BITCOIN ENTITIES
How many owners are behind Bitcoin's addresses?
Addresses are not owners. This is what happens when the chain's own evidence groups them by who controls what.
Bitcoin’s addresses and the owners behind them
All three bars share one scale: every address Bitcoin has ever seen. This is one count, made at one block, rather than a history, so there are no dates to pick or zoom into.
Right now
430 million addresses collapse into 90 million owners.
Among the addresses the chain’s own evidence lets us group, every 4.8 addresses belong to one wallet on average. That grouped set is 27.7% of the 1.55 billion addresses Bitcoin has ever seen.
What an owner is
An owner here is a wallet the evidence shows controlling several addresses. It says nothing about who the owner is.
How far addresses overstate the crowd
Among the addresses we can group, there are 4.8 for every owner. But those addresses are, by selection, the ones belonging to wallets with several addresses. Count every address that never revealed a link as an owner of its own, and addresses still outnumber owners 1.28 to 1 across the whole chain. That is the floor. How far above it the true figure sits, the chain cannot show, and anyone quoting a single number is choosing a story.
addresses per owner, among the addresses we can group
By selection, these belong to owners with several addresses.
addresses per owner across the whole chain, at the least
Counting every address that never revealed a link as an owner of its own.
429,626,260 grouped · 1,549,357,523 ever seen
The biggest group
The largest single group holds 59 million addresses: 13.7% of the addresses we can group, and 3.8% of every address Bitcoin has ever seen.
addresses in the largest group
Whose they are, the page does not say.
of all grouped addresses
Its share of the set we can group.
of all addresses ever seen
The same group against the whole chain. Both framings, always.
A group this large may be one very big service moving its own coins, or several owners joined by transactions that only looked like shared control. Nothing on this page says which.
For you
Treat every address count as a ceiling. A rising address count can mean new people arriving, or one exchange rotating its wallets. These owner counts are the closest the chain itself gets to a headcount, and even they count wallets, not people. Nobody can count Bitcoin’s people from the chain, including us, and this page would rather say so than pretend.
Understanding
Bitcoin Entities
Where it stands today
The 430 million Bitcoin addresses the chain’s own evidence can group collapse into 90 million owners as of .
Why do addresses overcount everyone?
A single owner can make a new address for every payment, and large companies make millions of them. So Bitcoin’s address count is closer to a count of bank account numbers than of customers. Any claim about how many people own Bitcoin that starts from raw addresses starts too high.
How does grouping work?
When several addresses spend coins in one transaction together, one wallet almost always controlled all of them at that moment. That is evidence written into the chain itself, by the owner, and it is what we build from, reading every transaction ever made on our own copy of the chain. We group addresses only where the chain shows shared control, and we leave them alone where it does not.
What is the honest limit?
Only addresses that ever revealed a link can be grouped, and most never do. An address that received coins once and never moved them shows nothing about its neighbours. So our grouped set covers a minority of all addresses ever seen, the page says exactly how much, and every figure states which population it describes. The overcount factor among grouped addresses is one number; the floor across the whole chain is a smaller one; both are on the page because either alone would mislead.
What will this page not claim?
Grouping says one wallet controlled several addresses. It does not say whose wallet it is, and we do not attempt to identify individuals. That holds for the largest group too: a group that size may be one very big service moving its own coins, or several owners joined by transactions that only looked like shared control, and nothing here says which. Where the evidence runs out, the honest answer is a number without a name.
Why is there no history or zoom?
This page is a single count, made at one block, of how Bitcoin’s addresses group into owners. It is not a daily history, so the chart has no dates to pick and nothing to zoom into.
Source: Maketo’s count of Bitcoin’s addresses and the owners the chain’s own evidence groups them into. Reading for .