[nanidin]

The tweet makes an assumption that there are 10 million people holding bitcoin, and the tweet goes on to imply that this is actually an overestimate.

The first google result for "how many people hold bitcoins" says that an estimated 46 million Americans own bitcoin. The huge inaccuracy shows the author's bias and kills the credibility of the rest of the thread.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Are you saying "has a Bitcoin wallet" = "own bitcoin"?

Only ~60M households (50%) have an investment account. I'm skeptical that there's a huge portion of households with bitcoin but w/o a traditional investment account. I'm also skeptical that ~80% of people with investment accounts have Bitcoin. Almost everyone I work with and most of my friends and family have an investment account. I only know a couple of people who currently have any Bitcoin. I know a lot of people that at one point owned Bitcoin, though.

[nanidin]

I'm not saying either way (as this wasn't specified in the tweet either) - just pointing out the huge discrepancy between easily accessible statistics and the story the author of the tweet is trying to tell. There is a huge assumption being made (10 million people hold bitcoin) and zero justification for that assumption.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It also seems like there is zero justification for you 46M Americans figure.

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/

There might be 46M wallets related to US accounts with Bitcoin in them, but 1 person could own 45M of them (I seriously doubt it, but you get the point).

[arthurcolle]

there are only 18.6 million bitcoins currently mined (upper bound of 21 million which will be asymptotically approached as the difficulty increases) and like 1.8 million of them are missing forever due to lost wallets.

[nanidin]

Yep - it seems we're getting deep into "73.6% of statistics are made up on the spot" territory no matter which source we choose :) Which then raises the question - why did the author of the tweet choose 10 million?

[antonvs]

> the author of the tweet

I think I see the problem.

Why does anyone treat tweets as though they're academic papers? It's just some rando BSing.

[fkfowl3]

where did you get the 60M households from and why are you counting households? Everyone in my family has an investment account, so you should be looking at per individual/capita which is closer to ~150 million. So the number of bitcoin holder is significantly higher even if you consider 20% of 150 million.

[FireBeyond]

That studies claims that 1 in 5 American adults hold BTC. I'm ... highly skeptical ... of that.

Then I look and see that it was a small sample sized survey of higher income individuals, and was commissioned by an "alternative investments firm" who wants to tout Bitcoin annuities and life insurance.

Since we're speaking of bias, after all...

[qeternity]

Wow. Ok, where to start.

For one, this is why reading articles and doing your own research (DYOR) is so important. That headline, which is attributed to NYDIG, a crypto proprietor, isn’t actually sourced anywhere else. Gemini, the Winklevii crypto exchange, places the number substantially lower.

Given that Coinbase has had a maximum of 8.8 million monthly active users, which is going to put us within spitting distance of the true number, suggests the true figure is much much lower.

Additionally, speculating on bitcoin’s price on an exchange does not mean you’re utilizing the network (hell, you don’t even need actual bitcoin to do this, futures will do). But this is what the overwhelming majority of people do with bitcoin.

So the real question is how many people use the bitcoin network to transfer bitcoins. This is what POW enables. Do I believe that 10m are sending bitcoin to each other? No fucking way. Much much lower.

So yeah, 10m seems conservative even if the assumption is poorly worded (network users vs coin holders).

[kevinh]

The first result is a survey done by a firm dedicated to Bitcoin that only surveyed people making $50k or higher. It's possible that 46m number is correct, but I wouldn't make the assumption that it's anywhere close to accurate.

[nanidin]

Agreed! Also consider that the first result is only meant to represent bitcoin owners in a country that makes up 4.6% of the world population.

[daqhris]

Besides the assumption about the number of holders, it's not clear how a holder contributes individually to power consumption. What if you own a wallet and don't do transactions? What if you're "hosting" it on a publicly traded company's servers?

In my understanding, there are many stakeholders when it's about bitcoin technology. Be it miners, traders, holders, exchanges... BTC is not solely a common legal entity (like: country, company) nor a widespread regular resource (as: oil, gas, water). It's more like the Internet; another protocol to exchange information(+value). Then, who is going to fairly assess the overall energy consumption of The Internet? Thus, the logic followed in that assertion is incredibly hard to understand (but unfortunately popular nowadays).

[ChrisLomont]

On the other hand, the vast majority of anyone holding any bitcoin are not making transactions, so the electricity per person using bitcoin over any medium sized window is probably vastly higher.

For example, in Jan 23 million bitcoin wallets had transactions. Since many actors hold multiple wallets, this would imply not so many active bitcoin users. [1]

Per capita could mean anyone who has ever touched it in any way, or could mean someone who actually uses it reasonably often.

[1] https://decrypt.co/56188/bitcoin-hit-record-number-of-22-3-m...

[SahAssar]

Do you think that between a third and half of US households have people holding significant amounts of bitcoin?