How many individual holders of Bitcoin are there?

[legiteum]

Is there some metric or study somewhere that could let us know how many individuals (individual humans) currently hold Bitcoin as an asset? Are there any metrics that could approximate the number? Estimate change over time?

I would think this would be a key metric in understanding the market.

[Charles-Tim]

There is no way you can know that because a single person may have more than one address. I have not seen such research or way to know how many bitcoin holders we have. You can only know about addresses and not the holders.

[Ambatman]

Alot!!!
Way more than 50
Well as Charles Tim said we cant really tell who owns what except the number of addresses.
That's one of the beauty of Bitcoin, its privacy.
Individuals that have multiple addresses exist while CEX holds many individual bitcoin in one wallet( why the term not your key not your wallet)

I would think this would be a key metric in understanding the market.

Not really,it would only help to know are diversified Bitcoin is
but if you looking for how many wallet address own a BTC then that would be possible to find online.

[The Cryptovator]

Ask yourself. How many Bitcoin addresses do you have? I believe I have generated more than 100 Bitcoin addresses. And most of them are used, and a few are blanked. So how could we assume how many humans are Bitcoin holders? There is absolutely no way to predict or identify real human holders. A merchant uses a lot of addresses on the payment gateway, but it's a human or company. Any tool can't identify the address owner; hence, it's impossible to count how many humans are holding Bitcoin.

[_BlackStar]

Is there some metric or study somewhere that could let us know how many individuals (individual humans) currently hold Bitcoin as an asset? Are there any metrics that could approximate the number? Estimate change over time?

I would think this would be a key metric in understanding the market.

No one knows for sure how many bitcoin holders there are - but so far there are millions of addresses that have bitcoin in them. You can check it here to see from largest to smallest amount of bitcoin.

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/addresses?#

It doesn't matter how many holders there are - your profits are yours, and so are your losses.

[Adbitco]

Sometimes it gets me weird seeing people asking this kind of questions knowing too well there will be no good answer or very hard to guess and give accurate results because there are lots of individual with not less than 3 to 5 bitcoin addresses especially those who uses those wallet that permit change of address like electrum. One can change address while doing transaction, at the point of this lots of addresses could be recorded making it too hard to sum up all total user that is having address.

[hatshepsut93]

My guesstimate would be assuming that an average user has coins in 5 different addresses, so just divide by that the current number of traanctions with sufficient balance, like at least $100. That's like 5-20 million users. But then there are also people who store their coins on exchange, and some don't even have a wallet and store all their coinse there. But you are getting the idea - there are tens of millions of users.

[Mate2237]

Op this will be an rhetorical question because I don't think anyone can know that metric system you are bringing. Even in my location I can't tell. The total number of Bitcoin created was 21 millions and as it is, I don't think anyone knows how many Bitcoin is left to mine and how many have been mined. And 95% of users here in the forum hold Bitcoin and the remaining is just for newbies and those who don't have enough money to invest yet.

But in 2022 someone created a thread that has the total number of Bitcoin whales and other holders of Bitcoin but it was not all but few.

[franky1]

ignoring CEX database balance users

there are 152million UTXO's meaning less than 152m actually hold parts of actual btc
(less than due to fact a person can own more then one utxo)

[Zaguru12]

It will be hard to get the number of people that hold bitcoin because you need all addresses to be linked to each other and then to the individual which is not easily possible because of the anonymous nature of bitcoin. The real right answer is how many addresses actually holds bitcoin or sats. Currently we have around 51,723,705 funded addresses according to LoyceV stats. This can be the only metric you can get because even chainalysis cannot link all addresses together.

The total number of Bitcoin created was 21 millions and as it is, I don't think anyone knows how many Bitcoin is left to mine and how many have been mined.

One can actually know the know the number of bitcoin already mined and the number left to mine. According to coinmarketcap a total of 19.588 million bitcoin is already in supply with less than 1.412 million left to mine since the total number to be mine isn’t exactly 21 million. That’s like around 95% already mined.

[tabas]

They probably have some ways to determine wallets but not individuals or people. Because someone or an individual can own tens or hundreds of wallets that contains Bitcoins. If the metric is just about having Bitcoin then that will be counted as a wallet that has it or they can have it in record as someone who holds Bitcoins. That's why it doesn't make sense to determine how many individuals are holding Bitcoin. Thus, if someone would ask everyone if they're holding Bitcoin, that won't make sense as well.

[Mate2237]

One can actually know the know the number of bitcoin already mined and the number left to mine. According to coinmarketcap a total of 19.588 million bitcoin is already in supply with less than 1.412 million left to mine since the total number to be mine isn’t exactly 21 million. That’s like around 95% already mined.

Hey guy this 1.412 Millions is getting me confused because it is getting contrary to the Total number of Bitcoin which was created and launched. Though as I said, I have seen some experts shown us the mined ones and the ones to mine but it was not like this number or figure you gave. Now from what you are saying the leftovers to mine is even more the the 21 millions people were saying. Lolz. This is more interesting. Well I am not a cryptocurrency analysis so I can't say anything on this for now. But I will make some research about this again.

[Cryptomultiplier]

Is there some metric or study somewhere that could let us know how many individuals (individual humans) currently hold Bitcoin as an asset? Are there any metrics that could approximate the number? Estimate change over time?

I would think this would be a key metric in understanding the market.

If there was a metrics that can evenly estimate the future number of individuals to adopt or join the network of BTC users, it would still not be accurate enough but just be a speculated figure.
Am of the honest view that new users join the network to hold BTC or to not feel left out of trading or feel dumb when the topic of BTC is brought up. Hence why the number of individual users or holders of BTC rise on still and can be hardly properly ascertained.

[Zaguru12]

Hey guy this 1.412 Millions is getting me confused because it is getting contrary to the Total number of Bitcoin which was created and launched. Though as I said, I have seen some experts shown us the mined ones and the ones to mine but it was not like this number or figure you gave. Now from what you are saying the leftovers to mine is even more the the 21 millions people were saying. Lolz. This is more interesting. Well I am not a cryptocurrency analysis so I can't say anything on this for now. But I will make some research about this again.

Hey mate I think you are actually mixing many things up, the stats provided up there isn’t even mine but rather that of coiinmarketcap as indicated there with a source and that could be wrong from what you might have read somewhere else bit still the difference wouldn’t still be much. If around 19.588 bitcoin have been mined according to them, then the number of bitcoin left to mine will just be 1.412 million, add this numbers up and they give you exactly 21 million bitcoin in total which as I said is not the exact number to be mined, as it is said that total number of bitcoin to be is kind of less than 21 million and not exactly that amount. The numbers aren’t mine and they are also not more than the 21 million you said.

Sorry but we are going off topic here and it is derailing the thread.

[PrivacyG]

I have had a few hundred Addresses at the very least.  I have my stash split across probably around 100 Addresses if not more and I do have a few Seeds and Private Keys I surely forgot about that are now lost with a balance of 0.001, 0.01 or more Bitcoin.

How is any body supposed to calculate a number of individual holders without an enormous error?

[apogio]

There is absolutely no way to know for sure.

But hypothetically, if we knew how many addresses have a balance (let's say N addresses), then we can assume that there are M people, where M <= N that hold bitcoin.

We could use LoyceV's data from here: http://addresses.loyce.club/

I am using the "List of all funded Bitcoin addresses" file.

It has 51,723,705 addresses in it, so we know that Loyce's node is aware of 51,723,705 addresses that have a balance.

We can assume that there are no more than 51,723,705 individual bitcoin holders.

Bonus problem: Can 2 or more people own 1 address? Absolutely! Let's say we both have one wallet and we use them in a multisig setup. This would generate an address set where we are both needed to generate the addresses. So all these addresses have both of us as owners. But we also own the addresses that our wallets generate separately.

Bonus problem 2: Can I own one of your addresses? In fact I could theoretically own all the addresses that exist using a single seed phrase, if I used various derivation paths.

EDIT:
Zaguru12 mentioned it first  

[cryptomaniac_xxx]

Is there some metric or study somewhere that could let us know how many individuals (individual humans) currently hold Bitcoin as an asset? Are there any metrics that could approximate the number? Estimate change over time?

I would think this would be a key metric in understanding the market.

I'm not sure if this is the data that you are looking for,



https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

But as you can see, there is a break down of the addresses that holds certain amount of BTC.

And I think the numbers are growing as per this tweet last August,



https://twitter.com/_Checkmatey_/status/1688350682682888193

[rahim066]

106 million the number a found on this website
https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/

[franky1]

address counts are meaningless
CEX account numbers are meaningless
wallet downloads are meaningless

all bitcoins are on UTXO so unless you have key access to a UTXO amount. you dont own bitcoin
there are only 152m UTXO meaning less than 152m actually have control of btc

[oktana]

Ask yourself. How many Bitcoin addresses do you have? I believe I have generated more than 100 Bitcoin addresses. And most of them are used, and a few are blanked. So how could we assume how many humans are Bitcoin holders? There is absolutely no way to predict or identify real human holders. A merchant uses a lot of addresses on the payment gateway, but it's a human or company. Any tool can't identify the address owner; hence, it's impossible to count how many humans are holding Bitcoin.

This is true because what assumption would we take? That each of the addresses you have generated belongs to different people? And the what? The empty ones would be wrong calculated as someone who isn’t holding? Who would even think that 100 addresses belong to one person, and to know what they have and if they have, you need to sum up all addresses. What’s even more crazy is what if this is the case for everyone? Having 100 addresses each. Really impossible calculation