What has always been most desired is adoption. I don't know if it's currently at 5%, but if with 5% it has already reached over $100k, imagine how much it could reach if it goes beyond that double that? This is something that could bring very positive momentum from everyone. Currently, the BTC market is fluctuating, above the $80k level, which isn't bad at all. Adoption will gradually arrive and take hold. It might take a while, but everyone is talking about BTC more now, and even the most negative news outlets are doing so, which already says a lot.

I'd say 5% is still pretty optimistic and I would not trust the exchanges or serviced that are part of the industry with statistics.

If 5% is true it would be easy with any random sample to find this result because it's a significant enough amount for it to be spread around the general population.

That also means that 1/20 people own bitcoin. Do you believe out of the people you know 1/20 owns bitcoins? It would mean in each college class you should be able to find several people. Yet the most likely scenario is none.
.don't trust, verify. We're not they far yet.

Yeah, and all this becomes clear when you step outside the crypto forums and the crypto influence zone and you realize in the daily real life nobody relly cares that much about crypto.
I always tell people, step aside for 7 days from the forums and x and you will have the feeling Bitcoin is dead, this is why I always think those numbers of hundreds of millions of users are just pure bs.

I doubt we are more than 10-20 million owners, including of IOU Bitcoin notes on CEXs, and far more likely around a few millions of actual users, like people that actually use it now and then.


You know what's funny?
When they claim those numbers, you have a base from which you then need to grow...
And if you start with 700 million and you need to hype a 30-50% grow ina  few years you will be left with no humans not owning crypto in the entire world.

I can't believe 400m people own Bitcoin. Only if you count broker apps where there is no actual Bitcoin. 5% is 1 in 20. True in some countries, absolutely not in most.


I used my country as a country that has a high tech literacy and app use. I could be wrong but the number just didn't make sense. Googling it and yeah it seems conservative on ramp estimates say only 100m.


Yeah, I figured ok if you count every single person who had a faucet, casino, Telegram wallet, Robinhood app, Paypal BTC OK then maybe maybe 400m but that means we're counting a lot of people who don't OWN Bitcoin. I think having BTC in an account is really not the same thing at all.

Bitcoin total supply can be changed, in theory it is possible but practically it is impossible because no Bitcoin holders want to see an increase in Bitcoin total supply. Such total supply increase won't help to raise value of each bitcoin they have, so that's is the reason Bitcoin holders are against this idea, even as said in theory, it's possible to do.

Can Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million be changed?

5% of the current world population is a about 435M people owing at least $1 worth of Bitcoin if we're to go by what you've said. But like a few user had mentioned, a link to the source would have been best to enable a better discussion. Well, if it's true, which I'm not exactly sure of how impactful an actual 5% of word population ought to be, then I think a 10% would even be far better. When there's 2X the number of users, you should expect close to 2X the price performance we have at the moment because of an increase in demand while there's a decrease in supply. But again, an actual statistics would have given us a clearer picture of how impactful 10% of the world population would look like.

I think I know only one person in real life who held/dealed with Bitcoin. And I'm into crypto industry since 2015. Not that I have a huge social network, but from daily interactions, I should have stumbled into a higher number of people who have been into Bitcoin, right?

And the most curious aspect of this is that doesn't matter how badly the economy is doing, people never get the interest to seek for alternatives like Bitcoin to avoid inflation, decreasing purchasing power and devaluation of fiat currency.

I remember a lot of discussion about that topic of Bitcoin ownership

And the skeptics are totally correct, there can't be more than 20-40 million "true" Bitcoin owners if there are only 40-50 million addresses with BTC on it. (Sidechains would make that possible, but they are not massively used. and you could also argue that the sidechainBTC are "not Bitcoin".)

But on the other hand, there are over 300 million Binance accounts and over 100 million Coinbase accounts according to their own reports. And there are also polls where e.g. about 15% of US citizens claim to own "cryptocurrencies". This may include stuff like memecoins and NFTs however, i.e. not much more than play money.

So my personal estimation is that there may have been, in total, 100-200 million Bitcoin users, but only a minority (20-40 million) of them owns them really and has an own private key. The rest either 1) has BTC on an exchange, but never owned it really on-chain (I'd say that could be 50-70 million at least), 2) owned BTC in the past, and 3) own some derivatives like ETFs, ETPs, sidechains, wrapped BTC etc. (a few million).

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But now to the topic question which is independent from the question how many users exist now:

A duplication of Bitcoin demand of course has happened already several times. From all the estimations I've read, since 2020 such a duplication should have taken place. And in 2020 also a big percentage of BTC have been mined. But every day, some people sell their Bitcoins, or a part of them. They simply think the price is attractive, either because they're early adopters and can now buy a house with their profit, or because they panic and they think it may go lower. Or whatever. You can't buy Bitcoins without someone selling them (if you're not a miner).

So I'd say if the adoption duplicates again, I'd say the price would evolve like between 2020 and now. That means, it would increase between 3 (late 2020 to now) and 10 times (I think we can ignore the March 2020 dip). This is of course because Bitcoin has a low circulation rate, and many simply HODL. And thus the additional demand would push the price much more to the upside than if Bitcoins were sold more often.

Bitcoin is going to grow more than this is what is going to happen because Bitcoin is always going to continue to grow and when more people starts getting interested then it will make the price of Bitcoin to keep going up and also this will affect Bitcoin adoption and image in the public eye. People that had doubts will begin to believe in Bitcoin and it is going to create more global demand and affect the market very positively. Many people still do not know about Bitcoin yet and when they do, they are going to buy hence the price of Bitcoin is always going to be an investment that has a big potential of making you profits as a long term investment.