Bitcoin Forum

In was recently reported that the number of unique Bitcoin addresses holding an excess of 0 bitcoins i.e more than zero bitcoin in them just got to an all time high
Full article: https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-addresses-hit-a-new-all-time-high/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

This shows an evident increase in the adoption of Bitcoin all over the world, although unique addresses does not necessarily translate to unique users of the network, it shows the growth of the network.
Is this evidence of Bitcoin going mainstream?
Would an ATH in addresses lead to a new ATH in the price?

Not necessarily it means Bitcoin adoption is going high since all addresses have zero bitcoin. When bitcoin adoption will go high we will have merchants all over the world that will accept bitcoin, government policies in favor of bitcoin and things like that. unfortunately, we are not witnessing such things at the moment.

No, it says all addresses recorded has more than 0 bitcoins in them. I have edited the OP to remove any ambiguity

You are describing the situation when bitcoin adoption reaches its peak, it is always on the increase since it's inception, with a growing list of merchants accepting it and governments approving it.

People are somehow just using one BTC address per transaction meaning everytime they make a transaction using one btc address, this BTC address are now thrownaway and abandoned. They say its the best practice to avoid being traced.

Maybe these empty BTC address will soon be filled with BTC also. I heard that when you do an transaction, the btc address will have a high possibility that it can be hacked thru quantum computer due to the exposure of the public key when making transaction.

The number IMO is quite low, considering the fact that since the start of the network and bitcoin being fully functional, Satoshi and other lead devs encouraged people to use up change addresses after every transaction. But since people are too lazy to do it (including me, I'm guilty of this in the beginning), the numbers are stacked up so low. Security is sometimes being compromised on addresses that are being repeatedly used and people are able to trace which address belongs to whom based on activity.

But yeah, as long as the network continues moving forward, I see no reason for bitcoin to not post a new ATH for used addresses containing more than 0 bitcoins in them. Once adoption hits its timing, see the numbers ramp up.

This has little to do with adoption if anything. It might be that people are getting smarter and are using one address per transaction, as it was originally recommended by Satoshi.

As for the price, is has even less to do with it. Some online services like exchanges have also gotten smarter and provide users a new address every time they want to send funds to. While you can actually use the old addresses, the correct thing to do is use the new one for each transaction. So an active trader that is also moving funds into an exchange would also be using different ones. If they are smart, at the time of withdraw they would make sure to also use a different address, even when withdrawing from the same exchange.

Ideally, transactions and addresses would be the same number. Some people are lazy or simply don't mind, especially those that brute forced vanity addresses, maybe for donations or such.

In my country merchants very rarely take bitcoin directly, so you have to hit the exchange and sell them for the amount of the thing you want to actually buy that day. Tomorrow the price in fiat will be much higher so it only makes sense to exchange for the thing you want to buy that day only. This translates in several more transactions than, say, someone living in a country with a "solid" fiat, who can do only one large exchange for living expenses of the month (not the day) or so. And our transactions while more, are for much smaller amounts.

Price in my opinion will see an uptrend up or near the halving, then there could be a correction. But it might occur before the halving, it depends if the price moves too quickly or not. Maybe after halving (and possibly correcting, it it changed too much), price will stabilize some more towards its next 4 year march. Even if it might repeat some previous pattern, notice that the fluctuations gradually are less and less, this is the natural price maturing. It ill be even more clear after another decade.*

(*) Assuming your fiat doesn't collapse.

One of the things that people play with is the number of addresses that contain some BTC, but this does not mean that they are addresses that are specific to the individual user. Every user who is buying/selling, participates in signature campaigns, bounties or any other activity which requires a valid BTC address probably owns hundreds of addresses.

This is not evidence that BTC is going mainstream, much less any indicator of new ATH. We have people who think that the number of addresses should be some benchmark for the price (Tom Lee and his stupidity), but it has nothing to do with it.

If you want to know "when next ATH", just look at Bitcoin history charts.

I wonder what the number would look like if we removed all the addresses belonging to the same wallet, and also all addresses that are less than 10k satoshi (1 dollar).

I mean, even having 50 cents in bitcoin is nice but the dust would probably be expensive to count them as serious holders.

Then again, a lot of people "own" bitcoin but not their own private keys so maybe it needs to correlate wallet and multi owners on 1 wallet?

what you can gather from the 'bitcoin richlist' is the ratio of value stored in addresses of =>100btc vs adresses of <=100btc

that way you can kind of get an idea of how much is in exchange coldwallets vs individual users

the more in an exchange in a short period=possible sell off impending(over supply=less demand)
the more users hoard in a short period=trading drama over possible rise impending(less supply=more demand from fiat users)

ofcourse this is not science as people can deposit into exchanges and just use them as a bank custodian for month never actually trading. so not able to use as a hour-day predictor.. but is useful in a more broader scope and used along with other indicators can help establish the emotions of broad userbase

It’s a good sign that more and more people are now willing to explore about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as alternatives to banks.

Even though that the dominance of Bitcoin has decreased recently (https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-dominance-rate-decrease-anticipated-by-analyst/?utm_campaign=amba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bitcointalk&utm_content=jc), it doesn’t stop them from creating more Bitcoin wallets and initiate more transactions as they want without borders.

It also means that when more Bitcoin wallets are created, people are starting to use it more often in sending and receiving money than bank accounts (which we do not control our funds). It also means that Bitcoin and other digital currencies will soar within the next decade (https://beincrypto.com/digital-currencies-to-soar-in-coming-decade-predicts-deutsche-bank/?utm_campaign=amba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bitcointalk&utm_content=jc) that will make way for the “cashless era” to be almost in full effect.

However, it may not really impact the price at all unless an “unknown” whale or big investor or institution have bagged some in exchanges rather than in OTCs.

No, it doesn't prove that bitcoin is going mainstream! Why?

The answer is already given by you - unique addresses doesn't necessarily mean unique number of people! And it certainly doesn't push for new ATH in price. With the increasing number of hacking incidents, it is always advisable to keep our bitcoins in different wallets and always create a new address while receiving payment from anyone! That's very basic security method we can follow to safeguard our assets!

However, increasing number of unique bitcoin addresses definitely means growth and adoption to some certain extent! Hopefully 2020 will bring cheers to our life when it reaches a new ATH!

It is evident that with more time there will be more users in the market and people will be storing their coins in different addresses and as you said these unique addresses does not necessarily mean that these are unique individuals holding the coins and many people hold their coins in different address for privacy reasons and the main thing you have to identify is the number of transactions per day and we are not seeing much different in that.

This is indeed a good thing for the adoption of crypto around the world. Most of the wallets might come from the third world countries that has difficulty earning and saving money. Bitcoin might change the future of many of such enthusiastic users. A single user would not mostly create a multiple wallet with small balance as most of the coins might get lost on transferring.

Although bitcoin is being more widely accepted, I think it is unrelated to the increasing number of BTC wallet addresses. Most wallet addresses contain a negligible amount of BTC, BTC is not evenly distributed but only concentrated in a few wallets proving it is still a speculative tool.

There's no correlation between them and the bitcoin price, and bitcoin adoption. Every user has made thousands of addresses


You're reading too much fantasy stories. Bitcoin cracking with quantum is not even possible as of now even the one google built as of todate.

This does not testify to the incredible adoption of Bitcoin, however, such statistics say that the network is gradually growing. Addresses do not have to be owned by individual users that is why i doubt.

I think an application created if there are users, over time there will be many users. The wallet addresses are created a lot but the majority are used only once, after which all bitcoin wallets do not work. If you want to view the blockchain of any crypto, you need to look at the transactions in each block and see the number of transactions they have. Keep in mind that Bitcoin and Ethereum reached a high point in late 2017 because there were many transactions that blocked their blockchain.

Increase in bitcoin addresses might not mean increased users, it could just be the same people creating on different wallet provider. No doubt more persons are increasing interested in bitcoin but some express caution on its volatility. I daily get people who wants to know what bitcoin is but think it's a quick rich scheme!

Definitely not. ATH in # of Bitcoin addresses signifies a lot but as we already know. This is not the only factor that will cause price growth. Other factors including : Supply, Demand, Market conditions, governance and regulations, mining costs and the market share. There are more factors though but these are the decisive ones. Bitcoin's price would reach a new all time high when most, if not all of the factors correlates with one another. And from the look of things, I believe we're on path for another mega run to reach ATH. That said, I'd still like to note that Bitcoin addresses ATH is an important metrics as it shows the network coverage and reach. More increase in # of address with at >0 BTC == more users == more adoption.

yes, that increase in number of addresses with a balance does show increase in adoption and i think it is the closest estimate we can have to measure adoption but it is still not without flaws. for example historically bitcoin has had a lot of spam attacks, many of which have been of the fan out type (that is when they create lots of UTXOs to increase the burden on nodes) which involves usage of a lot of different addresses, addresses that will be left with some left over balance eventually.
but considering the fact that the spams haven't been happening severely over the past year, we can attribute most of the current increase to legit adoption instead.

This is probably because people are using a different address for every transaction, which is a smart thing to do.

28 million is a lot but it can still double or triple in number very soon. There are over 7 billion people on planet Earth and only 21 million BTC ever to be mined.

I think the true value in bitcoin is educating others how they can obtain some for themselves and what they can use it for (aside from a store of value and long term investment asset). We need to create more online stores and apps which accept Bitcoin as a currency. Many web hosting platforms already accept Bitcoin as payment and so I think we still have a lot more room to grow before Bitcoin is used by everybody including your grandma.

I keep track of those changes in my topic:
Less than 0.3% of the world population owns more than 1$ worth of BTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5184268.msg52442765#msg52442765)

Just to make it clear, the amazing growth to 28.3 million addresses with a balance is just a slight growth from 27335350 on October 1st, or 4% in two months. And most of it, like 80% comes from addresses with a balance of less than 1$.


No, it can't.
Even if we assume that all the spare capacity we have in the network right now to be used only by batching transactions to new owners and new addresses we will have less than 100k a day, so we will need 280 days to double that number and 560 to triple it.
No matter how you try you can't overcome math!

Increase in the number of bitcoin addresses doesn't necessarily mean in an overall increase in the price of bitcoin as you said it just means that the network is growing. But surely it can eventually lead to an increase in price of bitcoin if the underlying issues such as high transaction fees can be solved.

I personally use ethereum to transfer funds from one place to another just because of the high fees occurring in transferring bitcoins. If problems like these are solved then bitcoin user adaption will grow just like old days when bitcoin controlled more than 70% of the network.

I think he has a point when he says it ofcourse who will not get hype when tech giant, suddenly get interested on blockchain
this means that there are more tech companies who will follow because they don't it, to get a chunk of the gold lying on those
blockchains, ofcourse as we know they were interested to profit but i think , they will also help us , use this blockhains in the
future but ofcourse with a price, but then its nice to here this news