Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by onlyrealcuzzo 1741 days ago
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.
2 comments
nanidin 1741 days ago
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.
link
onlyrealcuzzo 1741 days ago
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).

link
arthurcolle 1740 days ago
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.
link
nanidin 1741 days ago
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?
link
antonvs 1741 days ago
> 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.

link
fkfowl3 1741 days ago
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.
link