Poll: How many Bitcoins do you own?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6547669

by olalonde • 13 years ago

73 122 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

kalleboo• 13 years ago

Gave it a go back when namecheap added bitcoin payment just to try it out. I have 2 BTC left in a wallet backup, but I don't have the client installed anymore since I'm not keen on devoting 10 GB disk space to a copy of the blockchain.

Back then they were super easy to get (at least in Japan - feed some cash into an ATM, enter mt gox's account #, enter your username as your depositor name)

nwh• 13 years ago

Be aware that you don't need the blockchain to use Bitcoin really.

MultiBit or Electrum let you use the network securely without it, and have a minimal disk and memory footprint (megabytes, if that).

surfearth• 13 years ago

Wow, up until your comment I had no idea that BitcoinQT was taking up over 18Gb on my hard disk.

duiker101• 13 years ago

0, I like the idea but I still haven't found a single reason to own one.

goostavos2• 13 years ago

I don't currently own any. However I did pick up a Raspberry Pi recently, which made me a little interesting in the bit coin thing. I'm curious if a RPi cluster could (slowly) but efficiently (from a power consumption standpoint) mine.

s0rce• 13 years ago

No, ASIC miners will be much more efficient.

zapu• 13 years ago

Not really, there is no way you could buy mining equipment right now and make net profits. There are several calculators online that take difficulty increase into account.

c0ldfusi0nz• 13 years ago

The simple answer to your question is no.

dan12343• 13 years ago

I don't think the RPi could be much more than a status monitor for connected ASICs.

The Pi's CPU is capable of around 0.2MHashes/sec at 3.75W[0] whereas even a weedy USB ASIC such as the BitForce SC 5Gh/s is capable of 5,000MHashes/sec at 30W[1]

[0]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ARM [1]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC

prezjordan• 13 years ago

You would pay far more for the electricity consumed.

dan12343• 13 years ago

The last time my interest was piqued I found it so difficult to buy them in the UK (looked like the best way was to wire some money so someone in France…) that I gave up.

lucvh• 13 years ago

I had exactly the same experience. Kicking myself now as they were $8 each at the time...

TomGullen5• 13 years ago

Retrospective trading is a good way to chew yourself up. It's meaningless and pointless so don't dwell on it! Look at it from todays perspective.

TomGullen5• 13 years ago

I've been trying to set up an exchange here in the UK, but am facing a lot of what I consider anti competitive behaviour from UK banking. I met Vince Cable to talk about it and hopefully the situation will change in the future:

http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUK/comments/1n99os/met_with_v...

Although it's a big mountain to climb so perhaps it's wishful thinking at this stage!

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

Go talk to Burnley S&L

http://www.burnleysavingsandloans.co.uk/about-us/

See if Dave can help.

sensecall2• 13 years ago

Yep, same here. Recently used https://bitbargain.co.uk (no affiliation at all) to get myself a couple though, and was surprised just how simple it was.

dan12343• 13 years ago

bitbargain certainly seems to be a step in the right direction. I guess being an escrow service allows them to skip a lot of the legal work involved in setting up an exchange.

Are their prices set very much higher than the 'going rate' for bitcoins?

Lerc• 13 years ago

I found the practice of getting money to a place where you can buy bitcoin was an excellent lesson in the utility of bitcoin.

I'm a New Zealander who earns predominantly US dollars, I was an early adopter of bitcoin not as a way to get rich, but because I have been stung for fees so many times.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that I have been prepared to accept bitcoin for two or three years. I have yet to be actually be paid in bitcoin. I request payment in bitcoin, They ask what bitcoin is, I explain, They scream in terror because it's an imaginary drug money ponzi scheme and pay me in something else that stings me with fees (and now, due to new anti-money laundering rules requires more forms of ID than I actually possess)

TomGullen5• 13 years ago

We've invested about 3% of our cash in them. It's a nice high risk high reward gamble.

chiph• 13 years ago

For me, it's the chicken + egg problem -- the merchants that sell the stuff I want to buy don't accept them. So I don't have any BTC.

nvk• 13 years ago

I agree that's why we are launching a POS Terminal they are used to, its a long term play. More info here coinkite.com/faq

egypturnash2• 13 years ago

I dunno if that's worth the effort; more and more businesses I see are using Square on a phone or tablet to take credit cards. But good luck.

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Shouldn’t option 2 be ‘0.00000001-10’ instead of ‘0-10’? As it is stated now, someone with no BTC should vote for option 1 as well as option 2.

Actually, the other options overlap too. I suggest using ‘11-20’, ‘21-50’, ‘51-200’, ‘201-1,000’, and ‘1,001-10,000’.

EDIT: I adjusted option 2 to start with less than 1 but more than zero. Thanks for the correction. I also agree with other commenters that the ‘1-10’ range is too large.

randyrand• 13 years ago

Then what do people with .001 do? I like it how it is but to be correct it would be .00000001 - 10 (I think that's the right number of decimal places.)

eterm• 13 years ago

What if someone owns 0.2?

Ranges should be taken to mean A < x <= Y it seems.

olalonde3• 13 years ago

Oops, good catch... I just edited the poll.

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot. Good edit.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

A good follow up question for those that have them: How did you acquire them?

Currency Exchange, Selling Goods, Selling Services, Mining, etc

scottlinux• 13 years ago

coinbase.com is good if you are in the US.

modeless• 13 years ago

Currency exchange, specifically Mt. Gox back when Dwolla still supported them.

benmanns• 13 years ago

I think 0-10 is a too large a range. There's a big difference between having $10 worth (~0.07 BTC) and $1500 worth (~10 BTC). The first is what I have, which is basically play money. The latter is a more significant investment.

T-zex• 13 years ago

So this really depends on how you define the "play money".

theboss2• 13 years ago

Exactly this. I have some nonzero amount when I mined for 1 afternoon. Technically I don't have zero but I shouldnt be in the same category as people with a thousand dollars worth.

With that said.... I said I have zero in the poll.

crisnoble• 13 years ago

I think I have .0005 left over in a wallet somewhere. I also said zero. Seeing all this loose change and no easy way to get it out of there I'm wondering if someone can suggest a charity who would accept the measly amounts but use the aggregate for good.

igorgue2• 13 years ago

Yeah, completely agree!

the_watcher5• 13 years ago

Agreed, I bought the minimum amount from Coinbase out of interest (and giving myself a financial stake in something I am interested in and support). But that's ~.200001 BTC for a value of ~25

mildtrepidation2• 13 years ago

A very good point; thank you for making it. For people like me who don't keep track of the exchange rates for BTC at all, it fundamentally changes the way the poll looks.

At first glance it seemed to me this poll said pretty clearly that HN doesn't trust BTC (and to an extent, it still does, it just softly suggests it rather than shouting it with irate certainty). Having this context makes the result less interesting but at least frames it appropriately.

Zoomla2• 13 years ago

if bitcoins would ever become the primary world currency, I think you would be doing pretty good either way, even at 0.05 bitcoin

plaguuuuuu2• 13 years ago

Sorta. If I were to hold 10 it would still be a small percent of my total assets .. mostly comprising various stocks (I don't currently own real estate so I do indeed have some assets rather than debts, lol).

I'm in a position where I can wait for the next massive crash and buy up maybe 10 or 15 as essentially a form of gambling. Because why the fuck not.

skulquake• 13 years ago

I wish I had looked more deeply into the protocol back when the 10k BTC pizza event had occurred.

shocks• 13 years ago

Hindsight is 20-20.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Yep. I looked into Bitcoin when it first came out and I predicted that it would fail. Satoshi's paper never mentioned the emergent pyramid-scheme social dynamics...

paulhauggis• 13 years ago

I don't own a single Bitcoin. The problem is that it's too volatile.

calinet6• 13 years ago

Problem. Ha.

eliben3• 13 years ago

The dominance of 0 in the answers is illuminating

nilved• 13 years ago

Is it? A lot of people use Bitcoin, but it's still a very, very, very, very low percentage of people in all.

eliben3• 13 years ago

I would expect the percentage amongst HN-ers to be way higher though.

mozboz• 13 years ago

At time of writing 2/7ths of respondents own > 0 bitcoin. Are there many other new technologies you'd expect 2/7ths of all respondents to use/own? Especially one that doesn't really have a direct use to most consumers yet and high risk for people investing.

2/7th's is huge.

qnr• 13 years ago

It's absolutely huge. If 2/7 of the world population owned bitcoins, there would be at most 0.01 BTC per person.

eliben3• 13 years ago

From HN I'd expect more than that. Don't confuse HN-ers with "general population".

okasaki• 13 years ago

I mined about 50BTC years ago (when it took around 1 day CPU time), but a constantly deflating currency seemed like a dumb idea so I deleted it. It still seems like a dumb idea, but now I wish I hadn't.

the_watcher5• 13 years ago

Wait, you just deleted 50 BTC? That was possible?

gus_massa• 13 years ago

Actually, he hasn’t deleted the 50 BC. They are still there but they are trapped. He only deleted the only copy of the key to transfer them, so those BC will be trapped there “forever”.

Actually it’s possible to brute-force search for the key and make the BC free, and transfer them. But with the same method it’s possible to steal BC. The brute-force method is just too slow, and would require a few thousands or perhaps millions of years. (I don’t remember the exact estimation.)

With the help of the Moor’s law and some advance breaking the cryptographic security measures, this can happen sooner, but this would be a problem for every BC user.

jjcm• 13 years ago

Very possible. I was in the same boat as parent - I set up my all of my school's lab computers to mine. Ended up with quite a lot of BTC, which I didn't bother backing up since they weren't worth anything at the time. Needless to say when BTC bubbled I was kicking myself.

dreen• 13 years ago

Somewhere around 2, I'm not sure. I don't have any use for it at all, but my electricity bill is included in my accomodation, so mining = free money for me. At some point I'll just sell it, a kind of emergency fund.

Thiz• 13 years ago

In a couple of years it will be nearly impossible to own ONE single bitcoin for the majority of the population of the world.

Satoshis aplenty but bitcoins, fugget about it.

the_watcher5• 13 years ago

At that point the microBTC will become the de facto denomination. It's already fairly close to that, IMO. When 1 unit of something is worth 100x the most widely available currency, it's no longer useful to list prices in that denomination.

spurgu• 13 years ago

I own ~2.4 (bought them for 10€) but I forgot the password to my encrypted wallet.

Dakos• 13 years ago

And this is why you should keep a txt file with all your passwords uploaded to dropbox, trust me.

aidos• 13 years ago

I might trust you (I don't, nothing personal), but I wouldn't trust dropbox.

Munksgaard• 13 years ago

Trust Dropbox, you mean.

mail2vks• 13 years ago

That would mean Dropbox reading all passwords. Use KeePassX or any such tool and store the data file in Dropbox instead

lucb1e• 13 years ago

The funniest about this is that nobody seems to get it's a joke. That means they probably did it some time in the past :D

Xcelerate• 13 years ago

Mind if I give it a crack attempt? ;)

igorgue2• 13 years ago

I sold all that I had (about 2B) after the Silk Road thing.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

2 BTC, presumably, not 2B BTC... :-)

Zenst• 13 years ago

0 representation here - I do not own any, though that is reflective to my fiscal status currently though have not owned any previously either.

Why I own 0 bitcoins (currently): One aspect I find facinating about bitcoins over normal money is how they can be tracked and every coin can be audited openly down to its creation. Whilst with notes this is possible, tills and other transactions do not note down those serial numbers used and coins have no way at all of being tracked. Both due to the analogue forms of transactions mean that no exact coin or note is tracked and at most the amount is tracked albeit in a form not tied down to the history of said coin or note. Bitcoins are completely different.

Reason that is important is whilst the media etc seem to portray the criminal usage of bitcoins, the whole system is more secure and auditable than any paper notes or metal coins and with that any bad press about criminal usage of bitcoins are more equaly so with other forms of currency due to the very nature of usage.

So one day I may very well get some bitcoins, but finances aside I do see them as dynamic as shares and in many weays less spendable than shares, due to lack of mainstream recognition and acceptance. When you can go into a major bank and get an exchange rate is when some stability gets introduced and the whole dynamic price akin to shares is removed. That is when I will personaly utilise them as a currency of transaction and fiscal storage.

schoen• 13 years ago

I heard speculation that some ATMs were technically capable of recording the serial numbers of bills that they dispense to a particular customer (via OCR) and that some bill accepters used by banks or currency exchangers were capable of doing the same. Since modern ATMs already have quite sophisticated OTR on the input side -- I've found them very accurate lately at recognizing even sloppy handwriting on checks -- this is quite plausible technologically. It's not clear to me whether governments would ask cash-handling businesses to do this kind of bill-tracking today, and whether they'd expect to learn interesting things from it. (I'd imagine most bills participate in several cash transactions in between bank deposits.)

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Zero here. I don't own any bitcoins for the same reason I don't own any British pounds or Russian rubles: no reason to.

atom-morgan2• 13 years ago

Not even as a way to diversify some of your savings?

maxaf• 13 years ago

BTC isn't a reliable store of value under any reasonable standard.

aqme28• 13 years ago

It's not quite like investing in cash because it has far higher potential returns (and a lot more risk).

mikeash2• 13 years ago

It amuses me how the answer to "is Bitcoin a currency?" changes depending on which answer is good or bad.

jcfrei• 13 years ago

around 0.3 btc and more ltc than I should've bought...

jere2• 13 years ago

4 poll responders have over $1.5 million in BTC?

olalonde3• 13 years ago

Those polls are rarely accurate especially at the edges (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734). I added a "5,000,001+" option just to see how many people will click it.

jere2• 13 years ago

Yea I was thinking about that... an option that is so plainly impossible that it doesn't need to be considered (over 1/3 of all BTC does it). I imagine $1.5 million is just on the edge of plausibility for some adventurous, wealthy founders here.

rms• 13 years ago

Even if they are untruthful, there are surely multiple bitcoin millionaires from Hacker News. Bitcoin was announced here multiple times in the very early days.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

I don't own any. I'm waiting for when BTC will be a stable currency and not just a volatile speculation/investment object.

droogs• 13 years ago

I have just over 2 BTC, but now that Silk Road is closed down, I don't really have any use for them - my only purchases were pharmaceutical drugs that I can't get without prescription in my country.

So I'll probably just hang on to them in case Bitcoin shoots up in value some day, and I can sell them for real money.

Fuxy2• 13 years ago

I have 1 BTC I really love the idea of using it and if a had a easy and consistent way of getting it i would use it for most of my online transactions.

As it stands now it's incredibly hard to find someone selling BTC unless you're willing to mail a copy of your ID over the internet something i would never do.

the_watcher5• 13 years ago

What's wrong with Coinbase? I'm genuinely curious, I had no idea that people have issues buying and selling it, since I've only ever used Coinbase.

Fuxy2• 13 years ago

Besides the fact that it only work in the US nothing. It doesn't even have an option for GBP.

znowi• 13 years ago

I'd like to hear some stories from the 10k crowd :)

dredwerker• 13 years ago

I have just over 1. I have traded really hard to get here. I started with about 0.3. I wish I had put some real money in but hey ho

I see it as a curiosity that might go somewhere.I think that the govts will wake up and stop it, if it looks too successful.

Gonzih• 13 years ago

Looks like (at least for now) most of the people here (including me) do not care about bitcoin (less than 10 bitcoins).

GigabyteCoin• 13 years ago

If everybody here had ~10 bitcoins, that would only be enough for ~1,100,000 people in the world to own bitcoins.

If Bitcoin ever becomes mainstream... most people will have well below 0.01 BTC in their wallets at any given time.

dasil003• 13 years ago

That makes me wonder if they'll come up with names for fractional bitcoins just because people hate dealing with decimals.

stevewilber• 13 years ago

Major self-selection bias in this poll. People who don't care about bitcoin (and therefore own zero) won't click on the poll.

mildtrepidation2• 13 years ago

This may be countered by the fact that people who sign up and log in to HN (and most other sites that allow user commentary) in the first place tend to be vocal about their opinions and predilections.

I don't have much faith in BTC and don't own any, but still participated. I'm not saying the bias you mention doesn't exist, but it's not as black and white as you state.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

Zero. I dislike the idea of using bitcoin for currency speculation, though I look forward to using it for normal transactions sometime in the future when it stabilizes and when buying/selling them on demand becomes more streamlined.

Basically I am interested in "bitcoin, the cryptocurrency", not "bitcoin, the investment".

bergie• 13 years ago

There are several bars and restaurants in my neighbourhood that accept BitCoin, so I'm happy to have some for day-by-day use. Especially as most places in Berlin don't accept cards

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

There are a few things I could use bitcoin for, but not enough for me to bother using bitcoin instead of other currencies right now. I hope that changes soon though.

plaguuuuuu2• 13 years ago

I don't think it will necessarily stabilize due to lack of any intrinsic value.

The best future for Bitcoin is instantaneous on-demand conversion from other currencies.

kylelibra• 13 years ago

Total bitcoins in existence ~12M

Bitcoins claimed to be owned by people participating in this poll ~35M

matt_kantor• 13 years ago

Now it's upwards of 75M even if all voters are at the lower bounds of each range.

nordsieck• 13 years ago

It could be that people are claiming to own $5M+ worth of bitcoins.

Kinnard• 13 years ago

Not enough!

3lackRos3• 13 years ago

5,000,001+ 12 people.This is funny

felipelalli• 13 years ago

13 x 5,000,00 = 15,000,000

Almost impossible.

egypturnash2• 13 years ago

I have five. A couple months ago I thought about getting into ASIC miners, but a look at the numbers made me decide to not bother - nothing in the range I was willing to spend was likely to turn a profit. So I took the money I was willing to spend and bought four BTC from Coinbase. Then when the price crashed after the Silk Road bust I got a fifth for a bit less. Now that it's bouncing up around $150/btc I'm kinda wishing I'd bought more - if there's another drop I'll probably move myself up into the 11-50BTC range, then keep sitting on them.

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

I've stranded some fractions of a bitcoin in wallets I have the addresses for. IE probably < $10 worth that I got for free from some random websites or something once.

At various times I've wanted to buy some and store them properly, but buying them was too much of a hassle. Especially with all the personal information exchanges make you give them. I got kind of turned off when I realized the only way to convert cash was to know someone. (The primary thing I though they'd be useful for was paying for a VPN subscription.)

Zoomla2• 13 years ago

I am happy with the fraction of bitcoin that I received for free.. maybe one day it will be worth cashing in, but hopefully not.

codemonkeymike2• 13 years ago

I personally own 11.2BTC, Bought in at about $140 with $1000 and after a few crafty trades was able to make my money back and more. Its like a game, BTC go up and down for no predictable reason so you just have to buy low and sell high instinctively, and sometimes your wrong... instinctively

rschmitty• 13 years ago

so like an unregulated market of a single stock?

codemonkeymike2• 13 years ago

Yeh like trading on the OTCbb

lifeformed• 13 years ago

I have 1BTC that I got from selling an album of music I made, back when a bitcoin was worth $4.

Poll: How many Bitcoins do you own?

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