Bitcoin Forum

According to https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users ... Blockchain - one of the leading Wallett services - claims to have nearly 4 million wallets. On https://blockchain.com/about/ they claim +3.7M users.

But only 250.000(sic!) adresses are active ... https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses. In january the number dropped to 116.000.

So my assumption is, that there is a maximum of 120.00 people out there, that use Bitcoin. And I assume that 90% of blockchain.info wallet user have never used bitcoin. When you assume that the average user has 3 adresses active, the number of user further comes down to 40.000 people.

I see growth in bitcoin adoption on the side of merchants when I look at coinmap.org. Ok. They claim to have nearly 10.000 merchants that accept bitcoin. But I don't so massive adoption on the user side right now.

Are there any errors in my assumption?


Thanks,

Bitone

i think everyone holding and waiting the price to explode, it seems obvious, It would be curious to compare  the data of today with the data of when bitcoin had a higher value like 600, 800
i'm sure that there were many more people using their coins, although mostly in dumping

but i don't understand why you think that 90% of blockchain user, and not local wallet users are not using their bitcoin, from where you take this assumption?

This number is just for blockchain.info and there are also many more wallet services so it's just a rough estimate of bitcoin users.
It can never be found that how much users use bitcoins.
And I'm having electrum which gave me around 25 addresses when I started using it and I'm using more than half of those right now.

Not everyone uses an online wallet, And many people love to hold the btc, Not Everyone buys gadgets etc daily so the active number would be less. Not everyone can buy coffee etc by bitcoin in there specific areas. This is not a good way to calculate the number of users imo.

We will more then likely never know the number of Bitcoin users , it's just impossible . also Blockchain is nothing most of people know the security measures to take now [NO ONLINE WALLETS] so they are using Desktop , Paper & Hardware wallets .
And they are simply inactive because they are holding , from what i see more people are getting familliar with BTC and starting to use it .

fully agree with this. besides not all of btc users use this service. i think Blockchain cuts off your btc very high. if u got btc in ten parts , you have to pay minimum 0.001 for sending it from Blockchain sometimes 0.0005 just for one transaction . so some use other alternatives or operate their own wallets.

Yes there would be much more users of bitcoins than 40,000. And it is impossible to judge the exact number of users of bitcoins, as there are many countries that don't support bitcoins, but people of that countries are using bitcoins and you can never come to a specific number of bitcoin users.

It's impossible to know but probably way less people use Bitcoin than we can think off. We are still a small niche of enthusiasts ahead of the pack. We'll need at least a decade until the rest catches sup with is. Look at the bright side: We are the new 2009 early investors. We'll be compensated by history, im sure about that.

why do you assume that? If they have made a wallet for bitcoins, doesn't that by definition mean they have used bitcoin? Besides, there are other wallet services, not just blockchain.info. perhaps people simply migrated to other services.

If you are trying to estimate number of bitcoin users taking data only from one online bitcoin wallet provider - your numbers are gonna be totally wrong. The problem with bitcoin is we can't find exact numbers,
1 bitcoin user can have even 100+ addresses, transactions are unreliable to estimate anything really, number of account on blockchain or any other service don't tell us much.
IF you want to know more about this I suggest you read this article first: https://bitscan.com/bitnews/item/how-many-people-really-own-bitcoins-and-why-does-it-matter (https://bitscan.com/bitnews/item/how-many-people-really-own-bitcoins-and-why-does-it-matter)

40,000 users seem way to low, it would probably be at around +1M users. The price wouldn't  sustain if it only had 40k users and companies wouldn't invest in bitcoin at all if it had such a small userbase.

It will likely be much more than that. As for assumption of 3 addresses per person, you can increase that as the data is likely to include all deposit addresses of the services that people use . So would easily be more than 5 addresses per person.

Its really hard to estimate the number of people from that. I would also doubt that only 116000 addresses are active these days.

Yeap, agree! You can not simply take the addresses from one provider in order to conclude how many people Bitcoin use. There are some more. My guess is that there are around at least 500k users.

there are plenty of holders, yes. people don't want to make the same mistake as they did when they sold way too cheap. we will probably never know exactly how much bitcoin users there are.

I would change the thread to only 40k user use blockchain.info but that seems a bit less tbh although the number wouldnt be complete off

...

I have used some 100 BTC addresses (many of them just once) since starting w/ BTC almost two years ago.  I use some at blockchain.info, some w/ Trezor, some w/ Ledger Nano.  I have used BTC to buy gold (inc. Veldt Gold here at bitcointalk).

I have sent BTC to THREE friends, small amounts to get started, NONE of them has become active.  Also, my city does not seem to be very active in BTC. 

40,000 users seems to be very low, IMO.  If I had to guess, I would agree w/ above guesses say in the 500,000 - 1 million range (worldwide).

I would be very interested in getting knowledgeable numbers on BTC use...

40,000 is way too low. I think that anybody who is just a little more serious about bitcoin doesn't use actively online wallets. For example, I have used Multibit and core! Now I am using Electrum, mycellium and Trezor. Online wallets I have never ever used, even though I did create a counterwallet a while ago just to see how it looks.

To conclude, I think that your numbers are way off!

Exactly what I thought, impossible to get accurate results when only looking at one wallet provider.
But I do think that in general, popularity is kinda stalled at the moment, though I do not have the stats to back this up 

I am guessing since we are only talking about the blockchain wallets , then why is that number less ? I wouldn't scale it down to 40K as not everyone has 3 bitcoin addresses on blockchain. I personally have never used a blockchain wallet and wouldn't be surprised if more than 60% of the bitcoiners haven't.

it might be possible that there are only 40 thousand active users because popularity of bitcoin is growing really slowly or even shrinking but i guess that people are just holding bitcoins and waiting for big price jumps

I don't think so that the active users of bitcoin are only 40,000. You think bitcoin would be able to maintain this price with only 40,000 people using it actively? The reason I find this data innacurate is because it has been calculated by the stats of a wallet prodiver, a singlular wallet provider! There are so many people who use bitcoin but not everybody who use wallets, many don't even know what's a bitcoin wallet.

cheated stats.
i have many wallets to avoid problem ... and somes have don't touch since 2 years.

usual users of Bitcoins have cold storage (safe, unconnected) and hot storage (phone, connected).
So, like 3 cold storage and 1 hot storage.

OK just one question.
If I have to keep my private keys safe for 4 to 5 years.
What is the best way to do so ???  Because storing digitally in a pen drive is a little bit risky, I mean God knows if it will work or not after 5 years.

I don't understand why upthread comments say that you are only quoting data for one wallet. The above data is for all addresses on the block chain. Duh!    ::)

I think it is very likely that Bitcoin adoption has stalled.

And it is very likely that active use is much less than a million users.

There are likely a million+ users who hold balances though.

I wouldn't worry about it. We are heading into a low price below $100 for Spring 2016, because the $usd is coming so strong due to the contagion in Europe, China, and developing markets. Commodities are declining.

Next year we will bottom and see the interest in private assets grow again, but it will be driven more by anti-government sentiment (due to expropriation in the EU) and thus anonymous coins will receive much more interest than Bitcoin.

I would advise you to save it on a digital drive and properly store your access details with you, which you seem would be suitable to survive for many years, maybe you can save it in locker services provided by financial institutions. I think that you should rather save it and make a copy or two of it, and save it with yourself personally in a locker at home or under the bed, who the fuck knows.

Thanks for all the answers, but the core point was NOT answered or disproved.


That is a fact. So today, there are 225.000 bitcoin adresses today that have more than 0 BTC balance and as you all mentioned, that a user has more than one adress, the number of users is somewhere near 40.000 users.

A lot of answers in the thread have been:

- A user has more than one adress
- Lots of users use cold storage

I totally agree with you. But that even underlines my argument. My assumption is, that a user has one or more exclusive bitcoin adresses. I see no case, that users would share an adress. I assume that each blockchain.info wallet is associated with at least one unique adress.

My definition of a user is a hodler. A person that holds bitcoin at the moment. And that maximum is 225.000 persons today.

If I assume that a user has on average 5 adresses, than there are round about 40.000 people that hold bitcoin.

The only argument that I could see, is that wallet services like blockchain.info use shared adresses. But I just checked and can confirm that I have a unique adress.

Looking forward to your feedback!


Bitone

Please look at this:
https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users

What is your conclusion if there would be only 40k users?

that the average user hodls about 525 bitcoins

People using online and hardware wallets. Largest online BTC wallet of course is Blockchain. So in fact it will be very difficult to find the exact number of BTC users  :D

There is about 32 million unspent outputs. Assuming (finger-in-ass statistics) that each user has 3 outputs, that means 10 million users.


bitcoin-cli gettxoutsetinfo
{
    "height" : 368844,
    "bestblock" : "000000000000000009903b717a12e67406fe2367d81978660ef54b4ac897f9e6",
    "transactions" : 6861102,
    "txouts" : 32955971,
    "bytes_serialized" : 1047605254,
    "hash_serialized" : "6ffd5faad9c8fe2e9b6667e509e44982a2789f08e7bdbf601f0ff0ac9fe17810",
    "total_amount" : 14470964.76614708
}

And according to this:

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set (http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set)

the number has exploded during the last two monts.