If you have started to take a serious interest in the world of Bitcoin, then you have probably wondered at some point how many people own Bitcoin.
This is a really good question, because the answer to it could indicate acceptance by a large number of people.
However, the true answer is that nobody is ever going to know the exact number of Bitcoin users in the world.
As we will explain in the article below about Bitcoin users, we can only estimate the number of people that invest in and trade the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
One of the most common methods of estimating Bitcoin ownership is to look at the amount held in different addresses.
Estimates show that there are 106 million people who own Bitcoin.
There are 460 million Bitcoin addresses that have a balance greater than 0.0 Bitcoin. Out of these 460 million Bitcoin addresses, 288 million of them don’t hold any Bitcoin in them today.
The remaining 172 million are Bitcoin addresses that make regular Bitcoin transactions.
Out of this number, 147 million belonged to Bitcoin services, exchanges, merchants, or other types of market actors.
This brings us down to 25 million addresses that are considered to be active wallets that are owned by private individuals on the network.
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The Issues with This Method
There are a couple of issues with this method. Let’s discuss them.
One Person Can Have Multiple Addresses and Wallets
The trouble with this method is that one individual can have a lot of different wallets and addresses. As an example, one might have a Bitcoin wallet or address on their iPhone, and the rest on their laptop.
This means that if we treated every address as a person, it would count as two people, when really, it is one.
There are a lot of people out there that own hundreds of addresses, and up to 10 different cryptocurrency wallets.
Services Can Hold BTC in One Address that Belongs to Many Individuals
On the other side of the coin, one address can actually belong to more than one person. Bitfinex is an exchange that allows its users to trade Bitcoin, that works with millions of clients.
If we considered each address as an individual, this would be considered one person, but in fact might really represent thousands of people.
Many People Don’t Move Their Bitcoin Off the Exchange
There are also a lot of people out there that never end up creating a Bitcoin wallet, and just used centralized services or exchanges.
This means that it is impossible to count the scope of people, because we aren’t able to tie them to an address.
Another Method to Work out How Many People Own Bitcoin
Another common method to estimate how many people use Bitcoin in the world is to estimate the number of owners, by checking the number of accounts on exchanges.
Some exchanges are going to tell you their user counts.
Others require you to guess, either by looking at the trading volume, or by looking at visitor counts. Just like with the first method, there are issues with this one as well.
Inactive Accounts
There are a lot of people out there that are going to open an exchange, buy some Bitcoin, and then later sell it.
Of course, this still counts as an account when it comes to the exchange’s data, but the account doesn’t actually own any Bitcoin anymore.
Other Coins
The majority of exchanges out there these days offer more cryptocurrencies than just Bitcoin. This means that a user could sign up and only buy Ethereum, and not Bitcoin.
More than One Account
As we mentioned in the previous method, one individual can have unlimited exchange accounts.
Fake Accounts
There is also the risk that some visitor counts and volume of exchanges are fake, created by the exchange itself so that it can appear to be bigger than it is.
A survey that was conducted sampled over 10,000 American adults about cryptocurrency ownership and awareness. The survey indicated that 16% had traded, invested in, or used cryptocurrency.
In the age bracket of 18 to 39, this percentage increased to 43%. This means that the complete number of people that own Bitcoin depends on how you want to define own.
If owning Bitcoin means saving at least a dollars’ worth of it in any Bitcoin wallet, then there can’t be more than approximately 30 million owners.
However, if owning Bitcoin is simply saving Bitcoin in a centralized wallet or exchange, the numbers published by these surveys do seem reasonable and realistic.
The truth of the matter is that most owners of Bitcoin are unlikely to store their coins on a centralized exchange.
When thinking about Bitcoin ownership figures, one study suggested that 25 million cryptocurrency traders are based outside of Europe and the USA, so we think that it’s quite likely that there are over 100 owners of Bitcoin.
If this is true, then it means that 1.3% of the world’s population owns Bitcoin.
How Many Daily Bitcoin Users?
When talking about the Bitcoin network itself, it processes over 270,000 transactions a day. However, this number is deceptive as well, because one transaction can include multiple recipients.
There are only between 400,000, and 800,000 active addresses a day. This means that there are most likely to be between 300,000 and 500,000 unique users either receiving or sending Bitcoin every day.
In March 2021, daily active addresses decreased to around 720,000.
What’s interesting about this statistic is that it goes against Bitcoin’s rise in price, which indicates that people aren’t moving their funds around, and potentially choosing to hold their positions, so that they can get their hands on deeper gains.
There are a lot of people out there that use Bitcoin everyday by saving.
An individual who has money saved in Bitcoin is using it for saving or investing, which means that they aren’t necessarily conducting transactions everyday with their Bitcoin.
This is why it is also important to look at how many Bitcoins are in wallets.
How Many Wallets for Bitcoin Specifically are Out There?
At this point, you probably know what we are going to say in response to this question, and that is that nobody is ever going to be able to know. First, you have to define a Bitcoin wallet.
Are we counting Bitcoin wallets that used to be used to trade Bitcoin, but are now empty?
Coinbase, as an example, claims that they have more than 68 million accounts, and Blockchain says that they have more than 76 million wallets. Combine these two, and this is at least 144 million wallets.
When it comes to private data, there are hundreds more wallets. We have also already concluded that there are most likely more than 100 million owners of Bitcoin.
But this being said, there are a lot of people that have opened wallets before, but now don’t own any Bitcoin. Also, most people have more than one wallet.
So, we aren’t going to try and estimate how many wallets there are. However, there has likely been over 200 million, and perhaps billions of wallets created during the existence of Bitcoin.
With this being said, there can’t be more than 64 million active wallets.
How Many People are Aware of Bitcoin?
According to crypto statistics, roughly 90% of Americans have an awareness of Bitcoin. 88% of Japanese, and then 93% of people in the UK have heard of Bitcoin.
There’s another report that says that 66% of Europeans have an awareness of Bitcoin, while 79% of Austrians have heard of it, and 78% in Poland.
In China, there are 40% of people who are interested in potentially investing in Bitcoin.
What’s clear from these statistics is that when it comes to the populations of developed countries, they are well aware of Bitcoin.
It would seem based on the numbers above that there are over 2 billion people that have an awareness of Bitcoin.
How Many People Own 1 Bitcoin?
At the end of 2021, there were more than 800,000 addresses worth at least one Bitcoin. However, this doesn’t mean that over 800,000 people have one Bitcoin or more.
On the one hand, you’ve got people that own more than one address with at least one Bitcoin, but we don’t know how many there are.
This would actually bring the total number of people that have more than one Bitcoin down. On the other hand, there are addresses owned by exchanges that have thousands of Bitcoin.
This Bitcoin belongs to many thousands of people, and a lot of them own more than one Bitcoin in that specific address.
FAQs
How People Trade Ethereum?
Like so many of the other pieces of information and statistics that we have talked about in this article, it is impossible to know the exact number of people that use Ethereum.
However, the latest estimates guess that there are roughly 10 million users.
How Many People Trade DOGE?
Dogecoin has gained a huge amount of popularity, thanks to Elon Musk.
As a result, the relatively recent cryptocurrency has over 1,000,000 users.
How Much Bitcoin Does the Average Individual Have?
The average person owns about 0.00244 Bitcoin.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, when thinking about Bitcoin adoption and usage, the answer to it is pretty complicated.
There are many factors that go into determining exactly how many people are currently investing in trading Bitcoin around the world, and the numbers are going to vary depending on what you are choosing to count.
At the end of the day, it is clear to see that Bitcoin is wildly popular, based on the number of Bitcoin users there are in the world, and we don’t imagine that it’s going to go anywhere anytime soon.
