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

[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.

[1715278141]

1715278141

[1715278141]

1715278141

[1715278141]

1715278141

[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.