The public structure of the Bitcoin blockchain allows us to view & analyze every transaction on the network.
We can see exactly where every bitcoin was born, as mining rewards for solving for & placing valid new blocks into its blockchain, & exactly where every bitcoin has traveled, through potentially multiple addresses on its blockchain.
By tracing every bitcoin through respective transactions over the life of its blockchain, we can come to glean to composition & distribution of all the currently mined bitcoin over all their current addresses.
I came across a cool tool the other day (bitcoinprivacy.net — made by Jorge Martinez Pizarro & Stefan Richter) that allowed me to easily view a lot of this data, and wanted to share & visualize it with a few charts.
Please note, the data displays bitcoin wealth distribution across addresses, not necessarily individual holders of bitcoin. The distinction & difficulty will be discussed & explored further after the address charts.
To summarize in text, there are currently:
For some additional details & information:
Due to the nature of easy & anonymous address creation, and corporate account management inherent to Bitcoin & the companies in the ecosystem, estimating the actual number of unique bitcoin holders as opposed to addresses is unfortunately much more difficult — & not something we can glean from observing its blockchain alone.
Addresses can not only overstate user numbers when single people unknowingly control numerous addresses, but also understate user numbers when single addresses hold the funds of numerous unknown people, like an exchange who may control balances in a traditional database.
Some relevant estimates & statements on customer, wallet, & holder numbers can be seen below for additional perspective on the composition & murkiness of the space.
- Blockchain.info shows 8.7 million wallet users.
- Coinbase shows 4.4 million customers served.
- ARK Invest & Coinbase estimate“roughly seven million people around
the world hold a material amount of bitcoin” & “Coinbase stores nearly half a billion dollars of bitcoin–more than any other provider in the world”. - The Android “Bitcoin Wallet” app has been installed “1–5 million times”, Coinbase’s Android app has been installed “500k — 1 million times”, and Mycelium’s Android app& Blockchain.info’s Android app have each been installed “100k — 500k times”.
- Many bitcoin are stuck in addresses with lost private keys — another extremely area of analysis full of murkiness & unknowns. A great article written over 2 years ago by John W. Ratcliff proposed as high as 30% of then existing bitcoin were “zombies”, & the still unknown Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to hold about 1 million bitcoin alone, with no way to tell if the private keys are still controlled.
By examining the Bitcoin blockchain, we can easily map the composition of wealth among addresses.
Unfortunately however, the distribution amongst individual holders is far beyond the scope of its blockchain alone.
-Alex Sunnarborg
Founder & CFO — Lawnmower.io
Disclaimer: All viewpoints are completely my own. Nothing presented represents the viewpoints, opinions, etc. of any corporation or organization and all data/charts/analyses are for illustrative and discussion purposes only and should not be construed or interpreted as fact, advice, recommendation, or anything of similar nature.