How Many People Own Bitcoin?

Bitcoin slowly enters puberty. The number of holders has risen by a factor of over 11 years – much like the value of a virtual currency. However, due to the semi-anonymous nature of the cryptocurrency, the total number of holders remains difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, an analyst at Outlier Ventures tried to do so.

According to an analysis posted on the decentralized.co blog, the current number of holders is at least a fraction of bitcoin, nearly 30 million. Even in January 2011 there were seventy thousand. The rate of increase in the number of virtual coin holders is at least partially reflected in the number of newly generated bitcoin addresses per day. These generally serve as delivery data for sending virtual coins.

However, a new address can be generated for each transaction, so their total amount is indicative of the number of bitcoin owners only indirectly. However, while in 2011 there were an average of 7,100 new addresses per day, a decade later it is almost 360,000. “It is one of the measures of expansion of the bitcoin ecosystem,” says the author of the analysis.

At the same time, the number of so-called whale addresses has increased from 34 to 130 over the decade, ie places in the cybernetics where ten thousand or more bitcoins are ‘stored’ at once.

However, the bitcoin´s beginnings, which has been in operation since 3 January 2009, were slow. He recorded his first transaction two years after its inception when someone used it to buy pizza. Since then, the cost of the first-born cryptocurrency has increased significantly, with hundreds of imitations appearing, some with more and some with less success.

Despite its rapid expansion, however, the number of owners of the most widely used digital coins still lags far behind the numbers of users of today’s most popular fintech services. For example, over 440 million people use the Apple Pay payment function

BTC was founded in 2009 as an alternative to official currencies, Bitcoin has established itself as the world’s leading virtual currency over the years.

But the price of bitcoin is undergoing considerable fluctuations. For this year, some experts expect further fluctuations in the exchange rate, which, according to optimists, could surpass the magical $ 20,000 mark.