with Bitcoin.

If Segwit adoption keeps increasing, which it seems to be doing slowly, it means there are more transactions that can fit into one single block. In other words, less incentive to increase the block size. Another very important on-chain upgrade will be Schnorr, which will then free up block space that can be utilized to process even more transactions.

On top of that, with how Tether is moving its activities from Bitcoin's Omni to Ethereum, it frees up some block space as well, hence the lower daily transaction count. Ethereum on the other hand is currently choking on all the Tether demand. Currently there are 140,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool and people complain about waiting hours and some even days for a confirmation.

Really great and it shows that bitcoin is gradually moving in the direction where it could achieve the impossible, other than this facts, you'll actually think we've surpassed such amount of usage, but it's clear bitcoin is still behind in that aspect, and a look at the price and it's level of adoption doesn't actually show that, I think it's a big plus.
And that change is actually needed, though I think it may not be happening anytime soon, the newcomers over the years are actually in the network for buying, holding and selling high, they find it extremely difficult to explore other important aspects of the network which I also would love to see more people do.

Sounds like having the blockchain with less able transactions per minute (or more expensive) is an advantage, as it disincentives others from borrowing the blockchain for their own projects... Shoo shoo Tether, go to Ethereum and leave us alone... Perfect!

I start to see the beauty of Luke's reduce the block size idea :)
But yeah, its fine how it is. Bitcoin only needs bitcoin in its blockchain...

It was just an idea that was thrown on the table so it has not much weight at all, but I am actually quite against a reduction of the block size as proposed by LDJR. Bitcoin might be doing fine with its current block size, but we shouldn't exaggerate in the sense that it can be fine too with even less block space. We don't know that. What we know is that 1MB works and thus shouldn't be touched.

Segwit is the right path forward. I often looked at the rate of adoption and was kinda disappointed, but looking back now, it brings gradual growth in transaction throughput, which is actually a healthy form of growth. It makes people more aware of how important it is to use the block space more efficiently.

If you're not using native Segwit, you're pretty much robbing yourself. People should take some responsibility and stop using platforms who are not on board with this.

It's still pretty impressive considered the network was bootstrapped from a single user.


This has to be an important distinction to make. When people are polled about whether they own bitcoins, surely they are including their exchange accounts. Sadly, I would venture to guess a majority of investors store coins on exchanges.

I still think stats like "20% of people in Turkey" are totally bogus. Those poll results couldn't be duplicated using a representative sample.

Bitcoin separates money from State/Banks, but its not involved in altering world inequity. It might be helping leveling the playing field, or not, but it would be a side effect and not its intention.

Whatever humanity will do with money that is not controlled by State or Banks, it is for them to decide. Bitcoin doesn't touch this.

I do not really believe the "inequality is bad" camp, which is typical socialism rhetoric. You can have everyone equally poor, or a very in-equal society where the poorest individual happens to live better than in those very few countries where everyone is forced by the state to be equally poor...

But even if you want to do a revolution, you cannot manipulate Bitcoin to your whims. In any social system (or lack of), Bitcoin is Bitcoin, uncontrolled, free.

i don't think this is entirely true.
of course as there is an overall increase in bitcoin adoption, there is an increase in number of people doing different things such as holding their coins on exchanges but i don't think the percentage has changed. for example if before there were x% doing that while total was 100k, there are still the same x% doing that if total is 200k, heck i would say that the percentage has shrank even due to all exchange hacks!

why? because the order books on exchanges are still pretty thin. if it were any more packed that would have shown a great increase in the number of people holding coins on exchanges and that would have led to less volatility and less manipulation of price.

another indication is the huge spikes we see in number of unconfirmed transactions each time price makes a move. each rise or drop causes "day traders" who are NOT storing their coins on exchanges to move their coins to exchanges to sell or buy and withdraw right away.

As you talked about the price...
I know everyone is bullish about BTC, even I am.

However, your conclusion isn't bad, but alarming. Because we have so little actual usage and btc reached very high prices.

There is more speculation here than most of us is willing to admit. As you just proved now, less than 20 milllion people have btc (probably much less, because there so many people with more than 5 addresses, without even knowing sometimes)

Our community need less speculation.

And with the total attack on pow alt coins  making them less trustworthy to use  btc  now has to put up or shut up.

Asic builder/sellers  along with piss poor developers set back crypto  years by killing or at least critically wounding gpu mining.

If not for xmr developers I would pretty much lose hope  for the world of crypto.

It would take regulation to really make the real reason why cryptocurrency was created to manifest and I don’t  really see the government doing anything about that for now and I think the reason why government has even gone a bit soft on bitcoin or cryptocurrency is because they have seen it as a system that people are  just using for asset purpose and for trading which feels like it's no longer of a threat to them when it comes to cryptocurrency because people are not really using it for the utility purpose of it.

I think that we need to start encouraging most business owners to even first of all accept to integrate bitcoin payment system. That is the way to start because many people are complaining now that there is no platform for them to spend the crypto even if they want to.

Yea #stompix I hate it when they pull these statistics from their a$$. I think it is just part of the hype strategies that are being pushed by people with hidden agendas. The large majority of the transactions and also the owners of coins are coming from 1st world countries and we cannot deny that.

I think people want to create the perception that 3rd world markets are largely an untapped market for Bitcoin, but when I do contract work in these countries, I see that the infrastructure are not in place to support a thriving Bitcoin economy. <Poor electricity & Internet access etc.>   ::)

Ok, maybe my fault here I should have added and 3rd party wallets and clarify what I mean by exchanges.
Unfortunately, all the people I know in real life that hold coins (2, lol) have them sitting on Binance (not on the order book) because no matter what I tell them they feel "safer" there. And when somebody says "I've installed windows two times this year" as an argument, you give up.  :)


This is what is annoying me lately.
They think that 100 million people with 5 cents an hour wage will rush to buy bitcoin.
Or that bitcoin will save this and that country, that it will improve the economy it will cure Ebola or whatever.

No! It won't, and those bs articles are on par with the so-called mainstream media everybody hates.
But when CCN tells the same crap level news at CNN I'm beginning to wonder who is more toxic, as using poor people and countries as a way to promote your interests is the probably worse.

Those that put forward such figure are merely just making nonsense out of something cos I don't get where they see their figure from even with yr own estimation I still believe the population of those that own crypto is still very much low to yr estimation but yrs is still much OK and can be relate with .

lol, and Binance of all places! it is not as if it were hacked recently. tell them to at least choose an exchange that doesn't have such a gigantic hack in their recent history.
i had a friend that was doing the same, holding his bitcoins on exchanges believing it is the safest way possible. i showed him so many cases of exchanges getting hacked, people getting their accounts hacked, people being scammed by their exchanges,... that he made a withdrawal the next day to his Electrum wallet which i helped set up. :)

Well, since I always end in discussions about trillions of people using and owning bitcoin and crypto I'm going to try and keep this topic updated once a month with the data from the first few days regarding distribution for future reference. Good that I made it self moderated!  8)

So this is how it looks now:

https://i.imgur.com/ljhrJUL.png

Archived here:
http://archive.fo/YIVFN



So, October 2nd
14,061,631 addresses with more than one mbit, in the most unrealistic scenario 0.2% of the world population BTC.
  6,620,858 addresses with more than 100$, 0.1% of the population.

This is why it’s important late adopters don’t get disheartened about not having as many BTC as others. Buy what you can afford to buy, it doesn’t matter if you’re not currently a bitcoin millionaire. The price goes one way long term so even if you have $1,000 in BTC right now, hell even $100 it’s the best place for ypur fiat & you will make great profits if you have patience.

Bitcoin users community is getting bigger day by day but honestly its speed of getting accepted as a payment system is kinda slower. Basically only users can't make bigger differences where most of the countries government are stepping behind about crypto currency. Modern world's people are very much interested to use bitcoin as their daily payment method but without having own government clarification its kinda tough for them to continue with it. Same thing is decreasing investors in crypto currency. I think this scenario will gonna change soon and crypto users will be able to enjoy their life with bitcoin.

I think the degree of unreality of this scenario is at least two orders of magnitude. Somewhere I saw statistics on ad impressions to unique users on bitcointalk, and there were numbers around 18500. Of course, not all Bitcoin owners regularly visit bitcointalk, but all of them have much more than one btc address. Therefore, the truth is somewhere in the middle between tens of thousands and tens of millions. (And this is a good news for those who crying "Oh my God, I'm late for this train").

Ups, 2Mb block link here (https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block-height/594319). :)

So let's do a little one month bull run update:

https://i.imgur.com/sZG3Yu8.png

Archived here:
http://archive.ph/dG8re

In terms of $ we have more addresses with by:

1 USD                           4.2%
100 USD                       4.1%
1,000 USD                       4.3%
10,000 USD                   6.5%
100,000 USD                 6.8%
1,000,000 USD              8.7%
10,000,000 USD           13.2%

Rich are getting richer :P

In terms of pure BTC distribution:

(0 - 0.001)           274490          2%
[0.001 - 0.01)      312059   4.80%
[0.01 - 0.1)      68836   1.40%
[0.1 - 1)              -21299   -1.20%
[1 - 10)               1046   0.10%
[10 - 100)                 361   0.20%
[100 - 1,000)         140        1%
[1,000 - 10,000)      -39   -1.90%
[10,000 - 100,000)         3   2.80%
[100,000 - 1,000,000)    -1      -25%

Total, we have grown by 635596 addresses, with a 2.3% increase over the last month.
Not bad , not bad.

December update:
http://archive.ph/RLg4h

For coiners:

So dust grows, small holding drop, large amounts up,  whales down :P

For fiat lovers:
Everything is down:P, following the price

1 USD   100 USD   1,000 USD   10,000 USD   100,000 USD   1,000,000 USD   10,000,000 USD
-1%           -6.6%       -10.1%         -12.8%             -11%               -13%                -20%

Let's do a crisis update, I expected the number of wallets with coins to drop a bit because the mempool showed people rushing coins around so their destination should have been exchanged, but it's not the case

http://archive.vn/wip/AU2oX

For coiners:

For fiat lovers, bad news...

https://i.imgur.com/wMyO6fG.png