Bitcoin Forum

There was a survey conducted by Huobi which was also reported by Cointelegraph (https://cointelegraph.com/news/survey-almost-half-of-crypto-traders-are-long-term-investors).

No. of respondents:	491
Age range:	mostly from 26 to 50
Investment experience:	Most with less than 3 years

So it appears that most of the respondents are relatively new to crypto investments and they weren't around during the 2017 bullrun. I guess they can be considered lucky. They might have been rekt too like most newbies then had they bought btc when it was pumping.

An interesting result is that 45% of the respondents have one year or longer timeline for their investment. To me, this indicates that they are preparing for the much anticipated bull run next year based on btc's 4-year cycle or the pattern that btc tends to pump 1 year after halving.

Another 12.5% said they are willing to wait four years or more for their ROI. These are either serious hodlers who sees potential in bitcoin or they just want to try and see if they can profit or not.

The no. of respondents might be small and do not really represent the new breed of btc investors but it's still a good sign that they do not see this as a pump and dump/get rich quick/ponzi scheme.

What do you make of this survey? Are we seeing a change on how newcomers view bitcoin investment?

Less than 500 people who are all readers of Cointelegraph is not a representative selection of respondents, so the poll results are telling us nothing that can be generalized to make conclusions about the crypto investors' community as such. These respondents happened not to be around in 2017, but many people were, and many weren't newbies and did not buy Bitcoin during ATH (I didn't, for instance, but I also did not sell and it wasn't the best decision). As for willing to wait for profits for years, it's just a typical hodler position, so I don't see what makes them a new breed at all.

It honestly doesn't improve my confidence for even the slightest.

Various people can claim that they will be holding their bitcoin for whatever amount of years and such, but then when the price drops enough to the point that it scared their asses off? They dump, saying that bitcoin is dead, or to "buy back lower".

I think it's better to look at how the bitcoin "bulls" acted in the last crash after the bull run, than listen to what they say.

Although, just like OP mentioned, 500 people is not a good representation of how the general users of bitcoin sees it, it is noteworthy to know that there is now a change in the way people see bitcoin now.
It's seems as though missing out on the 2017 bull run is a good thing as these set of people that miss the 2017 bull run now see potential in bitcoin and are not holding just for the anticipated pump in price.
I think people are beginning to see that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme or a get rich quick stuff. They are beginning to see the true reason bitcoin was made in the first place

See the thing is people are now tired of the banking system and day by day we are getting bad news and after this pandemic am sure that the situation is bound to improve in terms of the investments in Bitcoins.
For sure there will be more people willing to hold their bitcoins for a much longer time.
What I get from the OP's current post is that the sampling size is really small and therefore we need a larger sampling size so that we can reduce the standard deviation down to minimal to have a good stand point right here .
We cannot find anything with a small sampling size and at the same time having a larger sampling size would need a lot of information and not many people are willing to give a survey without any benefits.
But I do love the positive posts for sure. I believe we are in a better position for sure compared to few years back.

Also the age range 26-50 is kind of small we have people who are young and are really really positive about all this.

I agree the results are not that impressive and they're not telling us much specially when the sample size in general terms is that small and thus can't ads much weight to  the findings. What we see is that there are more investors that have joined crypto but given the space of about 3 years that was to be expected.

I saw data from exchanges that showed the number of speculators is steadily falling since 2018 and the number of holders increasing. This is good and bad at the same time. Good because more people believe in Bitcoin. Bad because it reduces the supply available on exchanges makindg it easier to manipulate the price.


They were looking at traders and people below 20 rarely have enough money or aren't experienced enough to invest serious money.

Most of them won't resist throughout the years due to emotional rollercoasters. When you see a price dump similar to what we had in the beginning of the pandemic, it'd hard to take that drop in without considering to sell or even selling in rush and fear. The high percentage of longer term hodlers doesn't show much. I would've held for more than an year as well if I thought I could've had a profit but ended up being on a loss. We've only recently hit the extremely low percentage of addresses that are on a loss. Under 3 yrs of experience next to long term hodling equals in my mind a high number of people who've invested during bull runs and are still waiting to earn a profit.

Agreed, this is why most of the social sciences are complete junk, questions about what people would do in an scenario that is brought up are useless since people will have the tendency to think the best of them and that they will execute actions that are reasonable and timely, in the case of a crash I am sure most of those that were interviewed will panic and sell their coins despite their plans of holding their coins for years and I am sure that if we interviewed them at that time they will give the excuse they had no other option but to sell their coins due to the circumstances they were in.

It’s easy to say that I will be holding for the next 4 years to an interview even if deep down, I’d be selling my coins if my profits doubled in a heartbeat. These people right here are trading for a profit, and the moment the right price hits the ticker they’d be letting go of those precious coins in the market. These aren’t new-breed investors but rather more of the same, with unconfirmed tolerance to price volatility and whatnot. You may call them the ‘shaky hands’ given their stay on this wildly-volatile market since we all know that newbies tend to get controlled by their emotions when investing, even if they say that they’ll hold no matter what in a survey.

The survey is fine and you can have a certain assumption on what the situation would be. We are living in a world when the pre elections polls are opposite to what the real results are, so if there is a certain selection from a small group of people and if they tell that they are willing to hold for the long term, it is good for the moment. Trading is all about making the maximum profit, be it short time or long term investor and no can can predict what the exact market would be and hence having a flexible mind set according to the market situation would be the best bet.

Nothing has change though in my opinion, what we are seeing is just a pattern. After a bullrun or even during a bullrun there will always be fresh blood going to pump the market, getting rekt, obviously exited and never comeback. But there will always be some groups that are going to replace them, just like what we are seeing today. As for the age of the new investors, doesn't mean anything as well. As long as these investors know the risk involved, whether was age, race, color, ethnicity or social standing, there will always be investors coming along to the ecosystem.

I appreciate the effort that they've done for this survey but it doesn't really mean that they represent most of the new investors. But let's look into it at the more positive side. These participants are doing great if they're still new to this space.

If they have a longer timeline, they know what's bitcoin and the timeline that they have set and allocating for their investment to grow. It's true that if they've invested earlier or joined the FOMO during the bull-run, they might not be one of those participants and just quit investing in bitcoin.

This is true. I can say that "Hey I'm holding Bitcoin for around 1-2 years so that I can get some profits" but whenever the price of Bitcoin goes down, I will panic and therefore sell my Bitcoins and what they said in the survey isn't true at all.

This is what is happening and will happen in the future especially with these new Bitcoin investors. Some of them doesn't know how to control their emotions and some of them are just buying it for the sake of profit but in reality, they can't take the volatility of it and when Bitcoin drops they will panic and will sell the Bitcoins they are holding.

Yes, there is probably a change. With the price of Bitcoin maintaining a 5-digit figure, they must have realized that it now takes a longer term to be able to acquire a nice ROI. Unless they were able to buy during those times when Bitcoin was falling hard at around $3,000- $5,000, you wouldn't get a x3- x5 ROI easily.

But I guess the get-rich-quick perception of Bitcoin is still there. It's just that the quick in there is not anymore in terms of months but a few years. That is still relatively quick considering that the new target is probably set at $30,000 or more. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that surveys like this are totally useless. They only can be effective when wanting to gain data on what people think, but not necessarily what people would do especially in certain situations like this because it doesn't factor in emotions like fear.

I believe on what they say "History repeats itself".
Even these "new breed" of bitcoin investors are didn't experience what we experienced on bull run and a huge dump around year 2017 - 2018. I still believe it will happen again in the future, maybe with a twist or have difference with before.

In recent days there are a lot of people who are investing in Bitcoin and these are actually mostly young people, I can see that clearly here in my community. About five years ago or more, there were very few people here who knew about Bitcoin, but today I notice a large number of young people preparing to invest in Bitcoin.

Even those old timer has this kind of belief that the 4 years cycle from halving to another halving will bring them Profit.
 These 45% is much higher but of course they are just a piece of the whole market representative.
These are the true HODLERs and not just buying for faster income.
We can feel that the way market is responding now ,though i believe that this is about the pandemic but reading this Surveys result ,
i think there are many supporter now that is serious than those who wanted for quick buck.

Yup that is right.

I am waiting for that word too. I am sure that we will see another bull run this year or next year. I don't mind waiting for that time to comes. All people now are in their position to sell their coins at a high price, but once again, we can't do that if the bull run does not come. But people believe that the bull run will comes, no matter if they need to wait for more.

I think for people who invest in bitcoin since 2017 learned much about how bitcoin moves, and they still accumulating more bitcoin while the price is at a low price. The newcomers need to know more about bitcoin if they want to invest in bitcoin because we see many people invest in bitcoin because of reading the news from the website or social media. That will be too risky for them if they don't know anything about bitcoin and just invest in bitcoin without knowing about bitcoin.

Considering how much bitcoin was raging in 2017, I'm not surprised seeing new people popping up to invest in it, who in turn brought even more people with them.

It is the expected statistics. Those who have been in the topic for a long time know that the next year will be especially successful for bitcoin owners because of the cycle that repeats every 4 years. This is no longer a secret. Statistics rather only confirm this fact and show that everything is moving in the right direction.

When an asset matures it moves from speculative volatile form to more stable investment, attracting people looking for a store of value with some profit on top. Bitcoin is old enough to become a real store of value after 10 years of constant presence on the market. I believe that this poll, although small, might be pointing out to a real situation on the market.

10 years of existence is long enough that people will still be in doubt about Bitcoin. But I was not only convinced that these breed of investors are mostly can even hold their hand not to sell their Bitcoins once the market is in the struggle because I was then falling into that scenario, I'd sell it with no regrets.

But bitcoin is still really speculative and volatile in it's current state though. A lot of bitcoiners(including me) just hold bitcoin because we're betting that it will be a stable hedge sometime in the future.

i don't think the number and the scale or even the source is sufficient enough to make any decent conclusions. but logically it makes sense that many of the new investors at this point are not coming in based on hype and blindness which means they do some research and the history and the future potential of bitcoin clearly tells them that the long term holding and the current accumulation while they can is going to be the best approach.

i'm sure that if this survey were performed in 2015-2016 we would have seen very similar results and it will be the same in 2023 which would probably fall after the next bubble during the accumulation phase of next rally.

This is very positive, given that new investors are coming to the crypto world, we have the clearest example that is the son of Peter Schiff, whose father is totally against Bitcoin and he is Pro Gold, just remember the controversial tweet:

https://i.imgur.com/Glp3p0L.png
Source: https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1303009420713111553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw (https://twitter.com/PeterSchiff/status/1303009420713111553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

This is only the beginning of the many investors to come, the more time passes, the Bitcoin market will grow much more.

I hope the people who claim to hold their Bitcoin and not panic selling are honest with their statement. Because there are too many "investors" who claim the same thing but do the opposite right away when there is a drop in price.

I'm into the world way back from 2016 to 2017 and on that, I don't have too much knowledge into the world of investment on bitcoin instead I'm having a good time some reading stuffs related to the bitcoin and how do they make an investment.

Base on my experience there is nothing change, I'm still the one who makes an investment on the bitcoin when the market price of the coin is low and sell it when goes high also the same thing I encourage other people too usually my friends because they have some extra money and why not makes an investment and don't afraid to put on bitcoin.

They're Huobi users and maybe not Cointelegraph readers.

Maybe you missed the point. Let me expound more on that.

• Many 2017 newbie investors most likely bought bitcoin thinking they are going to get rich. I even read some stories about selling properties and taking out loans because they thought the pump will continue and they're going to earn a lot of money. The FOMO is too strong during those times. They might have been enticed by xx% pumps in a matter of week/s
• 2020 investors, based on the survey, seems more mature and more knowledgeable. They see bitcoin as real long term investment (at least one year), Thus, "new breed"

I agree that what you say is different from what you do when you are really in that situation. I've also experienced trying to hodl while the price is dumping but it didn't last. I had to fight my "hodler's ego" and it turned out it's the right decision.

About the bulls' actions, I doubt anyone would spill their strategy in public but I'd be interested to read that as well.

I failed to include the "bitcoin is a bubble" in the OP. It's one of the most used attacks around 2018. The bounce back is probably one reason why we see the change in mentality towards bitcoin. If it was able to survive a ~90% crash, it can probably survive anything.

It could be a pattern/cycle as well but I wouldn't underestimate the exposure bitcoin had since 2017. I believe that was the time it really caught the attention of mainstream media, traditional investors, and financial institutions. It's highly probably that many of the spectators got curious and started researching.

I agree that there will always be fresh blood to be rekt though, especially when btc pumps to $20K or higher, but perhaps we'll see more prepared new investors when that time comes.

Is this really different from the past? I mean, Bitcoin had only thousands of investors in the beginning, and now it has millions, so of course most of the current investors have only a few years of experience. And since Bitcoin is very techy, of course most investors will be in 25-50 years old. Not younger, because young people have no money to be investors, not older because older people would have hard time understanding Bitcoin.

I'd broaden that number from like 17-50.

Agree on the latter, but as far as I know people can buy like $10 of bitcoin on famously used platforms like Coinbase and Cash App. You don't need a thousand dollars to be called an "investor".

Agreed. I think that those people who came and engaged with Bitcoin in during this time are those people who are open to embrace any opportunities. And these people are mostly the millennial. And I also agree that regardless of the amount, an investor is still an investor.

Due to the pandemic a lot of people are looking for a part time job or something that they can use to earn money and I think this is a great opportunity for us to mass promote the crypto world in order for us to gain more investors. For sure more people will enter the crypto world if we all the members here will promote the campaign.

I don't consider them lucky but they could be lucky if they did experience the 2017 bull run and if they are real investors thier views and goals won't change because of it . 
this is what I'm going to say  too . 491 is not even 1 percent of the total bitcoin population but this numbers are pretty solid  . With the number of years these people can spend on here , they can grow consistently if more people find that they are one of these groups compare to the most number of btc investors that are not in a group .

Who would bother buying $10 worth of Bitcoin, even in the most optimistic scenario you'll just get $500, but more realistically, you'll see $30-50 if you sell at the next top. You always need some decent starting capital to start investing, the share of these microinvestors is probably negligible compared to the rest. This isn't the early days anymore where you could have put a few dollars in and they would become hundreds of thousands of dollars years later.

Who would bother? A lot of people. Both who are actually passionate, and the ones that just simply FOMO'd.

Yea but the point here is not about how much money you need to become a sort of "decent" or "effective" investor, it's that there are actually young people that buy bitcoin; that could potentially lead up to more bitcoin being bought by them once they actually have more money after growing up and getting jobs.

The majority of crypto investors are still relatively new in our days. Only few of them are here from 2015

I think young investors emerge more and they enter new fields, including the venture sector.
Where I live, young people tend to over-enjoy business. They choose their businesses, act as real estate agents, invest in the forex market, invest in cryptocurrencies, and Ponzi projects.
I feel sad because of that, they should go to school fully and go to work before investing. Because the ancients said "he that knows nothing doubts nothing", so the children are too young and do not know what they are entangled with.
Invest well but should research carefully before acting. They move away from reality and think that investing will bring wealth, they need a job rather than just like investing.

I am not surprised that young people pay attention to crypto. The age group 25-30 is the age when they have finished college and go to work. They have more time to research anything new on the internet. They look to cryptocurrencies because they have free time and for the attractive profits from this market.

The survey results of 491 respondents cannot be used as a benchmark to conclude something, too few to conclude that there is
a new breed of Bitcoin investors. Based on my observations there is nothing new about the types of investors that exist today.
All investors are the same holding popular coins, and will sell after they reach the sell target. Investors are also used to using
the stop-loss feature, and investors will buy coins that are trending, as now there is a trend for DeFi projects. So many investors
who invest in DeFi projects, So my conclusion is that there are no new breed of Bitcoin investors.

Do you really do this? I thought long time forum members would be a little more confident with their investments.

I stopped panicking years ago and there aren't many things that could force me to sell. A medical condition of mine or one of my family members could be one of these things but price volatility definitely not.

It's probably safe to assume that LogitechMouse was referring to bitcoin holders in general, not Bitcointalk forum members. There are other bitcoiners outside Bitcointalk, you know. :P

I agree. Many people even newbies can claim that they will be willing and have a tough mind and soul to remain still into holding into their Bitcoin investments up until the very end of time but those were just boastful and confident claims with no pure proven results because once they see that the market is facing a struggle they cannot get into their butt hurt and they are tend to pull out their investments to try to save their money from the suffering. Actions literally speaks louder than words. Instead of claiming, better just do it and show it on how tough you really are for newbies haven't seen the critical points that can possible to happen unlike the long time investors who have already been here since then.

One thing's for sure: it's pretty easy to think and claim that you'll be holding unto your bitcoin for years and years if the price is continuously rising(à la 2017 bull run). When the market does the opposite on the other hand..

There is no complicated rule when someone tries to invest in bitcoin. They only need to spend money and make a wallet to save their bitcoin. Comparing to some institutional investment place meaning there is a party who manages it bitcoin is easier than them, so I'm not weird when bitcoin has been accepted by most countries there will be many new investors who come.

Maybe it's regardless of whether they know the ins and outs of bitcoin or not or maybe they just rely on luck because there is a lot of interesting information about investing in bitcoin. But perhaps when they get lost they will find a way to redeem the lose that has spent because of the carelessness they had made themselves.

It's definitely not complicated if you're just going to buy bitcoin through services such as Coinbase and Cash App and just leave the coins in custody. On the other hand, if you actually want to have self-custody over your coins and at the same time not exposing your identity/privacy, it's definitely complicated.

New generation people invest on cryptos after watching youtube video or reading an article with the hope of making good returns in a year but investments won't generate money in that way, even 4 years is quite low to make huge profits probably they should be ready to hold their coins for the next 10 years. :D

Maybe not,,, but the results of many many such surveys, with different demographics and at different aspects of researcher objectives can together mean something.

I do not think there is a new breed of Bitcoin investors too,,, for sure the new speculative people in altcoins and Defi are a thing but Bitcoin holders and buyers are always the same,,, patient, quiet, have real jobs;)

I think hodlers are still the same only trying to diversify into the new hype, DeFi projects. As for investment in btc, there might not be much of new investors The survey might not have been objective, it has not be shown in btc price because we are yet to get to the last ATH.

The holders will always want to diversify assets and find other things that can help them to increase their wealth. They will use DeFi projects to make more money as the DeFi projects become a new trend in the crypto world. If they make a lot of money, they will leave the market and wait for a while to buy back another coin, which is down a lot. If the bitcoin price is at the downtrend, they will buy more bitcoin as the price will be low.

The survey (*) has some meaning to Huobi, but it does not mean that the results of the survey may be extrapolated elsewhere. Huobi claims to server 5M customers worldwide (on their LinkedIn page). The sample size (491 people) may seem statistically fit with say a 5% margin of error and a confidence interval of 95%, but there are things to consider which may affect the results noticeably:

- The survey is answered by Huobi customers (which may have an intrinsic bias per se vs other exchanges, and certainly from an objective point of view).

- The survey states that the respondents are "active users in emerging markets across Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America". That leaves out the habits for North America for example. What’s more, Statista claims that 41,8% of the exchange’s visitors are from China (https://www.statista.com/statistics/944257/share-of-huobi-visitors-by-country/). This could introduce a regional bias in the underlying data (which we cannot see).

- How the questions themselves are set (and the available set of answers), which we cannot see.

The information is valuable though to the Exchange itself, as it profiles to some extent some information on its own customer base (as I said, not necessarily extrapolable).

 (*) I could not find the original complete survey. It seems to have been released by means of conclusions in a press release (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cryptocurrencies-are-primary-investments-for-many-finds-new-huobi-survey-301134622.html)

Although the survey sample is small, it reveals positive results for Bitcoin. I am also interested that Bitcoin has a strong and growing community. I often do my own Twitter search and follow accounts of related personalities and the community is authentic. Despite the circumstances we are experiencing, we have taken Bitcoin to the best position with a good perspective towards the future.

This doesn't necessarily mean that 491 participants could constitute to the entire population of bitcoin and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Just like what DdmrDdmr said, they could have been affected by their personal interests and experience throughout using the huobi exchange. But exchanges also differs, some exchange have good trading volume, higher liquidity, and more factors that could affect the buying decision of a person. Surveys about bitcoin should be conducted more effectively by CMC, in which, prices are impacted based from API from different exchanges.

lucky for those who can survive up to 10 years but bad luck for those who can't... :D
sometimes many videos that don't match expectations circulate on YouTube, we have to be able to choose which one is the most suitable for us because not all coins can make new investors going rich.

spread the referral link here = banned

It is true that day by day a lot of people are leaning towards Bitcoin. There are many people who prefer to invest in Bitcoin rather than depositing their money in banks. The price of Bitcoin is rising every year and people are becoming more and more interested in investing here as they know about it. It is true that most of the people who come here are young generation.

Yeah I can agree, small respondents can make sense in survey, and it uncovers some part of bitcoin investments.

I believe that there will be place for bitcoin in the future, but we should not take this as pure reason to buy bitcoin, make some realization first if you really want or you just ride the tide with bitcoin coz you see it rising, ready yourself for it coz no one is really sure where bitcoin is heading. However I see a strong support for bitcoin, imagine sitting at top for a decade.