How Many People Actually Own Bitcoin Worldwide?

[stompix]

Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

Users as in people who actively use Bitcoin?  It is hard to believe we will reach that many.  Eventually, we will have at least a Billion people who have used Bitcoin at least once.  It is only about time until it happens.

It's not hard to believe it's technically impossible unless something changes!
The network capacity is 15 million a month, that's it, 180 milliona year, hardly enough to call a user when he is doing a tx every 5 years!
LN is not helping here, you still need users to create that initial funding tx, no way for 1 billion to be able to do it till 2030!

And if you look at the actual on-chain data right now, well, not that many are keen to do it anyhow!

The 100-300 million estimations are also consistent with all polls I know about BItcoin ownership, which talk about up to 15-20% of "crypto ownership" (not only Bitcoin!) in some selected countries like Argentina or the US or the UAE, but in most it is more in the range of 5-10%, and that includes "past users". According to this poll currently around half of the users who have somewhen owned Bitcoin still currently own it. Thus a low single digit percentage of Bitcoin alone, including all IOUs, seems reasonable.

You know, this number 300 million....
When you think Binance has the majority of SafuBitcoin so let's say 100 milllion users , 400 000 coins in  cold storage, that would be ...$280....
Let's say 50 million and we barely get an average of $500 and this with thosecoldwallets holding a ton of those coins from when BTC was way lower.

I'm not buying anything over 3% owenership, including SafuBitcoin!

[X-ray]

As others have pointed out, figuring the particular number is very hard. You just never know if multiple wallet is being owned by an individual. It's more realistic to see the trading volume worldwide across different countries to determine how popular bitcoin is in there.

If the volume is reaching hundred millions or billions, that's already popular enough.

In the Coinbase US the volume is reaching almost 1 billion dollar for 24h and to be exact around ~800m, the real total volume could easily be 3x-5x of that if accounting for ETF and other exchanges.

[OsaiEmma]

The interesting part in all of these is that Bitcoin adoption is still in its early stage right now. If only 1–2% of the world owns Bitcoin today, then the question becomes.

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

I brought this three questions out so members can answer and we discuss.
However by advice to everyone accumulate enough bitcoin and hold because the future of bitcoin success is clear.

For your first question, what will happen if 10% of 8billion people owns Bitcoin, and here's my thought:
If eventually at some point, 10% of 8billion people owns Bitcoin, that is 800million people owning Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will be extremely scarce, let's take a hypothetical situation and say, when this happens, the TS of Bitcoin got to its maximum of 21 million, so let's say 21million/800million that will be ~0.026.

So hypothetically no body will be able to have up to 1btc, but there are people with even a thousand BTC already so you can imagine the rate of scarcity, this will make the demand high hereby exponentially shooting up the price, and I know the price will be astronomical.

The second question, will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Not difficult per say but rather very expensive, at this point, a fraction of Bitcoin (Satoshi) will be really expensive, so imagine owning 1 Bitcoin, that will be mind blowing expensive.

Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?
Now that's more than 10% of the world population, but u previously said this,

Note: calculating the real number of Bitcoin holders is not easy because the Bitcoin network does not record identities, it only records addresses.

So if we get to that point, we probably cannot tell for sure, but who knows, we just might.

[Furball808]

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?

Depends how they use bitcoin. Will there be more people who will keep holding bitcoin or will there be more those who will use it for everyday transactions? With that many adopting bitcoin, the latter part may be possible since it will be more accessible.

Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?

That exactly is why the demand or the value will keep rising. It’s best if you own now compared to if you still want to “fight” others for ownership.

[Darker45]

"Actually own" as in they're in full control of their own Satoshis? I bet it doesn't reach 1-2% of the world's population. Especially with what's happening lately when people could get exposure to Bitcoin in more ways than one, many might not even have not just a private key but even an address.

Before, you can own but not own Bitcoin only when you're keeping your Sats in centralized exchanges and other services. Today, you can get your exposure to Bitcoin via ETFs and Bitcoin treasuries. That's not actually owning Bitcoin.

[GiftedMAN]

It's very tough to determine the number of people that own Bitcoin globally but one thing I clear which is that Bitcoin has gsined more popularity than before which means that a good numbers of people now own it but we can't tell the specific amount. And as Bitcoin keep being valuable more people would own it.

[knowngunman]

Note: calculating the real number of Bitcoin holders is not easy because the Bitcoin network does not record identities, it only records addresses.

And the address does not represent holders. There are several addresses with no ownership due to lost keys and the fact that people can have multiple addresses make it difficult to get the actual number of holders through public address.

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

Of course, The limited supply means it becomes more harder for each person to hold a whole coin in the future. This will create scarcity and scarcity in crypto automatically translate to price increase.

If Bitcoin adoption reaches a billion, it means owning 0.01 BTC place you above most people on earth who could ever own bitcoin. So yeah we can consider now as early before global adoption reach that high.

[pawanjain]

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

It's not entirely possible to know the number of bitcoin owners worldwide because blockchain only stores addresses.
We can surely know the number of bitcoin addresses but that won't prove anything.
We are still at an early stage and yet only a small portion of the world holds bitcoin.
It's quite possible that we reach 1 billion bitcoin users across the world.

So yeah, the supply shock is already out there in the upcoming years and we may see bitcoin skyrocketing due to the supply shock.
Since there are less than 21 million bitcoins for the whole world, holding even 0.01 BTC might make you a millionaire in the future.
So yeah, the limited supply will make ownership increasingly difficult for new bitcoin users (price wise).

[Lucius]

~snip~
What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?

Why do you think 10% is significant compared to 2%? That's still a very small percentage to change anything, and the real question is what those 2% or 10% are doing with Bitcoin, or how many people understand what they've actually bought?

Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?

I think that limited supply is not a problem, because there will always be coins on the market that can be purchased, it's just a question of at what price. In addition, the average Joe is not one of those who will buy 1 BTC or a significant amount, but a few tens or hundreds of $ worth of BTC.
 

Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

10% would be around 800+ million users, so you're essentially asking the same question. For me, this is a less important issue, because the number of users will always be difficult to determine.

I brought this three questions out so members can answer and we discuss.
However by advice to everyone accumulate enough bitcoin and hold because the future of bitcoin success is clear.

How can you be sure that the future of BTC is clear? Whether anyone likes it or not, the future of BTC, like everything else, is quite uncertain. In a world where wars have become normal, and internet shutdowns are an integral part of them, who can say that anything that depends on the internet is safe?

[Catenaccio]

It's quite possible that we reach 1 billion bitcoin users across the world.

Bitcoin active addresses chart shows that peaks are around 1.2M active addresses but now it is about 650,000 active addresses.
https://www.bitcoinmagazinepro.com/charts/bitcoin-active-addresses/

Since there are less than 21 million bitcoins for the whole world, holding even 0.01 BTC might make you a millionaire in the future.
So yeah, the limited supply will make ownership increasingly difficult for new bitcoin users (price wise).

It is only a minor little than 21 million bitcoins so saying it is 21M or a little bit less than 21M (as 20999999.9769 bitcoins) is not big difference.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

[Localhostspeed]

As others have pointed out, figuring the particular number is very hard. You just never know if multiple wallet is being owned by an individual. It's more realistic to see the trading volume worldwide across different countries to determine how popular bitcoin is in there.

If the volume is reaching hundred millions or billions, that's already popular enough.

In the Coinbase US the volume is reaching almost 1 billion dollar for 24h and to be exact around ~800m, the real total volume could easily be 3x-5x of that if accounting for ETF and other exchanges.

Since the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't have an identity attached to address, there is no way for us to know which address belongs to a person and another. If we consider the number of users across all the centralized exchanges that owns their coins on the exchanges, we may have huge numbers in millions, we have not also discussed those that use a custody wallet where they have to generate many wallets and many don't repeat their addresses multiple times.

What about the addresses that people can't get their private keys again, the wallet address belongs to people but since they can't access it again, we don't know how it's going to be from the question OP has asked. The best way to analyze on Bitcoin is when it's done from wallet address perspective and not from identity because even Bitcoin isn't best done with identity since it's against the use of Kyc and also like to improve the human privacy.

[Jostern]

How do you intend to quantify that, because you can not determine the number of people that have bitcoin in their disposal, because that is a very difficult thing to determine, most of the people who are talking about having bitcoin they might still not have bitcoin in their disposal, and that is a very difficult thing to understand, some people do not have bitcoin but if you ask them they will tell you that they have bitcoin, and honestly speaking you will have to understand that it is very difficult to know number of people who have bitcoin, and I have come to understand that bitcoin is an easy commodity to understand how it possibly works out for people who are investing.

[Hyphen(-)]

Note: calculating the real number of Bitcoin holders is not easy because the Bitcoin network does not record identities, it only records addresses.

The interesting part in all of these is that Bitcoin adoption is still in its early stage right now. If only 1–2% of the world owns Bitcoin today, then the question becomes.

Yes, to get the exact number of people holding Bitcoin will be very difficult because one person can own as many Bitcoin wallets and addresses they want and you know that with one seed phrase, you can generate a lot of Bitcoin addresses that is why no statistical data can give you the actual number because there is no KYC in crypto wallets.
Furthermore, exchanges have users that hold Bitcoinin their wallet, I dint know what those Bitcoin in the exchange custody is considered because a lot of people uses centralized exchanges instead of decentralized wallets.
In my opinion, the percentage should be more than 2%.

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

I brought this three questions out so members can answer and we discuss.
However by advice to everyone accumulate enough bitcoin and hold because the future of bitcoin success is clear.

Adoption is what we want always, the rate at which people come to adopt Bitcoin the more it will be valuable because of its limited supply, and I think the price will go higher than expected.

[cryptoaddictchie]

Thats quite an interesring point because if only a small percentage of the world currently owns Bitcoin, it shows that adoption is still relatively early compared to traditional financial systems. If adoption ever reached something like 10% of the global population, the limited supply could definitely make each coin more valuable and push new users toward owning smaller fractions instead of whole coins. At the same time, mass adoption will likely depend not just on scarcity but also on better education, usability, and trust in the ecosystem. My only guess why bitcoin dropping is pure manipulation from some big deep pocket users who want a round robin of good entry.

[Youngrebel]

Most popular question that is being asked in the crypto space is, how many people in the world actually own Bitcoin?
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, the adoption is still relatively small when you compare it to the world population.

Recently it is being estimated that around 100 million people worldwide hold Bitcoin in some form. Now considering the world population is about 8 billion people, this means only around 1–2% of the world currently owns Bitcoin.

Note: calculating the real number of Bitcoin holders is not easy because the Bitcoin network does not record identities, it only records addresses.

The interesting part in all of these is that Bitcoin adoption is still in its early stage right now. If only 1–2% of the world owns Bitcoin today, then the question becomes.

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

I brought this three questions out so members can answer and we discuss.
However by advice to everyone accumulate enough bitcoin and hold because the future of bitcoin success is clear.

This is relatively a very small % of people with Bitcoin holders compa5ed to the entire population of people in the world.  But I'm sure one major reason for this is due to the fact that most countries donot support  the use of Bitcoin in their countries.  Infact most people in such countries who even have it or does anything related to that are hiding it and doing it in a secretive way. So such person cannot go about trying to tell people about it or even make others know about it. It is mostly done in the secrete, hence the poor turn out to owning a Bitcoin.

[Ndabagi01]

The interesting part in all of these is that Bitcoin adoption is still in its early stage right now. If only 1–2% of the world owns Bitcoin today, then the question becomes.

What will really happen if 10% of the global population adopts Bitcoin?
Will the limited supply make ownership increasingly difficult for new users?
Could Bitcoin eventually reach 1 billion users?

I brought this three questions out so members can answer and we discuss.
However by advice to everyone accumulate enough bitcoin and hold because the future of bitcoin success is clear.

If 10% of gen global world population will own bitcoin, then we can just assume that almost every part of the world will know about bitcoin and won’t be something new to them again. Just 1% of people hold bitcoin now and we can see how far it has come to be. I just imagine how if we have more people owning bitcoin, it would be like a worldwide adopting with 10% of people owning bitcoin.

Limited supply will increasing have effect on its price but owning more bitcoin is actually not going to affect new users because of the increasing ownership. Bitcoin can be bought in Satoshi’s, so I don’t think that will be a major problem.

[d5000]

LN is not helping here, you still need users to create that initial funding tx, no way for 1 billion to be able to do it till 2030!

That's why Bitcoin would need sidechains and Ark for mass adoption. Ark has made progress last year, sidechains too, but there is still not fully decentralized one. This seems to be however an incentive problem (premined semi-centralized sidechains are more attractive for startups) because technical solutions for the biggest problem (the two-way peg) already exist (dynamic federations like tBTC and hashrate escrows).

The reason why the adoption for payments is lacking is in my opinion that downside volatility is still too high. Even a prepaid card type investment (e.g. in Lightning) doesn't really get attractive if you can lose 30% in a few weeks.

When you think Binance has the majority of SafuBitcoin so let's say 100 milllion users , 400 000 coins in  cold storage, that would be ...$280....
Let's say 50 million and we barely get an average of $500 and this with thosecoldwallets holding a ton of those coins from when BTC was way lower.
I'm not buying anything over 3% owenership, including SafuBitcoin!

3%, or roughly 80-100 million, would also be my personal estimation for each person which is owning at least a satoshi including IOUs, wrapped tokens, ETFs and all other "bitcoin-pegged" assets, but also those who received 0.01 BTC from a friend in 2015 and then forgot about it, or directly lost their coins. All estimations in a much higher range (e.g. the 300 million or so by crypto.com) include past owners.

Your calculation has however a slight flaw: "a majority" does not mean "almost all" Bitcoins. In many countries, Binance is not that dominant. Google says its market share overall is around 40%. So we'd get values of about $500-600 per capita for 100 million users, which would be a reasonable average.

[nakamura12]

I would say that people can only make a estimate on how many people actually own bitcoin worldwide. If you make a research about how many people own bitcoin worldwide is that it is only an estimate and never say exact total of people who owns bitcoin. If you read many replies here is that it is also an estimate number. The number of people who owns bitcoin change since there will be some bitcoin owner who are forced to sell their bitcoin like for emergency funds when they run out of money and only bitcoin left so, it means he is no longer an person that owns a bitcoin.

[CryptoYar]

Despitee the growth, there are less than 1 million owners of full Bitcoin and as we get near 10 percent use cash black hole will probably happen since most of supply is already given to long-term owners. I think you are on right path by telling to buy in large amounts now, fight will no longer be between one person and another to get last 1 million coins, but between businesses and nations.
We are already in 1997 internet moment of Bitcoin, and as we get near 1 billion users in 2028, having even single piece will put you in top group of world that most people will not be in way to pay to join later.

[Agbamoni]

Well, I don't know where you got your own information from and what your source is. But last year when I came across a Tweet on Twitter it said, less than 4% of the world population owns Bitcoin. Since I was not satisfied with little information on that Tweet, I immediately embarked on some research, during the research I was able to gather some information on how they did the calculations to arrive at that figure, my thread. And the minute I saw this thread I immediately embarked on some research to check if the figure changed, but to my surprise still less than 4% of the world population owns Bitcoin. Meaning Bitcoin adoption is still slow, and very slow in Africa.

It wont exceed 4% for now, at least not yet. However, one thing is sure, there will be changes, rapid interest in Bitcoin as years go by, and the adoption will increase. If para venture, the use case of Bitcoin gets to a point where users can now shop for groceries and make payments with Bitcoin for small amounts ( that is, if it is possible), there will be more holders of Bitcoin. Well, I would like you to do proper research on the total number of addresses that have received or sent Bitcoin before. I think the numbers will be close to the 4%