Bitcoin Forum

My kid decided she was going to do a paper for school on bitcoin since i talk about it so much, then tonight over dinner she asks me a question i had no definitive answer to.

How many bitcoin addresses currently hold bitcoin in them? more than a 0 balance.

After a few hours searching the WWW i have found nothing more than a few charts that show "addresses used by day"  and 10,000 pages telling me how many bitcoins have already been mined which i already know.

Is there any way to retrieve that data from the bitcoin client, or any website that accurately has that data? i need to find something that she can use to cite her source with. 

Any help would be appreciated.

Use this tool:

https://github.com/znort987/blockparser

Hey thanks, but i dont have a single Ubuntu machine in the house. Looks like it would have been a great solution if it were not Linux dependent. I appreciate the effort none the less.

num changes ever second

new transactions always created

better to choose block

then ask

how many bitcoin addresses are associated with one or more unspent outputs as of block X?

if u want by day then this link seem good:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-many-people-actually-own-bitcoin-2014-3?IR=T&

There's a more updated thread on bct but I can't find it right now.  According to this article from March, around 25 million addresses have been used and 2.5 million have a balance in them.

CP1, Thank you very much, that is exactly what i was searching for all day. You have been a great help !!!!!

This is also very interesting:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=441336.msg7921460#msg7921460

maybe some big wallet no one can open it . a lot of people last will not care again for over a years.
and not remember that.

alot of them leaeve their wallet and forget about them .
better fill in paper .

Google bitcoin rich list.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2828/how-many-bitcoin-addresses-are-have-been-carrying-a-balance, "As of block 165643 [2012-02-06 16:30:37]", 2411568 addresses had 0 value. The percentage of used addresses had been dropping from the genesis block to then (~20% at that time; 2.4 million had 0 out of ~3 million total), and I'd guess it's gone down a bit more since then.

Taking the total number of addresses from http://webbtc.com/stats, I'd guess that the number of non-zero addresses is currently around 10-20%, so 4.3 to 8.6 million 7.4% (being a little lower than 7.6%, see below), so 3.2 million active.

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address?atblock=310000 says that 96.14% of addresses have 0-0.001, but unfortunately they don't break "0" into its own category.

Edit: That's the answer to this thread, as of 311412 (2014-07-19 00:15:19), 3141660 non-zero and 38374288 zero-balance addresses (~7.6% active).

I just wanted to say thank you to all of you so far, as info keeps piling in i keep on the hunt and it seems no source has even remotely the same answer in the same time frame. i would expect variation as bitcoins are always moving from address to address, but differences of over a few million within a few days just does not seem to add up.

I know bitcoind uses the rpc, is there any way to query the bitcoind client to spit out a current number of addresses in use without using linux? Any cool blockchain querying windows applications?

Windows? Didn't that die yet? ;)

You can get a Fermi estimate using bitcoind.
RPC command 'gettxoutsetinfo' reports 12.6 million transaction outputs.
That's an upper bound. Not all outputs are pay to pubkey hash, and some people practice address reuse.

Are there any good estimates of outputs that have no pubkey hash?

Via RPC? Not that I know of.
A blockchain parser can do tons of fun analysis, but that probably wasn't what you were looking for.

From http://webbtc.com/stats, about 99.10% of outputs are to a pubkey hash. Another 0.77% are to pubkeys. About 0.13% are others: multisigs, P2SH, OP_RETURN, and non-standard unknown scripts.

For the sake of a rough/Fermi estimate: all outputs are pubkey hash.

I still use XP. Really. :)