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What is the number of Bitcoin owners?


As institutional investors‘ interests continue to grow in Bitcoin (BTC), the ability to hold one whole coin could start to concentrate among these high-capitalized players. This would happen amid an increased demand for Bitcoin, which has a limited maximum supply of 21 million units, expected to be fully circulating by 2140.

Notably, one Bitcoin costs approximately $29,500, and there are close to 19.52 million BTC circulating, both at the time of publication.

It is important to say that Bitcoin is a pseudonymous network, and one single individual can control multiple addresses without a known link between them. Therefore, it is factually impossible to know how many people own 1 BTC.

Nevertheless, Finbold retrieved data from BitInfoCharts on October 20 that shows 1,018,130 addresses holding at least 1 Bitcoin. These addresses own around 18.12 million BTC, for 92.87% of the entire circulating supply.

Bitcoin (BTC) distribution
Bitcoin (BTC) distribution. Source: BitInfoCharts.com

1 Bitcoin population similar to Ottawa or Abu Dhabi

Interestingly, if we considered the number of addresses as the BTC population, the number of addresses that own at least 1 Bitcoin would be equal to capital cities such as Ottawa in Canada, or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, both with around 1 million population.

This population holds around $534.54 billion in value considering Bitcoin price by press time, which is more than 100 billion dollars higher than the $415 billion GDP of the whole United Arab Emirates.

However, this capital is concentrated in an even smaller number of people who own 1 Bitcoin or more. According to the website BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com, each person owns, on average, between 3 to 10 cryptocurrency wallets and hundreds of different addresses.

Besides that, the same website affirms that the vast majority of addresses are controlled by custodians, like cryptocurrency exchanges. With just a small percentage of all the Bitcoin addresses belonging to economically active wallets owned by private people on the network.

Sources


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