Is there a way to determine the number of people who are actually using Bitcoin till date? Who would have access to such information? Meaning a way to find out, how many new people have used Bitcoin in 2016 , so that we can say exponential growth is natural not artificially created by hoarders.
I am afraid that there is no good way to do that, i think you can count amount of wallets... But i am not sure about that either, as probably wallet owners will not want to give this info
Even you are counting that wallet you can not still count the numbers of users because many people are using many wallets.. and multiple wallet.
For now we can just estimate how much percentage of users are using bitcoin..