How many individual holders of Bitcoin are there?

[kryptqnick]

There's no way to know for sure. The most common assumption I've seen is taking the number of Bitcoin addresses and assuming that there's roughly one address per person (some people have more, but some addresses also contain the funds of tons of people, like wallets of crypto exchanges). But that's, of course, a very rough estimate. There are also repsentative polls, which can be quite useful, but they usually only cover specific countries. This can provide insight into how many people own some BTC in specific countries, but that doesn't give the full picture. As Bitcoin users don't need to provide IDs, and it's easy for one person to operate multiple Bitcoin wallets, it's hard to make a good estimate of the total amount of users.

[Blitzboy]

Its difficult to count Bitcoin holders. The blockchain's unique wallet addresses can be examined first. Its a ballpark figure as one person can have many wallets. Initial data on active wallets is available from several blockchain analytics companies.The number of Bitcoin debates on Reddit, Twitter, and specialized forums may indicate rising participation and adoption. Although its not a precise statistic, more people participating in these debates likely means more Bitcoin holders.

Bitcoin's acceptance by institutions and integration into payment systems and investment portfolios suggest ongoing rise among individual holdings. This development is more than numbers-it represents a radical change in money perception and use. Growing popularity of Bitcoin shows its resiliency and potential as a movement, not just an asset.

[yazher]

You cannot possibly do this because most of the time people are using multiple wallets even if they only own those bitcoins for themselves and the list goes on and on and so as their friends and families as well. Let's just say we have more people owning bitcoins right now compared to the last 5 years and still counting especially right now because we have lots of promotions and popular artists and companies are also joining us unlike in the past when they were avoiding us completely.  The point here is, let's just be thankful because right now we are not being alienated or strangers to others because they have become one of us right now due to the fact that they also wanted to have successful investments as well.

[suzanne5223]

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?

There are some results provided by a user of this forum and there are some stats you'll find online but there's no way you'll know the real number of individuals that are currently holding Bitcoin as an asset cause we have some BTC holders that like privacy and always keep themselves from prying eyes.
 

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

The key metric to understanding the market is understanding what influences the market like positive, negative news, halving, mining difficulty, etc.

[Asuspawer09]

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.

There were probably no accurate data about how many individual holders of Bitocin since we dont really know how many Bitcoin address one trader has, I mean one trader could easily have multiple addresses right so it's impossible to know how many addresses you have, but you could totally look it up online how many Bitcoin address was active, etc, there was a website if I'm not mistaken it was called Glassnode where they gather data as well as a graph of this data. There is also data on how many addresses have one Bitcoin on their wallet, holding less than one Bitcoin or even more, that could surely be useful in some cases on research, etc.

This is for sure not that accurate and just pretty much estimates but for sure they can be a good reference if you really want to understand the market situation, could also be useful data in the future. You could take a look at Glassnode and see it by yourself if it can be useful to you. But in my opinion, there are still so many factors that affect our market so it's really impossible to accurately predict the movement of the market probably they might be a good reference and basis but not all the time.

[justdimin]

You cannot possibly do this because most of the time people are using multiple wallets even if they only own those bitcoins for themselves and the list goes on and on and so as their friends and families as well. Let's just say we have more people owning bitcoins right now compared to the last 5 years and still counting especially right now because we have lots of promotions and popular artists and companies are also joining us unlike in the past when they were avoiding us completely.  The point here is, let's just be thankful because right now we are not being alienated or strangers to others because they have become one of us right now due to the fact that they also wanted to have successful investments as well.

Yeah true, there is no possible way to ever know how many people are using crypto. However, we could potentially see the active ones, because there are way too many inactive ones, check all the addresses that are active within the last 30 days, and that could be something decent to see, you are still missing all those that deal with just exchanges, but it is not a bad idea.

I personally believe that the best thing to do right now would be making sure that we do not focus on the number of people who are in the crypto world, but the amount of money, that is much more important. If you look at it from the money perspective, that would always make bitcoin better. It would be better to have 1 person with 1 billion invested into bitcoin then 1 million people with one dollar invested. This is why we need to take a look at the money and not the population, and the money is there, we can see it and we can make calculations based on that as well, it's called the volume.

[MarjorieZimmermanGinger]

The number of stockholders of a security is always a key metric. I guess it speaks to market volatility, the resiliency of the instrument to shocks, and so on. Also, if a security becomes more widely held over time, that's often a good sign, and more closely held can be a sign of trouble (obviously this is just one data point though).

Of course many many people here at bitcointalk.org sure think this metric is important since they insist the metric is going up all of the time, which is why they want to buy more Bitcoin :-).

Why does it reflect market volatility, do you mean because there are a number of buying and selling processes that occur on the exchange and how is this related if the holder keeps bitcoin in a wallet and never trades in the short term. As far as I remember, I once read a post about holders storing more bitcoin in their wallets compared to bitcoin that was traded on the exchange. Do you think market volatility is the same as the narrative you are trying to put forward.

So far I have never considered the amount of bitcoin holdings held, whether traded or stored in the wallet, when wanting to invest and maybe many other people also think the same about that. The reason why bitcoin is much more fundamental is because it has resilience and a four-year cycle as its journey.

[legiteum]

Why does it reflect market volatility, do you mean because there are a number of buying and selling processes that occur on the exchange and how is this related if the holder keeps bitcoin in a wallet and never trades in the short term. As far as I remember, I once read a post about holders storing more bitcoin in their wallets compared to bitcoin that was traded on the exchange. Do you think market volatility is the same as the narrative you are trying to put forward.

So far I have never considered the amount of bitcoin holdings held, whether traded or stored in the wallet, when wanting to invest and maybe many other people also think the same about that. The reason why bitcoin is much more fundamental is because it has resilience and a four-year cycle as its journey.

I was only guessing at the volatility thing. I only know that people consider this a key metric for other instruments that are owned by a multitude of entities e.g. stocks.

Regardless of the reasons, clearly lots of people consider how widely held Bitcoin is to be an important metric. That in of itself makes it an important metric since it speaks to the perception of the instrument's popularity / desirability.

Put it another way, if a study showed that fewer and fewer people were investing in bitcoin over time, that would exert a lot of downward pressure on the price.

[Dimitri94]

It is impossible to know the statistics of how many bitcoins are held by holders. If you try to understand this you can guess by yourself. A person can use multiple bitcoin wallets. Maybe you are using one bitcoin wallet but someone else may be using 50-100 wallets or less or more. There is no obligation to use it. You can use your wallet as per your need. I don't think it is necessary to investigate this matter. We know about circulating supply I think that is enough. Out of 21 million bitcoins, more than 19 million bitcoins are held in various wallets.

[Patrol69]

It is almost impossible to tell who has an individual investment in Bitcoin and how much Bitcoin is held. It can't really be calculated in any way. Assuming that the most advanced technology is used to calculate this but whenever it is calculated completely, it will be seen that more than one amount of investors have invested before calculating but then the calculation will be wrong. If you know any investor, you can know about his investment through him, but it is not possible to know how much every investor is investing in the world or how much any investor is investing. Now if someone says that more than 2 crore people in the world have invested in Bitcoin, we have to believe it because we cannot calculate the exact amount.

[AirtelBuzz]

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 has a way of knowing. I think a person can have multiple bitcoins in multiple wallets. Asking such a question seems strange to me. But no one can say for sure who has how many bitcoins or who is investing how many bitcoins.It is unknown to everyone how many bitcoins people in the world have or how many bitcoin addresses they have.Let's come to your point since you ask this kind of question the answer I would say is that millions of people in the world have bitcoins you have to believe because you don't know.

[peter0425]

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.

You cannot call it decentralized if you can name names of whom are holding and from where and when. so sorry to tell that there are no record or even estimation of actual Holders or Users but  what we can see is How many wallets are in moving or used but that does not prove how many users because there are wallets that is being owned by single person some even using thousand of wallet for single person .
but what I wanna ask is for what that you ask this? is there by any chance that you have to know this ?or something to do with you?

[Smartvirus]

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.

If by any means any and every address could be traced right back to an individual, then that becomes a problem for Bitcoin as, some vital part of the development is its anonymity. You either get to lose that willing by tying yourself and identity to some address or not.
For most individuals, they change address just as you want because it’s that easy. Most times, you can generate several addresses on same wallet or using several wallets without having any link to show that it’s managed by a single individual or entity.

@OP, you just wouldn’t get that answer, find or develop a tool that can accurately do that. Very few and well funded exchanges have been able to archive some sort of linkage and that is mainly due to reports on an abuse from an address and consequently, bookmarking the address with all related transactions on it using its platform and the next is, signed addresses and addresses used per user on signature campaigns.

It doesn’t speak volume on the lost of addresses used by on forum users and off for users.
By the way @OP, the information you seek has got little to no good to do in the cryptospace.

[Z_MBFM]

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.

You cannot call it decentralized if you can name names of whom are holding and from where and when. so sorry to tell that there are no record or even estimation of actual Holders or Users but  what we can see is How many wallets are in moving or used but that does not prove how many users because there are wallets that is being owned by single person some even using thousand of wallet for single person .
but what I wanna ask is for what that you ask this? is there by any chance that you have to know this ?or something to do with you?

Here it is possible to see how many wallets have Bitcoins but no one can say who will hold them for how many days as it is a personal matter. so no website or any individual can provide this information. And meanwhile it is not possible to extract any person's information through the Bitcoin wallet, that is why it is decentralized. Since no one can ever say what op wants to know, op should lock this topic. Because even if the answer to this question is not found here, there will be various types of unnecessary discussions which are completely unnecessary

[legiteum]

You cannot call it decentralized if you can name names of whom are holding and from where and when. so sorry to tell that there are no record or even estimation of actual Holders or Users but  what we can see is How many wallets are in moving or used but that does not prove how many users because there are wallets that is being owned by single person some even using thousand of wallet for single person .
but what I wanna ask is for what that you ask this? is there by any chance that you have to know this ?or something to do with you?

There seem to be ways of estimating the numbers, which many on this thread have already posted. There are also ways of getting at individuals, as the advent of mixers demonstrates.

Obviously we can't get an exact number, but getting a vague idea can show us the trends, which is the most important thing.

The reason I asked is based on trying to understand the market, nothing personal.

[franky1]

no way to know exact numbers

but BTC is held on UTXO
and if there are 152m utxo. then there are less than 152m holders. because someone may have more then one utxo

but what is for sure there cant be more then 152m btc holders. however there can be hundreds of millions of centralised exchange balance records being promised coin if the withdraw.. but CEX balance records are not btc holders

[so98nn]

I am not sure how there are some data analytics because its literally confusing to understand the number of individual bitcoin holders. I mean whenever I am performing a peer to peer transactions with one of the vendor they are generating new address each time. Now lets assume there are thousands of peeps like me whose doing such p2p transactions everyday. This means that vendor must be creating thousands or at least hundreds of addresses everyday for privacy purpose. How one can confidently say that these are individual addresses? I mean this adds up wrong data and they might consider them as hundreds of different individuals. As far as I understand there is just no way to segregate such addresses. I am surprised still they have such analytics. Also, cant imagine the same if collect all addresses from all the exchanges available around the globe.

[Tamaperdana]

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.

It seems that doing research or research on this will definitely be difficult. Because bitcoin is a highly anonymous asset, even the name of the owner of each wallet would be difficult to know. Plus, I don't think it's that important to know someone else's bitcoin amount. So it's better to focus on your own bitcoins and keep doing DIP.

[Dzwaafu11]

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 haven’t seen any statistics showing this question you asked. We don’t know how many bitcoin holders we have, even in our various areas, because you can’t invest and are telling people that you have invested in bitcoin because it will lead to being scammed and other things that are similar to such things. So, as other people have said earlier, that is how there is not an amount of bitcoin holders, although we have millions of them, but seriously, to say the exact amount of them, it will be hard. So therefore, you should know this from now on; we don’t actually know yet; other people have already said that.

Just take the example of p2p trading. Those people buying or selling bitcoin are always giving different addresses, so that means these people, whether the buyer or the seller, are using multiple addresses, and all their bitcoin inside them can be used to create more than 100 wallets for security purposes, so how will they be able to identify the amount of the holder? I believe it will confuse you to see that many people have already told you that 95% of bitcoin has already been held and mine, which means those bitcoins are already held by investors in different types of wallets, but to get the exact amount of people holding this bitcoin is what you will find difficult, man.

[famososMuertos]

Well, today it is around millions, but I do not think that these data are relevant in the comparison of knowing the market volume,now, for governments and exchanges, it if important.

Then, crypto.com estimates 420 million users. But it is still just an estimate, so the best way to determine a close number is to know the Txs, and in that sense this infographic serves to speculate the figure that we may never know with certainty.

^{However, this doesn’t help us determine how many people actually use Bitcoin. After all, one person can create as many addresses as they like. Moreover, one person might have multiple wallet addresses across various crypto exchanges. Additionally, most of these Bitcoin wallet addresses are empty or inactive.}

^{source:https://www.techopedia.com/cryptocurrency/how-many-people-use-bitcoin}

^{#TBT topic 2024}