How many people or percentage has held at least 50 or 100 btc at one point?

[jerry0]

What percentage of people would you say that is?  Whether it is now or all the way back in 2009 etc.  Back then when people bought btc or got it, i assume people usually got like 10 or 50 or 100 or in bunches right when it was like 1 cent or 10 cents or even 1 dollar?  The thing is are there lots of people on this forum who held at least 50, 100 or more btc a while back like say 2012 and before?  I would have to assume some people probably had 500 or 1000 or even 5000 easily back then right when it was like under 10 cents and then using it or not caring about it?



Thus there probably are many would be millionaires even now had they kept the btc?  How much people around the world would you say that is around?  Are there lot of people back then who had say 500 or 1000 btc and bought it for like 10 cents and then sold it at 1 dollar and thought great i made a great profit?  Then they did not follow btc after that only to see how much it has went up later on?

[1714940728]

1714940728

[RonF]

I do not know, but I bought over 250 bitcoin several years ago when it was about $250 and then got a free amount of free bitcoin cash in August

[newIndia]

The simplest answer is there is no way to know for sure.

[100bitcoin]

I do not know, but I bought over 250 bitcoin several years ago when it was about $250 and then got a free amount of free bitcoin cash in August

So, u r HODLing 250 units of all bitcoin forks including bitcoin itself?

[avikz]

What percentage of people would you say that is?  Whether it is now or all the way back in 2009 etc.  Back then when people bought btc or got it, i assume people usually got like 10 or 50 or 100 or in bunches right when it was like 1 cent or 10 cents or even 1 dollar?  The thing is are there lots of people on this forum who held at least 50, 100 or more btc a while back like say 2012 and before?  I would have to assume some people probably had 500 or 1000 or even 5000 easily back then right when it was like under 10 cents and then using it or not caring about it?



Thus there probably are many would be millionaires even now had they kept the btc?  How much people around the world would you say that is around?  Are there lot of people back then who had say 500 or 1000 btc and bought it for like 10 cents and then sold it at 1 dollar and thought great i made a great profit?  Then they did not follow btc after that only to see how much it has went up later on?

There's no actual way to know it. Bitcoin is not centralized like bank accounts. So if you ask JPM that how many of their bank account holders have 1 million or more, they will have the data readily available. That's not the case of bitcoin.

There are certainly a lot of millionaires in crypto market. But that's the beauty of bitcoin because there's no way to know how much wealth a person is holding unless you know his/her bitcoin address.

[franky1]

my coins are spread over many addresses so fortunately i do not have to disclose the actual amounts (i got no interest in being spammed by people wanting to kiss my ass like some rich uncle would get around the time they write their Will)
but 2012 was a good year to enter the bitcoin ecosystem for me (circa $6 per coin at the time)

id say many involved pre 2013 most definitely did get a nice hoard of bitcoins.
if you exclude the 'top 100' richlist addresses as those are majority exchanges/custodians/mining pools anyways, you end up seeing there are some addresses that still hoard coins from over half a decade ago

although trying to get an actual % / number of people is something no one will be able to give a useful number of

[pooya87]

How many people or percentage has held at least 50 or 100 btc at one point?

there is simply no way of knowing this. even in early days if you mined bitcoin you would have done it to a new address each time so there is a good chance the coins are spread among multiple addresses. and at some point people saw the rise, sold or at least moved their coins to different addresses,... i have seen whales do it multiple times. they spread the coins among multiple addresses.

Thus there probably are many would be millionaires even now had they kept the btc? 

there are but again not necessarily. many who bought or mined in early days, lost access or sold at some point and some held. so you can't necessarily say if someone had large amounts of bitcoin at some point he is now a millionaire.

[RapTarX]

So, u r HODLing 250 units of all bitcoin forks including bitcoin itself?

Almost true, in some cases, the fork wasn't 1:1, BTX was 1:2. For each 2 BTC, you will get 1 BTX only. BCD was 10:1, for each BTC, you will get 10 BCD. But the majority of the forks were 1:1. In that case, he owns 250 units of all fork coin which is a paasive amount.

[romero121]

It is really hard to know the percentage or the number of people holding 50 btc or above. As the balance in any bitcoin address is transparent it is possible to count the number of users. But the complication is that it cannot be done in a short as each and every bitcoin wallet till date needs to be viewed. I believe around ten percent of the entire cryptocurrency users will be having 50btc or more by now.

[glowing10]

The simplest answer is there is no way to know for sure.

This would be impossible to know but only thing is that on this forum do we have anybody who has held or had a privileged to hold such number of btc and do they still hold that which means they really knew that future of crypto is going to come.

[qiwoman2]

It would be really interesting to know that fact. The highest I went to was 43 Bitcoin, when I bought into an ICO but never sold those coins when they were worth 43 Bitcoin but sold them when they went down to 12 BTC, ALSO failed to sell 38 BTC worth of Coins last January so for me to ever get to 50 BTC in pure BTC would need a huge miracle or for me to make a few hundred thousand dollars worth of exploding Crypto to buy that amount of Bitcoin. So I wonder here how many people have actually 50 or more BTC in their hand? I would love to know even that percentage amount from this forum, how many big BTC holders do we have right now Any ideas in here anyone knows?

[bhadz]

I do not know, but I bought over 250 bitcoin several years ago when it was about $250 and then got a free amount of free bitcoin cash in August

You may not be a whale but you hold a lot of it right now and the price seems good. I think you're a dolphin in terms of ranking the people in the community on how many you are holding. Including the bitcoin forks (BCH and others) if you sold some of it during the all time high days on December 2017, you have earned pretty good.

The simplest answer is there is no way to know for sure.

Yep, even creating a survey won't do.

[Kakmakr]

The thing is, it will be a impossible task to determine that, because you do not know if someone has split their coins into say 20 different addresses with 2 or 3 coins each.  It might have been easier to determine that, if there were no mixing of coins being done, but after the introduction of mixer services, this all became impossible to trace. 

A lot of these old bitcoiners also used services that are closed down now, so you will never be able to trace that back to a specific individual. 

[Lucius]

In time when BTC was born and very easy to mine with 50BTC per block, it was not too many people involved in mining or trading. If we look at today's research in terms of how many people are today participates in cryptocurrency, estimates say it is from 0.5% to 1% of world population. Given the present situation we can conclude that this percentage was far smaller in the first years of BTC existence.

According to my free judgment, it may be a few thousand people who have 50 or 100 BTC at one point, taking into account that some people mine hundreds of thousands coins at the very beginning. Today is not easy for most people to get even one whole coin because price is to high, and people who have thousands BTC use every favorable situation to buy even more.

[bitfocus]

the answer is, you can't know that for sure, but if you have time like infinity and all the addresses, you can check them manually and sum up, lol.

[leonair]

Obviously there no platform or people who did a system in looking for this kind of instances but actually I think there is a way but you must do it manually, look at the transaction from the genesis block up to the block that satisfies your question so with this you can see each transferred Bitcoin amount, it's doable but close to impossible  .

[jems]

The simplest answer is there is no way to know for sure.

I agree with you, no one knows for sure about that but what is certain is that the large number of bitcoin holders is currently getting smaller because many of them sell it in 2017 and maybe right now they are still selling with disappointment.

[drumamat]

I think everyone who on the forum has the rank of a legend by far have 100 bitcoins on your account).It is difficult of course to know the exact number of holders, but I have never had even 10 bitcoins on the account.

[BurgerCash]

There's certainly an upper limit due to the limited amount of bitcoins, but since pretty much every person is in possession of more than one public key it's hard to determine just by looking at the blockchain.
But a few years ago with only 10MM bitcoins mined, when Roger Ver owned 300k, Satoshi owned 1MM, Winkelvoss twins owned 1MM, Jed Mccaleb owned 250k, Erik Voorhees owned 100k, Gavin Andresen probably owned a lot as well... - there was probably room for no more than a few thousand owners of 100 BTC.

[jerry0]

Back then, was many ppl with like 50 or 100 btc or even 1000 btc basically treating it like nothing when it was worth like 10 cents a coin?  For example i read about ppl who would gamble btc at online casino etc with 100s of btc like it was nothing.  WAs there a lot of that back then?  Because if btc was 1 dollar, then its only worth 1k... if there is 1000 bitcoin.

[pooya87]

Back then, was many ppl with like 50 or 100 btc or even 1000 btc basically treating it like nothing when it was worth like 10 cents a coin?  For example i read about ppl who would gamble btc at online casino etc with 100s of btc like it was nothing.  WAs there a lot of that back then?  Because if btc was 1 dollar, then its only worth 1k... if there is 1000 bitcoin.

there wasn't that many places to gamble bitcoin back when price was less than $1 and those that were around weren't that popular to attract that many users. not to mention that gambling isn't something that everyone does.
apart from that, there is certain anonymity about bitcoin which makes it impossible to know how many people were doing what with their coins and how much they owned.

[jerry0]

Well what about those from a long time ago when btc was around 10 dollars and less?  Or when it was 1 dollar?  Surely ppl had like 500 plus or more when it was 1 dollar or less and didn't treat it like its worth anything?

[jerry0]

But there were lot of ppl that treated bitcoin like it was nothing right?  Like they would send 100 or 1000 bitcoins to others without thinking much of it?

[keziakusayang]

we certainly cannot know how much someone holds bitcoin. of course it's very secret, only a few people dare to express it.
but in my opinion there aren't many people who hold a lot of bitcoin. millionaire millionaires are very afraid to invest in bitcoin because the price of bitcoin is not stable. maybe even if there is, I think it's an investor who bought a lot of bitcoin a few years ago when the price of bitcoin was very low.
to know for sure I think nobody knows.

[adaseb]

I am pretty sure if you bought 100 BTC at $1/BTC you would of most likely sold half of it at $2/BTC and the rest at $5-$20/BTC. Pretty sure this is how the majority of the sales took place.

There is a small percentage of people who are still holding in the $1-$20BTC area but they probably already took profits along the way. And some people like Roger Ver, ran a business and accepted BTC and had loads of it and only sold small amounts as the price kept rising exponentially.

[LuckyBtc]

I certainly haven't held that many and probably won't in future as price is going to rise significantly. You won't get any accurate answer to this, People don't want to reveal how much they're hodling for the obvious reasons. However, Bitcoin blockchain is an open book, You could write a script that would scrape data and give you some answers..

[Kakmakr]

Just remember owning 50 to 500 coins back in 2009 to 2012 was not a big accomplishment back then and people thought nothing of spending say 50 coins on t-shirts and whatever was sold back then. Lazlo's Pizza is a good example of that, so it only becomes relevant if those people bought those coins back then and hoarded it until after 2017. 

I bet ya, Gavin can kick himself for paying between 1 and 5 coins per hour via his faucet back then, but looking back at it, it might not have gained the same traction if he did not distribute those coins. 

[adaseb]

Just remember owning 50 to 500 coins back in 2009 to 2012 was not a big accomplishment back then and people thought nothing of spending say 50 coins on t-shirts and whatever was sold back then. Lazlo's Pizza is a good example of that, so it only becomes relevant if those people bought those coins back then and hoarded it until after 2017. 

I bet ya, Gavin can kick himself for paying between 1 and 5 coins per hour via his faucet back then, but looking back at it, it might not have gained the same traction if he did not distribute those coins. 

Yes this is true and this is why its not fair to bash that guy for spending 10000 BTC on a couple of pizza's because who knows if Bitcoin would be where it is today if it wasn't for that transaction.

Maybe if that transaction never happened people wouldn't see the utility of Bitcoin and it could of died off, its a possbility. In hindsight it sure looks like a bad trade but that bad trade might of been what made bitcoin what it is today. Because after that pizza trade there was more and more people buying goods and services with Bitcoin.

[RonF]

Me - 250.375 BTC at $250 plus each.

[AjithBtc]

Right now the percentage of bitcoin users seems to be 3-5%, among them when we calculate about the people having 50,100 or more bitcoin will be very less. Most of the users with such a big number seems to be the early adopters. When it was a giveaway none cared about it. Further when growth progressed the demand increased same is the price and it went as an expensive investment.

[jerry0]

Did ppl who bought btc at 1 dollar really sold them at 2 dollars or more?  I can understand that if you buy big amounts... but lot of ppl did this when say buying 100 btc at 1 dollar and then selling it off at 2 dollars for 100 dollar profit?


If that is case, wouldn't that mean tons of ppl had 1000s of btc especially when it was 50 cents or so?  At around what price in btc... did it start to get more ppl into it?  I know it was at 1 cent when it first came out... but at what price was it where ppl say okay this could be something?  Like 1 dollar?  Obviously when it was 10 or 30 dollars, that became pretty well known for ppl.

[veleten]

it is not possible to tell  how many , for that you would have to check billions of addresses
but in the early years 50-100 bitcoins was nothing , an average GPU in 2010 could mine you a coin in a few days
I remember faucets ( not the one dishing 5 btc and then 1 btc out , the smaller ones ) that gave out 100k satoshi per claim
and they were not even popular - hell who would have known that time ....
I had more than that and I literally wasted my fortune , hindsight is always 20 20

[gentlemand]

but at what price was it where ppl say okay this could be something?  Like 1 dollar?  Obviously when it was 10 or 30 dollars, that became pretty well known for ppl.

People have been urging others to stick a fork in it well into 2015 and beyond. I remember one guy starting a thread telling us he'd sold everything as he'd done the math and it was literally impossible for the price to ever go above $300.

Around 30 minutes after he posted that the price went over $300.

It's easy to forget how small it was in 2010/11 and how obvious everything looks in retrospect. If you'd made 100x times your money from 1c to 1$ then I'm sure many around now would've sold if they were around back then.

If you'd arrived on a thread in 2011 and laid out what was happening less than a decade later - a five figure price, the US president dissing it, the biggest names in finance getting ready to trade it - you would've been laughed out of there. People might have believed that if you said it happened in 2069.

[Nolimitz84]

Right now the percentage of bitcoin users seems to be 3-5%, among them when we calculate about the people having 50,100 or more bitcoin will be very less. Most of the users with such a big number seems to be the early adopters. When it was a giveaway none cared about it. Further when growth progressed the demand increased same is the price and it went as an expensive investment.

Yes, I remember the story with the guy who threw his hard drive on the garbage that stored thousands of bitcoins.When he found out what the price of bitcoins became, he started looking for that hard drive in a landfill, but naturally he never found it. It's sad to hear such stories.I didn't have a lot of bitcoins just because there was nowhere to buy them.I just didn't know how to buy it.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

I think everyone who on the forum has the rank of a legend by far have 100 bitcoins on your account).It is difficult of course to know the exact number of holders, but I have never had even 10 bitcoins on the account.

Think again, before the merit system was introduced a year ago (2018), it took just appropriately 3years to achieve the legendary rank status with activities. Therefore anyone privilege to be active on the forum would had been able to achieve that rank irrespective of hodling bitcoin or not. Don't forget most users only joined the forum so they could earn themselves some bitcoin and not because they had bitcoin beside, back then the level of trust bitcoin has now wasn't present so not everyone would be optimistic enough to invest approximately $30,000-$50,000 into holding 100 BTC as you presume.

[gentlemand]

Think again, before the merit system was introduced a year ago (2018), it took just appropriately 3years to achieve the legendary rank status with activities. Therefore anyone privilege to be active on the forum would had been able to achieve that rank irrespective of hodling bitcoin or not. Don't forget most users only joined the forum so they could earn themselves some bitcoin and not because they had bitcoin beside, back then the level of trust bitcoin has now wasn't present so not everyone would be optimistic enough to invest approximately $30,000-$50,000 into holding 100 BTC as you presume.

Aye. It's bonkers to assume that you're loaded just because you've been here a long time. I've seen plenty of old school users admit to having a piddling amount.

Real life gets in the way for most people. It might have been the only source of realisable money for many and the bills never stop coming.

[custard_pudding]

i think less than 0.0000013 of world population has ever held more then 1 bitcoin.
How does this info help you?

[ene1980]

 Are there lot of people back then who had say 500 or 1000 btc and bought it for like 10 cents and then sold it at 1 dollar and thought great i made a great profit?  Then they did not follow btc after that only to see how much it has went up later on?

Everyone used to mine bitcoin in the earlier days literally using your CPU and GPU power and during those period the block reward was 50BTC and you could get thousands of coins if you had a decent GPU in no time until people started mining pools to combine the hashing power, so when the market started its valuation people used to sell the coins at that rate basically single and double digit valuation and you never felt that you are selling off your golden goose during that time.

[jostorres]

That is a very big question as no one can actually say what percentage of people has such in their possession right now bit we donhave some whales and also exchanges can have such bit we can't get the figure for sure.

That is right, it is hard to tell, holding such Amount of bitcoin depends on the financial status of the investor and the amount bitcoin was sold for at the time the interest to invest in bitcoin arose. I doubt if we have anyone that can even still boast of having their BTC bought 10 years ago intact. We have several people that bought at 1 cent and sold at 1 dollar without ever thinking bitcoin will get to this stage.

The only people that I know usually do have up to such amount aside whales are traders, because tee more money they trade with, the more they get from it. Some have even been able to gather up to that, but because of personal needs, they end up spending. I could remember that there was time I could boast of 7 BTC, but as needs arises and I started spending, the BTC kept declining until it turns to 2 BTC, so for me, I can only boast of 2BTC right now for my bitcoin investment.

[imstillthebest]

there were actually many  . too many that we cannot exactly count anymore  .

  by browsing on this forum we can see different people with different threads about how they was dissapointed to loose thier huge amount of btc because they didnt expect that btc will grow huge like this  but some are just on a badluck to loose thier btc on thier old hardrives and broken devices  such as usb flash drive , computer , etc ...   but for other we can say that we are lucky because we didnt experience those horrilble experience that they have before  .

[bryant.coleman]

I am not sure about the number of individuals who held more than 50 BTC at some point of time. Due to the anonymous nature of BTC, such stats are not available. I am someone who held 70 BTC at one point (and lost most of it). I still regret the way I lost all those coins. If I had them in my wallet now, then I could have retired from my full time job and purchased my own house.

I started collecting crypto in 2012. I purchased 15 BTC for $150 in 2012, and accumulated more than 50 BTC from airdrops, signatures and freelancing. By mid-2013, I had more than 70 BTC in my wallet. Then I became greedy and invested in BTCT-Co. The exchange suddenly closed down, and I lost about 30 BTC when that happened. Then during 2014-15, I went through some financial difficulty and had to sell most of the remaining coins.

[nankers]

Thus there probably are many would be millionaires even now had they kept the btc?  How much people around the world would you say that is around?  Are there lot of people back then who had say 500 or 1000 btc and bought it for like 10 cents and then sold it at 1 dollar and thought great i made a great profit?  Then they did not follow btc after that only to see how much it has went up later on?

maybe no one knows for sure, but I have the assumption that if the price of bitcoin is high, the number of holders of large amounts of bitcoin will decrease, but conversely if the price of bitcoin has decreased, then the holders of large amounts of bitcoin will increase. I assume so after seeing the increase in the price of bitcoins which almost reached $ 20K and many bitcoin holders who sold some of their bitcoin and when in 2018 when bitcoin almost touched the price of $ 3000, the bitcoin millionaires returned to collect their bitcoins periodically

[DdmrDdmr]

This is not going to answer the question in the OP, but is may serve to get a general lateral idea through viewing the number of addresses with a certain range of BTCs, and their evolution over time:

The information is derived from https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html, and the historical data from (irregular) instances of the same page over time, stored in the WayBackMachine. The information is not stored at regular intervals, thus I have selected dated based on those available (there is no save 2016 snapshot for instance).

People do not just manage a single address, so there is no way of knowing which of those addresses add up to a larger sum from a person’s point of view. Being the OPs query not resoluble either than by sheer personal declaration and count of a limited set of answers, this could serve as the next best thing from a global point of view.

[jerry0]

Well what if someone uses electrum and has btc but they are spread out in different addresses?  So wouldn't that mean someone with say 200 btc could have 100 in one and 2 in another etc?


So the current btc at the moment.  There is btc in over 20 million btc addresses at the current moment?  So half of the current btc in an address now has 0.001 btc and less? 


Why is the 10-100 btc bolded though compared to the other ones? 

[rodel caling]

It's very complicated to know who people holding huge of bitcoin and get rich by doing this ways but of course I believe a lot of the holders at that time they get huge profits and possible a rich. We know hard to trace and difficult to know who is them because bitcoin is anonymous same from of the holders.

[pixie85]

I met someone who held a lot of bitcoins at one time. He was buying mining equipment as a hobby in 2013 and you had to have at least 20 bitcoins to buy anything because the price was so low below 100 dollars a coin. People didn't see it as low to them it was high because bitcoin kept rising.

Many people had that much because you could invest the value of a new laptop into this thing and get close to 20 so holding 50 or 100 wasn't a big deal. If they only knew

[TimeBits]

As for your title  

Re: How many people or percentage has held at least 50 or 100 btc at one point?

You will never know, Because you can`t tell if people have multiple addresses or not. 1 person could have 1000`s of wallets with 50 btc in them. No way to tell if it is 1000 people or 1.

[DdmrDdmr]

Well what if someone uses electrum and has btc but they are spread out in different addresses?  So wouldn't that mean someone with say 200 btc could have 100 in one and 2 in another etc?

Correct (except for the part that 200 =100+2). As I stated before, there is no general way to know which addresses belong to a single individual or entity, and therefore the OPs question is not resoluble except for declared personal cases (which, in sum, will not be representative of the global amount of people que OP’s query wanted to know). That’s why I proposed the above table as an alternative approach, which varied the OP’s question, but that does have objective global data associated to it: the number of addresses at a given point in time that hold a certain range of BTCs. To add perspective, I added some historical snapshot data.

So the current btc at the moment.  There is btc in over 20 million btc addresses at the current moment?  So half of the current btc in an address now has 0.001 btc and less?  

Accordind to the data shown at https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html, there are 20,8M BTC addresses currently (*) ; 48,6% of which hold more than 0 BTCs less than 0.001 BTCs.
(*) The cero interval is an open interval, and therefore, addresses with 0 BTCs are not accounted (meaning that there are more addresses than the 20,8M BTCs, but without balance).

Why is the 10-100 btc bolded though compared to the other ones?  

I highlighted that line simply because it was the range that included (not equal) the interval the OP wanted to query about, with all the fine print stated above.

[bryant.coleman]

I think there is no way that we can know that.  If we will base our count based on the number of wallets then we will definitely get the wrong number. I think one person can own multiple Bitcoin wallets or group of people may own a single wallet. We can trace what is the largest amount on every wallet but we can still don't know the details about the owners.

You are absolutely right. Analyzing the wallet balances may not give the proper distribution of Bitcoin holding by individuals. For me, the most reliable data may be the leaked Mt Gox user data of 2014. It had information on both fiat and crypto balances of all the Mt Gox users at that time and since it was mandatory to undergo KYC in Mt Gox, I would rate this information as quite accurate.

There are other studies out there, and one which caught my attention is the Bitcoin distribution thread by rpietila. You can find the thread here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316297.0

I found the thread quite interesting, but can't vouch for the accuracy of the data. A number of the trusted users have came out against rpietila, and they have claimed that his stats lack any truth.

[jerry0]

Would it be safe to say that lot of ppl had 1000 btc or more when it was like 1 cent or 10 cents?

[Lucius]

Would it be safe to say that lot of ppl had 1000 btc or more when it was like 1 cent or 10 cents?

How about to start from the beginning of your thread and read all posts? You get many quality answers, and you still ask same question to which there is no 100% correct answer. What is lot of ppl by your definition, is that 1000, 5000 or maybe 10 000 people?

In early days 50 BTC per block on average every ten minutes makes 7200 BTC per day or 216000 BTC per month, so in first 4 years it was mined over 10 million BTC, which are realistically divided between a very small number of people who mined in that period of time.

[RonF]

me - 250.375 Bitcoin at about $250 each plus 250.375 Bitcoin cash given for free when it first came out in August.  Made me wealthy.