How many Bitcoin users are there?

[cloud9]

Given a world wide internet population of 2,095,006,005 (March 31, 2011 - http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm )

and a 1-month average Bitcoin (bitcoin.org) general internet reach compared to general internet usage world wide of 0.03130% (June 6, 2011 - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcoin.org# - GRAPH - TRAFFIC STATS - REACH)

Will it be a reasonable approximation to estimate that Bitcoin (bitcoin.org) has a global internet reach population of roughly 2,095,006,005 x 0.03130% = 665,736 !! ?

[jerfelix]

I think the best approximation of worldwide Bitcoin users might be a factor of the number of forum users there are.  Click on the members tab near the top of this page, and then click the column header twice, that says Date Registered.  This will give you the name of the most recent 30 members of the forum.  Hover over the top name, and you can see that he's number u=18915 (as I write this).

Maybe 5% of Bitcoin users register on the forum, so maybe there are 380K Bitcoin users.


Or another way to look at it:  Look at sourceforge, search for Bitcoin, and see how many people downloaded the software.  79,385 this week.  (you can also see how many over time, but that feature seems to be giving http500 errors at the moment.)  79K downloads in a very strong week.  So maybe 400K downloads all-time.

So your number is probably in the right range.  Definitely bigger than 100K, and probably less than 1M.

[cloud9]

Thanks  for  tne  alternative  means  of  estimation  -  thought  my  estimate  were  way  out,  not  anymore  though?

[jerfelix]

Sourceforge shows 347K downloads to date.   (288K through May 31; 220K from May 1 to today).

Assuming that there's a 1-to-1 relationship between downloads and users, there's your answer.

http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=244765&ugn=bitcoin&type=&mode=alltime

Problems with this metric:

Downward adjustments:
-  Many users have downloaded it to multiple computers.  I account for 3 of those. 
-  Many users downloaded it multiple times to upgrade their version.
   (But with 220K of the downloads being since May 1, I don't think this is a major adjustment)
-  There may be ways to download it via Package installers that don't hit sourceforge.  Not sure.

Upward adjustments:
-  Some users will just use the online wallets, and not download the software.


So my estimate is that there are between 150K and 350K users.
Others may have better estimates.

[cloud9]

And that's only people who are interested in the client taking responsibility for their own security and maybe want to generate their own bitcoins - it excludes people just having an account with mybitcoin.com , or mtgox.com , instawallet.org , etc., etc. to hold their bitcoins.

[jerfelix]

And that's only people who are interested in the client taking responsibility for their own security and maybe want to generate their own bitcoins - it excludes people just having an account with mybitcoin.com , or mtgox.com to hold their bitcoins.

Yeah, that was what I meant by "upward adjustment".

[oztusk]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/78-percent-of-bitcoin-currency-stashed-under-digital-mattress-study-finds/

[hazek]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/78-percent-of-bitcoin-currency-stashed-under-digital-mattress-study-finds/

An article based on a false premise coming to a wrong conclusion.

[GoldSilverBitcoin]

I wonder if there is anymore information on this topic.

[marcovaldo]

I think the best approximation of worldwide Bitcoin users might be a factor of the number of forum users there are.  Click on the members tab near the top of this page, and then click the column header twice, that says Date Registered.  This will give you the name of the most recent 30 members of the forum.  Hover over the top name, and you can see that he's number u=18915 (as I write this).

Maybe 5% of Bitcoin users register on the forum, so maybe there are 380K Bitcoin users.


Or another way to look at it:  Look at sourceforge, search for Bitcoin, and see how many people downloaded the software.  79,385 this week.  (you can also see how many over time, but that feature seems to be giving http500 errors at the moment.)  79K downloads in a very strong week.  So maybe 400K downloads all-time.

So your number is probably in the right range.  Definitely bigger than 100K, and probably less than 1M.

150k users are registered here, but most of them are inactive / not using bitcoins and/or alt accounts.
And why 5%?

[marcotheminer]

My guess is 400k!
Pretty big!

[marcovaldo]

My guess is 400k!
Pretty big!

I wonder how you came to that conclusion?


I think that the most accurate way of measuring it would be to make an poll to determine the average number of transactions that makes a unique user every month, and then to divide the number of transactions by this number. But it would be difficult to determine the average number of transaction per user. Should take 1 - 2k of significant people to answer.

[frankenmint]

I can confirm that there are about half a million active users (active defined as owned, sent or recieved bitcoins in the last month timeframe).

I have confirmed this throught thinking about it intensely.

hell yea the power of positive throught!    I'd say the proportion of users with online wallets is probably very large.   Thats pretty nice that at this moment theres less than a million ppl in btc.  Makes you wonder how many ltc or other coin users exist

[dancupid]

There are currently 440,000 blockchain My wallet registered users

http://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

These account for about 10,000 transaction per day on average.

http://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-tx?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=1&address=

There are about 55000 transactions per day on the whole network:

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

So I estimate there are 440k x 5.5 = 2.4 million users

[ildubbioso]

So I estimate there are 440k x 5.5 = 2.4 million users

That's probably the best estimate so far.

[niothor]

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address

There are 400k addresses with more than 1$ inside.
Taking into account that most users use multiple addresses (I have 6) and also a large number of forgotten ones I highly doubt that there are more than 100 000 active users.

Don't forget that the blockchain contains 23mils transaction with more than half of satoshi dice.
so that's 10 mils remaining transaction in two years. Hard to believe a number of 1 milion users (active).

[pengcqu]

My guess is 900k!

[bitcoinchecker]

42

[jim618]

I keep an eye on the multibit downloads, which are here:

https://multibit.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=multibit.org

In any given month there are:
+ new users
+ people updating their version.
+ people who stopped using MultiBit for whatever reason.

As the downloads for the last few months are roughly constant between 70K and 80K I think that is probably a good indication of total number of active users.

There are also the bitcoind downloads available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.5/stats/timeline

These are "a bit higher" than multibit downloads but not, say, double, so there are probably 100K active bitcoinds. (They might not be running 24x7 so there would be a smaller number of nodes).

There are also a large number of electrum users. They don't have public download figures, as far as I know. I think Alexa rankings are roughly reciprocal (i.e. double the rank is half the traffic) so, as multibit.org's rank is 96K and electrum.org is 226K then I guess there would be 30K - 40K active electrum users.

There are about 400K blockchain.info wallets, and about 40K new wallets every month. The number of active users is somewhere inbetween - 100K ? 200K? Let's say 150K.

Then you've got Armory, Coinbase, exchange accounts . . .

Lots of people use more than one wallet so the total number of active users I guess is:

+ more than 100K
+ maybe 250K
+ less than 500K

edit: this misses out mobile phone Bitcoin wallets - I don't have any figures for those.

[reactive4ce]

Very good estimate based on client new versions download. Around 250k active users is a lot of opportunity for any starting Bitcoin business