Quote from: Melbustus on November 28, 2014, 08:41:52 PM

Quote from: MadGamer on November 28, 2014, 05:19:37 PM

Quote from: lontivero on November 28, 2014, 05:04:38 PM

Hi, is there an estimation anywhere about how many real users bitcoin has?

Not sure but I guess I saw on some interview with an old man that they are estimated of 250k users , not that much right Cry

That old man, who is aggressive in his misunderstanding of Bitcoin, is Jeffrey Robinson, author of "Bitcon". He's an old-school financial crime author/researcher who does not understand the technology behind Bitcoin, and simply views it through his outdated and narrow lens. Hence, he's trying to downplay the number of bitcoin users and ignored many stats. He is a weak-thinker, and really just trying to promote his sensationalist and poorly "researched" book.

For example, the fact that Blockchain.info alone has almost 2.7 million wallets, and Coinbase has over 2 million. Note that Coinbase does robust KYC, so that 2 million *does* correspond to 2 million unique people.

Not to mention all the other wallets...

Also, "There are currently 14,104,525 unspent outputs in 3,609,649 unique address": http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2mkmoq/til_where_the_bitcoins_at_mysteries_of_the/

Obviously many bitcoin users control more than one address, and Coinbase users don't necessarily carry a bitcoin balance, but I'd guess it all nets out to about 1-3M bitcoin *owners*. And if you define a *user* as someone who either owns bitcoin and/*or* has made a bitcoin transaction in the last XX days, that number goes up.

Provably you think that I am reading that old man but I've never heard about him in my life. Anyway, you're right when you ask for a *user* definition and I think that users are:

* People that own bitcoins (they have a balance)
* People that perform transactions often.