Bitcoin Forum

I'm trying to figure out how much people are using the bitcoin network. If you own more than 5 wallets, please tell how many.

I have around 10+ with over 1 BTC.

What's the point to have that much wallet?

I might be a rare case.
Think of them like Bank accounts.
You have a Payroll account,accounts receivable,etc

I have GLBSE,MTGOX,My Pool,Cold Storage,etc

It make it really easy to track where the coins are coming in and going Out.

I have 3 small assets on GLBSE, I don't want to know how many the big guys have.

I use to put each wallet on its own vmware OS,but I don't do that anymore too time consuming.

Yeah also your phrasing of wallets can be vaguely interpreted.

wallet.dat as a wallet, contains a lot of addresses so theres no real way to trace how many people by wallets, and you can copy that elsewhere and just generate another one at whim. Then like the other response, website accounts have unique 'address wallets' in a sense. So you're likely to see people with a handful anyway because of external accounts.

I have 1 wallet.dat, and then I have MtGox and Virwox that I actively use, I probably 'made' some on some of those third party wallet sites but haven't looked back at them so they're still empty even though I have those accounts as technically my owned wallets as well...

Pretty pointless this thread.

I bet many of the "1" voters refer to their instawallet/gox or whatever hosted wallet where they would actually have to click "0" which is missing in your poll. Hosted wallets are one wallet for hundreds of users plus maybe some cold storage/technical wallets.

On the other end you have "wallets" like physical coins which can be seen as a wallet of its own each.

Technically speaking a wallet is a collection of addresses that might end up in one transaction if the owner of the wallet decides to move all of it at once. If Gox moves all coins, all your "1" wallets might end up in one transaction. The physical coins could turn out to be all part of one big wallet despite the fact they are sold as isolated wallets.

Maybe you should elaborate how you are planning to draw conclusions :)

I started out with no wallet (except my temporary working wallet) having more than 20 BTC.  As the price fell (and hence my accumulation rate and magnitude increased), I switched this to 100 BTC each.  I keep all of my wallets universally accessible, but the ability to turn them from encrypted blobs to workable entities is a real bitch.  Even for me it would require days of preparation and travel to get at most of them.  Since most of my BTC are long duration speculative bets this situation is fine for my use-case.

Yea I should ask about how much different address do you own instead of wallet. That way we can check how many address there is in the network and figure out with these stats how many people there is in the network. Of course it doesn't consider the lost addresses... but at least it could gives us a good idea.

Again, this will not help you as sending money to my receiving address on instawallet does not mean that this address will not spend my input the next day without my interaction.

I use several just to limit my exposure. Most of my coins rarely see the network. I keep them offline and secured in the real world. Them my wife and I keep smaller amounts synced online for purchases.   

The average user of the standard client doesn't have an easy way to know how many addresses they own.

I currently have 6 running bitcoind nodes, each with at least 10 coins. Plus bitcoinspinner and 2 electrum installs.

I have ONE wallet, and it is usually empty!

Its typical transaction flow goes like this:

Import Paper Wallet -> Spend Coins -> Send all the change to another paper wallet.
(It helps that I have a handheld USB-keyboard-wedge barcode scanner that can read QR codes)

I use sendmany a lot, and often combine the 2nd and 3rd steps into a single sendmany.  Doing this, I pretty much never have to pay a transaction fee but still get decent transaction priority due to maximized coin age.  My bitcoind is modified so my importprivkey command works without a full blockchain scan.