The first google result for "how many people hold bitcoins" says that an estimated 46 million Americans own bitcoin. The huge inaccuracy shows the author's bias and kills the credibility of the rest of the thread.
Only ~60M households (50%) have an investment account. I'm skeptical that there's a huge portion of households with bitcoin but w/o a traditional investment account. I'm also skeptical that ~80% of people with investment accounts have Bitcoin. Almost everyone I work with and most of my friends and family have an investment account. I only know a couple of people who currently have any Bitcoin. I know a lot of people that at one point owned Bitcoin, though.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/
There might be 46M wallets related to US accounts with Bitcoin in them, but 1 person could own 45M of them (I seriously doubt it, but you get the point).
I think I see the problem.
Why does anyone treat tweets as though they're academic papers? It's just some rando BSing.
Then I look and see that it was a small sample sized survey of higher income individuals, and was commissioned by an "alternative investments firm" who wants to tout Bitcoin annuities and life insurance.
Since we're speaking of bias, after all...
For one, this is why reading articles and doing your own research (DYOR) is so important. That headline, which is attributed to NYDIG, a crypto proprietor, isn’t actually sourced anywhere else. Gemini, the Winklevii crypto exchange, places the number substantially lower.
Given that Coinbase has had a maximum of 8.8 million monthly active users, which is going to put us within spitting distance of the true number, suggests the true figure is much much lower.
Additionally, speculating on bitcoin’s price on an exchange does not mean you’re utilizing the network (hell, you don’t even need actual bitcoin to do this, futures will do). But this is what the overwhelming majority of people do with bitcoin.
So the real question is how many people use the bitcoin network to transfer bitcoins. This is what POW enables. Do I believe that 10m are sending bitcoin to each other? No fucking way. Much much lower.
So yeah, 10m seems conservative even if the assumption is poorly worded (network users vs coin holders).
In my understanding, there are many stakeholders when it's about bitcoin technology. Be it miners, traders, holders, exchanges... BTC is not solely a common legal entity (like: country, company) nor a widespread regular resource (as: oil, gas, water). It's more like the Internet; another protocol to exchange information(+value). Then, who is going to fairly assess the overall energy consumption of The Internet? Thus, the logic followed in that assertion is incredibly hard to understand (but unfortunately popular nowadays).
For example, in Jan 23 million bitcoin wallets had transactions. Since many actors hold multiple wallets, this would imply not so many active bitcoin users. [1]
Per capita could mean anyone who has ever touched it in any way, or could mean someone who actually uses it reasonably often.
[1] https://decrypt.co/56188/bitcoin-hit-record-number-of-22-3-m...