~100 million
Number of Bitcoin Owners
There are only 30 million (source:
https://gz.blockchair.com/bitcoin/addresses/ ) Bitcoin addresses with a balance, so this can't be true.
And I assume most Bitcoin users have more than 1 funded address.
I don't know how glassnode counts only 30 million addresses, since only Coinbase has over 30 million customers (and blockchain over 40 million). I think glassnode counts wallets not addresses and thus each exchange with millions of users (which may not have other wallets) is counted as 1 wallet.
I don't even consider myself to be engaging a large amount of bitcoin transactional activities, but of course, over my 6.5 years in bitcoin, little by little and some heavier periods of transactional activities, I have found reasons to move bitcoins from time to time and even create various kinds of bitcoin accounts (in which custody has been with third parties).
While attempting to NOT break OPsec too much, I will say that I have had possession of around 15 accounts with various third-party custodians that have held varying amounts of bitcoin balances, and currently, I continue to have maybe only half or so of those third-party custodian accounts in which I still have access with some kind of non-zero balance in bitcoin. The accounts have had varying practices in terms of the creation of bitcoin addresses in terms of how they send and receive bitcoin and how they hold bitcoins within the services (sometimes they will show the purported addresses where your bitcoins are held and sometimes they will not).
I have also had experimented with nearly 10 different wallets, and again, maybe half of those wallets currently (as I type) have BTC balances and half do not, but each of the wallets also has a decent number of bitcoin addresses contained within.. and sometimes difficult to figure out which addresses are connected to what wallet, and sure my skills would not be as good as some chain analysis companies, but also frequently the chain analysis companies are likely touting out way more abilities than they have in order to create impressions that they know more than they do.
There had been times where I transacted bitcoin on an address that already has a balance (so more BTC is added to such an address), and then other times that I created a new address to receive bitcoin, and surely, if you make a bitcoin transaction but you do not transact the full BTC balance to the receiver address, then two new addresses would be created from that kind of not sending the full amount transaction (the recipient address and the change address).
Maybe sometimes through chain analysis bitcoin addresses might be inferably connected to one wallet, but sometimes it might not be clear if addresses are in the same wallet or not, unless they are joined when sending. Some wallets also enable the ability to custom join transaction addresses or keeping addresses separate in order NOT to join them when transacting from addresses that are within the same wallet (I think Samouri is pretty powerful in the ability to custom send from select addresses - but then having the ability to do something powerful and knowing how to use accomplish that thing are likely two different matters).
So, perhaps over the years, I can roughly estimate that I have had BTC balances in something around 300 bitcoin addresses (partly depending, also upon the extent to which exchanges sometimes will create new recipient addresses too in order to send and receive bitcoin with exchanges and to verify those transactions on the blockchain). Maybe currently, I have non-zero BTC balances on somewhere between 1/5th to 1/10th of the BTC addresses that I have ever owned, yet for OPsec reasons, we might not want to get into too many specifics, either.
There has always been some kind of lack of precision trying to figure out the number of bitcoin users from bitcoin addresses specifically or even to rely upon the purported accuracy of the reporting (disclosures) of various third-party wallet providers, exchanges, financial services or custodians.
Some BTC entities and BTC financial products like those offered through GBTC, CME or BAKKT likely have their own ways of managing their BTC addresses and even obfuscating their custody and verifiability of how many BTC they have or how many end users or institutions are using their product. I doubt that governments holding BTC are going to act much better in terms of how much they might disclose about BTC that they hold, how they obtained them and/or their intentions in terms of whether they plan to keep (HODL) them or to somehow dispose of them.
Remember also the situation in which faketoshi, craig wright, was claiming ownership to something like 20,000 coinbase (not the exchange) addresses that would constitute about 1 million or so bitcoin, there was a movement of 1 of those coinbase addresses that seemed to show that faketoshi did not have access to that address that he claimed to own (and that transaction initially divided into 40btc versus 10 btc, and then the 10btc got further divided into more than 20 addresses), and then another 145 of those coinbase addresses with 50 BTC each (which would be 7,250BTC in total) were linked together and appeared to be owned and controlled by one person/entity who was proclaimed to be neither craig wright nor satoshi. Lot of interesting puzzles in these attempts to figure out number of bitcoin users based on bitcoin addresses.
Even though the wallet information, address information and third-party custodian disclosers can lead to varying estimates of the number of bitcoin users can be quite difficult to decipher, surely none of us would be opposed to some of the hard working attempts to make reasonable assessments of the number of BTC users - even though some of us might be offended by sloppy and simplified assessment of number of users work that seems to take place on a regular basis, too.
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