The recent Facebook stablecoin’s introduction and the US President’s tweet criticizing crypto, has raised the public interest of crypto overall and Bitcoin in particular. How many people do you think, use Bitcoin today? It is difficult to say the exact number, but there are some data that allow us to have an overall impression.
Some important numbers
According to the different sources’ reports, today the Bitcoin users make under 1% from the whole population on the Earth. It indicates, that we are still in the beginning. The leading providers of the crypto market and consumers' data have revealed the following numbers:
- by December 2018 roughly 32 million Bitcoin wallets had been set up globally.
- 5% of US citizens hold Bitcoin.
- 7.1 million active Bitcoin users.
Total number of Bitcoin wallets
According to Statista, a leading crypto analytics’ data provider, there are almost 32 million Bitcoin wallets. It is worth to mention, that most of the Bitcoin users have several wallets and use multiple wallet addresses to increase their financial privacy during transactions.
Thus, the total number of Bitcoin users must be less than 32 million. As of August 2017, roughly 40 percent of the US citizens were willing to use Bitcoin for transactions. In the second quarter of 2019, there were 17.8 million Bitcoins in the world.
Notable, that the number of Bitcoin ATMs increased from 954 in January 2016 to 2,053 by January 2018. Most such ATMs, as of January 2018, were located in the United States and Canada. The Bitcoin ATMs located in Europe made 20.42 percent of the global ATM market share.
The size of the Bitcoin blockchain, a distributed database that contains a list of all Bitcoin transactions, has experienced high levels of growth since its creation, reaching approximately 226.6 gigabytes in size as of the end of June 2019.
Total number of active Bitcoin users and HODlers has increased
The number of active Bitcoin users continues to grow. Chainalysis has revealed that the active Bitcoin users make up around a third of the total number of Bitcoin owners.
The study has shown that 2.3 million people use Bitcoin to make payments while 4.8 million users hold Bitcoin to facilitate speculative trade of the cryptocurrency to turn a profit. Those who use Bitcoin for payments come up to 11% of the total Bitcoin users, while speculators make up 23%. Both groups actively move Bitcoin from their wallets almost daily, but do so for different reasons.
The blockchain analysts have also revealed, that the number of long-term investors, or “HODLers,” has grown as well. The group made up 30 percent of the total Bitcoin users. These are 6.4 million people who are holding Bitcoin for the long-term, in anticipation of gains to be made over the years.
A survey conducted by the Global Blockchain Council and SurveyMonkey has shown that 60 percent of the US citizens have heard of bitcoin and that around five percent hold the digital currency, that would mean that an estimated 16 million Americans have invested in bitcoin. According to the latest Bitcoin trading volumes from LocalBitcoins.com, a person-to-person bitcoin trading site, bitcoin adoption is on the rise in economically troubled South American nations such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia.
What to expect in the future?
In light of the limited data and the impossibility of accurately determining the number of Bitcoin users globally, we can assume that there could be around 25 million users around the world.
The popularity of Bitcoins and cryptocurrency, in general, continues to grow. This gives the prerequisites that the digital currency is likely to remain here for a long time.
Cryptocurrency is still at an early stage, and much can happen in the future. Predicting the number of Bitcoin users is a quite difficult task. The experts assume, that the number of crypto owners' will rise dramatically.
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