Thanks for your numbers. You're of course correct: the real Bitcoin holders who follow the "Not your keys not your coins" principle and hold their BTC on their own self-hosted (or at least non-custodial) wallet/addresses are much less than the 337 million calculated by crypto.com.

crypto.com bases its estimations on their own database and chain analisis activity about possible holdings of people on other exchanges, i.e. they include many people who hold only IOUs of BItcoin on one of the big exchanges. If I remember correctly, they explicitly state in their methodology that Bitcoin users who are not exchange users almost do not matter, because it's so few of them.

The 30,000$ average "on an address" does not surprise me. There are a lot of well-funded addresses with several entire BTCs.

And yeah, the $1000 average includes almost 1,7 billion families with an exact holding of 0 BTC (if we part from the number of 2 million families I mentioned). That's the nice thing about averages

There may be some other sources than the on-chain held coins and exchange holdings:

- Lightning nodes are currently negligible (less than 50,000).
- sidechains/L2s idem, I don't think that's more than 1 million or so (including centralized chains like Liquid),
- wBTC and other wrapped coins may be a bit more; above all including platforms like Thorchain, they're at least "on chain" on another cryptocurrency.

Then of course the holders of Bitcoin ETF/ETPs, Strategy bonds and shares, and so on.

I think it remains a big challenge to "convert" those holding BTC on exchanges to move them to their own wallets, so we would have "real Bitcoin owners". Maybe it's easier once a big sidechain gets popular. I may start investigating flows of that kind if I get data sources ...

Thanks for your numbers. You're of course correct: the real Bitcoin holders who follow the "Not your keys not your coins" principle and hold their BTC on their own self-hosted (or at least non-custodial) wallet/addresses are much less than the 337 million calculated by crypto.com.

crypto.com bases its estimations on their own database and chain analisis activity about possible holdings of people on other exchanges, i.e. they include many people who hold only IOUs of BItcoin on one of the big exchanges. If I remember correctly, they explicitly state in their methodology that Bitcoin users who are not exchange users almost do not matter, because it's so few of them.

The 30,000$ average "on an address" does not surprise me. There are a lot of well-funded addresses with several entire BTCs.

And yeah, the $1000 average includes almost 1,7 billion families with an exact holding of 0. That's the nice thing about averages

There may be some other sources than the on-chain held coins and exchange holdings:

- Lightning nodes are currently negligible (less than 50,000).
- sidechains/L2s idem, I don't think that's more than 1 million or so (including centralized chains like Liquid),
- wBTC and other wrapped coins may be a bit more; above all including platforms like Thorchain, they're at least "on chain" on another cryptocurrency.

Then of course the holders of Bitcoin ETF/ETPs, Strategy bonds and shares, and so on.

I think it remains a big challenge to "convert" those holding BTC on exchanges to move them to their own wallets, so we would have "real Bitcoin owners". Maybe it's easier once a big sidechain gets popular. I may start investigating flows of that kind if I get data sources ...