Bitcoin Forum

How many people are using bitcoin wallets?

I think that the most honest answer is: Nobody knows.

- Since one can make a wallet anonymously,
- Since one wallet can have any number of addresses,
- Since one can have wallet without ever putting money on it,
- Since one can have as many wallets as he wants,

I would not count on the accuracy of any numbers (guesses/estimations) people would give.


You can easily find out how many addresses have funds.
One can find out how many addresses ever had coins on them.
But this is not the number of people.

Even a single HD wallet can have as many as possible addresses, while two or more wallets can belong to a single person. Even how about custodial exchanges, an exchange can have few wallets, but having as many addresses given to their customers. How about people that are using custodial wallets too. All these make it to be unrealistic. Even to know the total number of people that are making use of noncustododial wallets is unrealistic as well, as seen in point one.

About 39 million (http://addresses.loyce.club/total_number_of_funded_addresses.txt).

16 months ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5265993.msg54912292#msg54912292), almost 700 million.
Update: currently (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5265993.msg58655572#msg58655572), this number went up to over 900 million unique addresses.

My guess: several million people own and use at least one Bitcoin wallet. This is much less than the estimates of hundreds of millions of Bitcoin users I've seen, so my assumption is most of them keep "their" Bitcoin on exchanges.

Are offline wallets safe?

Yes.

I do not know how custodial wallets are designed, the design may differ from one another. But also most of them or all of them are using just one, two or few wallets to generate addresses for users. It will also contribute.

This is in contrast to this thread that you created. But yes. It depends on you also, you have to still be careful of offline attackers like strangers and enemies that people are thinking are friends, never trust anyone and keep your seed phrase or private key in a place not vulnerable to damages or attacks.

Offline wallets are:
Paper wallet
Hardware wallets
Wallet on airgapped devices (like Electrum cold storage)

Also you will still have to be careful of clipboard malware, best to generally stay away from malware. Clipboard malware can still be capable of changing recipient's address to a hackers address when making transaction. The reason it is good to check and recheck the address you are sending coin to.

But unlike online wallets, your seed phrase and keys will remain offline, making it impossible for online attack to be able to reveal the seed phrase and keys to online attackers.

If a wallet was created by a good software (without errors, without in-built vulnerabilities like making the addresses by a rule the programmer can also easily obtain the private keys for those wallets) and, generated offline and that device/private key will never go online, then yes, they're safe.

However:
* different unrelated questions should go to different topics, else mix-up between answers can happen
* you should ask in more words - more clearly - your questions, else you may get very generic answers you may not find really useful

I've created several wallets on Blockchain.info (nowadays .com) too, but that doesn't mean I use them. So I guess they include dormant accounts, multiple accounts per user, and accounts containing only altcoins.
Saying they have 80 million unique wallets is like saying Bitcointalk has 3.4 million unique users. Lol.

It is wrong to call hardware wallets "offline wallets", especially if we associate it with their usual use, and for that we need the Internet - whether it's outgoing transactions, installing a coin app, or firmware update. It is true that seed is generated offline on the device and that there is currently no publicly known way to remotely hack such devices - which does not mean that one day it will not become a reality.

Every time you connect your HW to a computer or smartphone that is online, there is a possibility that something bad could happen, and I don't just mean clipboard malware.

There were 67M+ users in february of 2021.
In this month there is too many people using bitcoin wallet. Because they know how to survive in future, they are preparing for future.

1 address isn't equivalent to 1 wallet, so it's a very tough question to answer honestly and I don't think anyone can give you an accurate guess as to how many are there. One person can use many wallets, and many people can share the same wallet (exchanges), so getting that figure is almost impossible, and there are tons of different factors to weigh in before you arrive with 1 wallet.

You can, however, check how many addresses have something in them, and how many address had some balance before they were emptied.

First of all, how about this pinned post that I quoted this below content:


Offline wallets are also called cold wallets because their seed phrase and keys are not generated online and not revealed online which makes it more safe and secure to online wallets. There are many clipboard malware we have heard of before that stole coins while the recipient address was changed to a hacker's address while sending on a hardware wallet. Also we have heard of some other vulnerabilities before, but yet never heard of a malware that reveal the seed phrase or keys of a reputed hardware wallet. But if there is any, you can point it out which will make me to be wrong about this.

Also hardwares are getting modified, it is now very possible some hardware wallet can generate keys and addresses without even connecting it to a device like computer or phone. But the fact still remain that the seed phrase and the keys on hardware wallets are generated offline, stay offline if not imported on online wallet. The reason they are called cold wallets, cold wallets are offline wallets.

This cant be known honestly!

We do have online and offline wallets that could be divided whether its a hardware wallet or custodial wallets
like exchange platforms and there are wallets like non custodial ones like Electrum and considering that
someone could create his other new wallet then no one could able to trace it up if its owned by a similar person.

So why would be asking on how many? For what benefit? Statistics?

The fact that something does not exist at the moment or that we have not heard of it does not mean that there is no potential danger - it is not difficult to conclude that hackers around the world are trying to achieve something in this direction, given the value stored on millions of such devices sold from 2014 to date.


I have already written that I do not dispute the generation of seed that only happens on the device offline, but that you connect the same device to the Internet to use your wallets, which leaves the possibility of remote attack at any time in the future. The term cold wallet or cold storage should only be used for a properly made airgapped wallet - everything else confuses users who think they are absolutely untouchable if they use hardware wallets.

A few years ago, no one thought it would be possible to extract a seed from any Trezor HW in 5 minutes with equipment worth $100 (of course with physical access to the device) if such a device is not protected by extra security measures.

The same thing came in my mind when I read OP. My thoughts on this are that its a different financial system as compared to centralized banks so there is no trace of how many are in BTC pool. Also there is no way we can find how many are using the wallets. Anonymity is one of the key aspect of BTC so you cant trace people here.

Honestly Op These are the hardest question I'll encounter. And I think that this question remains unanswered questions until someone discovers a site that can count all the wallet addresses of Bitcoins, ???[lol] but what they stated above even 1 person can handle many wallets so we can not assure the exact number of people using bitcoin wallets,
Even a hacker cannot predict what is the exact number but some people pointed out that amount but they not sure if they are right or wrong.

[Edited] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5265993.0 I forgot this thread by our forum mate LoyceV. OP you check this.

Yes, but it depends on what kind of wallet it is, there are some shady wallets available which claims that they are the best but they simply steal your money so choose your wallet wisely. One person can hold million wallets so its not really possible to find how many people are using ir having Bitcoin wallets and even if we find the answer for this question its really useless.

Why you are counting wallet users when it's can't be counted.Because many users using Hardware wallets too.But we can say who has Bitcoin,he must using Wallets.

Why would you want to know? Are you thinking of getting a bitcoin wallet? Or are you trying to weigh if Bitcoin wallet is more  suitable for you than saving your Bitcoin on an exchange, them you would have just asked, to be honest I think this question isn't important for you, you don't have any use knowing how many people use Bitcoin wallet, expect you have other untold reasons

Hardware wallet is just also part of the hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, you can just generalize the whole HD wallets in which a single seed phrase can generate as many as possible keys and addresses which can belong to a single person that generated the seed phrase.

I don't think that their is a statistics analysis that have the data base of the totality or an aggregates of people using a valuable crypto wallet and no valuable crypto wallet, because the census will be difficult to get it's result, because at this point some people have died and Left their wallet, and some people too created a wallet that is not functonal likewise banking system kind of account opening, this scenario of bank will help to understand more better, because getting the round figure of function able Bank across the continent will be rigid to be compile.

So from my perspective their is no tool's i can mention that have the valuable statistics of wallets, except a research will be carry on any moment from now.

Yeah, there are no tools that can give accurate statistics number of wallets because every single wallet can generate Bitcoin addresses, it's all about predictions and assumptions that don't give accuracy of numbers.  And plus we have different kinds of wallets that can't measure their statistic of usages just like offline wallets.

But AFAIK, blockchain wallets have gained more popularity since 2015 until now, and here are the statistic reports.
Number of Blockchain Wallet Users 2021/2022: Breakdowns, Timelines, and Predictions (https://financesonline.com/number-of-blockchain-wallet-users/).

If there's a software to track it all. I'm sure it's accuracy would always fall below passing average % it's gonna be hard to monitor how many users there are in the game. But there were people that probably tracking this kind of statistic as well. Curious why do you want to know?

Actually blockchain.com lost its popularity early on due to a lot of issues including bugs that led to users losing their funds. They tried to take back parts of what they've lost with different techniques like changing their design, adding altcoins, adding purchase option, etc and were somewhat successful but they remain vastly unpopular still.
The only reason why the number of users grew is because the number of bitcoins has been growing in total and a small percentage is going to this terrible service.

There's no centralized list/database to get such data apparently. So your question cannot be answered, you will just hear speculations that is nowhere to become truth.

No one that has the basic knowledge of how bitcoin wallet works that will want to make research about what can never be attained. Anyone that says his research is accurate about the total bitcoin wallet is definitely wrong. This area of wallet is not an area that can be researched.

This is a very common wallet is my country (or to be accurate let me use 'in my area'). It is commonly used by novice or newbies while the novice is telling his friend that is also novice to also use blockchain.com wallet even when only legacy type of address was only supported. These people in my area do not even know if bitcoin addresses are of different types and neither have they heard of any hack before maybe. I checked google play store, the wallet has 10+ million download just like others common ones like the custodial Coinbase and the likes.

That will be a secret for those who use bitcoin wallets and I do not think that all of them will tell to other people like "Hey, I use bitcoin wallets every time, every minute to see my bitcoin at that wallet". No, that is not like that. But at least, those people will use their bitcoin wallets, maybe once a day or week or month. People are free to keep their secret and we do not know how many of those use bitcoin wallets because there are no valid data about who is the owner of that wallets.

Providing an accurate count is next to impossible as there are several million people who use the bitcoin wallet. Also, a single user can have multiple wallets, depending upon their requirements. Also mostly people exchanges their wallets, also many people use hardware wallets. So the accurate count cannot be provided.

No, saying that his questions can't be answered is wrong ideology, because any questions deserve a cogent answer and reason, because many people has render a tangible opinion, like as i said before, that we don't have a specific TDatabase that carries on the information, it's also a solution to resolve the problem