Bitcoin Forum

Hi, is there an estimation anywhere about how many real users bitcoin has?

just wallets but not users.

i would estimate 2-5 mio users worldwide?

Not sure but I guess I saw on some interview with an old man that they are estimated of 250k users , not that much right  :'(

About 20 of us, we have a few thousand sock puppets each....  ;)





Nah I'm just trolling the conspiracy theorists.

It's very hard to say, but I think probably 2 to max 3 million users.

Wallets don't say anything as there are services and companies who have hundreds of wallets with a balance.

A related question: where are the most Bitcoin users from? I think even this is very difficult to say...

It seems we are no very good estimating  ;D Anyway, we could say there are in the range [0.25; 5.00] million people. Very few people.

Wait, what? it's way less than that, total users should be less than 100k people. There are total of around 220k unique Bitcoin addresses with a non-zero balance, and I personally owns about 20 addresses with balance, the average user should own at least 2 or more addresses with balance.

estimates of 2-3mill based on unique addresses

but can be more due to many stupid people having all their funds in exchanges which move funds into a central cold store.

in short with 13-14mill coins in circulation if you have more than 10 bitcoins, you have an above average savings.

yes i know a few corporations have many many coins, but thats just the same as FIAT. and anyone that sells coins only has themselves to blame if they are now crying that they have less than 10btc holding where previously they had more

Good point, I have 6 addresses with balance.

You should count all addresses that ever had any input.
Now many addresses can have 0 balance but they are in blockchain and belong to somebody ;)

That old man, who is aggressive in his misunderstanding of Bitcoin, is Jeffrey Robinson, author of "Bitcon". He's an old-school financial crime author/researcher who does not understand the technology behind Bitcoin, and simply views it through his outdated and narrow lens. Hence, he's trying to downplay the number of bitcoin users and ignored many stats. He is a weak-thinker, and really just trying to promote his sensationalist and poorly "researched" book.

For example, the fact that Blockchain.info alone has almost 2.7 million (https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users) wallets, and Coinbase has over 2 million (https://www.coinbase.com/home). Note that Coinbase does robust KYC, so that 2 million *does* correspond to 2 million unique people.

Not to mention all the other wallets...

Also, "There are currently 14,104,525 unspent outputs in 3,609,649 unique address": http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2mkmoq/til_where_the_bitcoins_at_mysteries_of_the/

Obviously many bitcoin users control more than one address, and Coinbase users don't necessarily carry a bitcoin balance, but I'd guess it all nets out to about 1-3M bitcoin *owners*. And if you define a *user* as someone who either owns bitcoin and/*or* has made a bitcoin transaction in the last XX days, that number goes up.

Provably you think that I am reading that old man but I've never heard about him in my life. Anyway, you're right when you ask for a *user* definition and I think that users are:

* People that own bitcoins (they have a balance)
* People that perform transactions often.

Not sure if you can get the exact figure on number of users based on statistic cause a user might be holding several wallets. Some wallets are inactive while there are others which are probably abandoned due to loss of private. So what I meant to say is there are a lot of factors here.

I was way off with my estimate.

Never thought such a little group of people are actually owning Bitcoin. Looking at myself, I own 8 wallets with balance.

Imagine what will happen if more than a million people own Bitcoin.

Maybe in the world there are 2, maximum 3 million of people which use bitcoin but not more. It is still unknown to the big part of people  >:( We have to work to raise this number :)

I guess you didn't read the rest of the thread before replying to kokojie, since you missed the fact that kokojie's figure is off by an order of magnitude:

Some of them are zero, and by the author's own numbers:
There are 732,959 addresses with a 1 satoshi balance totaling 0.00732959 BTC

Most of these "unique addresses" are like that, with balance below 0.001 btc

So I guess I was inaccurate when saying "non-zero balance addresses", I should have said addresses with "meaningful" balance.

fair enough  :) - all in all a pretty laughable number  ;)

look here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=872881.0

Less than a million.

But there are 10x the number of wallets I think since each user often has a couple.

Coinbase alone has 2 million consumer wallets and they are only available in 19 countries (which is after a pretty recent expansion). Due to AML/KYC it would be unlikely for their users to need/want multiple wallets on coinbase.

Average number of wallets per user is not impossible to know with proper research. Number of wallets is known, so number of users is pretty much there. Anyone knows the number?

Number of wallets is known? By whom? Is this figure published somewhere?

If I not wrong 1 months ago I saw the main statistic of bitcoin protocol and remember that almost 500.000 user in the world actually use bitcoin. Very little number, but we'll increase it in the next future ! Ah, don't look at the address, many people have more than 1 address :)

If all Bitcoins are known where they are, I guess therefore the number of wallets is known too... But seems like I'm wrong, been surgfing a bit now...

I am pretty sure that number is around 10 million now :o

according to 1 bitcoin hater i know of its 250k active users, but imo thats pretty good, must people just invest and leave BTC sat in cold storage.

i think the same

maybe a little less...bitcoin is growing every day...hope the price does the same :)

I think someone is confusing 'wallets' for 'public addresses'.

In thins article: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-stellar-sidechains-feature-future-money-summit/
Shalek, the Ribbit Capital partner, told the audience during the closing panel:

“Bitcoin has this promise of enabling innovation. There are already 10 million people or more using bitcoin.”