Getting started with blockchain | How many people hold or use cryptocurrencies?

Author | Murong Ding

Produced|Baihua blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

Not long ago, the vernacular blockchain issued a statement saying that 2% of people around the world really understand the blockchain. According to the global population of 7 billion, is there really 140 million people in the world involved in digital currency and blockchain?

Today, we may wish to use some data to roughly estimate how many cryptocurrency participants in the blockchain industry.

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Estimating the number of users in the blockchain industry, many people think of the number of currency positions for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the leader in cryptocurrency. Anyone who enters the cryptocurrency circle is first attracted by Bitcoin. Ethereum has a wider range of applications. Tokens for many projects are based on Ethereum's smart contracts.

Therefore, the number of currency positions of Bitcoin and Ethereum can explain the problem.

01 bitcoin currency number

Most of the Bitcoin addresses do not have any number of coins (because they are not enabled), so only the currency address can explain the problem. However, anyone can create countless bitcoin addresses, which is a flaw in estimating the number of users with the number of bitcoin-holding addresses.

The number of Bitcoin's currency holding addresses can be queried via the Bitcoin Blockchain Browser.

Using the data from bitinfocharts.com above, we can easily figure out that the number of Bitcoin holdings is about 27.83 million.

Considering that many bitcoin whales don't put all their eggs in the same basket, they may have multiple accounts, and then consider that many people's bitcoins are placed on the trading platform, and they don't have bitcoin wallets, 2783 This number will be less than the actual number of users.

02 Ethereum's number of currency holding addresses

The address of Ethereum can be found on the Ethereum blockchain browser etherscan.com.

As of October 20, the number of addresses in Ethereum was approximately 78.1 million, and the daily address was approximately 66,000. According to this growth rate, it will take about one year, and the total number of addresses in Ethereum will increase to 100 million.

Because Ethereum's address is very convenient to create, no cost, so in order to get airdrops or "撸 candy", many people have created a number of Ethereum addresses, and some investors even created thousands of programs.

So, one thing is certain, the number of addresses in Ethereum is more than the number of real users in Ethereum.

03 Other estimation methods

In addition to estimating by the number of addresses, it can also be estimated by the number of users of the trading platform.

Due to the high cognitive threshold of the blockchain, many people are not very familiar with the operation of the wallet, so most of the operations are carried out on a centralized trading platform. Therefore, the number of users of the trading platform can be used as a basis for estimating the number of cryptocurrency participants.

However, since the specific real user data is a trade secret, the trading platform generally only announces an order of magnitude. For example, the currency has already announced that the registered users of the platform exceed 10 million. Not long ago, when responding to a user's query, the OKEx CEO mentioned that there are tens of millions of platform users.

04 summary

In summary, the number of users of cryptocurrencies is more than 27.83 million more than the number of BTC holdings, and less than the 78.1 million ETHs. If, according to the assumption that 30% of all users do not have a BTC and 80% have two ETH addresses, the estimated number of users is more than 40 million.

In 2018, Yuan Yuming, Dean of the Firecoin Blockchain Research Institute, said:

"From my statistics and judgment, the number of users in the global blockchain is 20 million. It is probably not enough. China has a large probability of only a few million users. The size of this user is very small."

Taking into account the changes in time, the estimated number of users of more than 40 million is reasonable, and Yuan Yuming's "20 million" estimate is also on the same order of magnitude.

How many users do you think are involved in cryptocurrency? Feel free to share your predictions in the message area.

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