The Bitcoin Desk
Bitcoin's ledger has recorded every payment made since January 2009. Anyone can download all of it tonight. It cannot tell you who owns a single coin.
That gap is not a defect anyone intends to close. The record identifies coins rather than people, and that is the property its holders value. Which leaves the most-asked question about the asset answerable only from outside the record: a survey of a few thousand people, a firm sorting addresses into groups and estimating the rest, or, on one occasion in 2020, a leaked shipping list.
This desk covers bitcoin the way Franklin Hugh Money covers anything else. Where it came from, how the machinery works, and what the documents say, rather than what the price did this week.
What the surveys can see
Ownership figures are survey figures. Worth stating before the charts rather than in a footnote under them. Two careful studies of American adults published in 2026 disagree by eleven points on how many people hold any cryptocurrency, and neither is careless. They asked different people in different ways.
| Region | Owners | Share |
|---|
Triple-A cryptocurrency ownership data for 2024. Triple-A is a crypto payments company that publishes ownership estimates. Regional figures sum to 549.9 million; Triple-A's headline global total is 562 million, and the roughly 12 million difference is unallocated in the published breakdown. Shares are computed against the 549.9 million that is regionally attributed.
Europe below North America is the number most people get wrong. It counts owners, not money moved. On the money-moved measure Chainalysis put European on-chain value received at roughly 2.6 trillion dollars for the year to June 2025, ahead of Asia-Pacific at 2.36 trillion and North America at 2.2 trillion. Fewer European owners, larger European transactions.
| Age | Share |
|---|
Security.org, 2026 Cryptocurrency Adoption and Sentiment Report. 992 US adults surveyed, of whom 293 owned crypto; every owner figure here rests on those 293. Figures are as published and sum to 99 percent because of rounding; the wedge angles are drawn against that 99.
Roughly two thirds of American crypto owners are between 30 and 59. The explanation is arithmetic rather than temperament. Pew found 26 percent of adults under 30 had used crypto against 28 percent of those aged 30 to 49, so the rates sit close together. There are more middle-aged Americans, and more of them finish the month with money left over.
| Gender | Owners | Share |
|---|
Donut: Triple-A 2024 global ownership, 343 million men and 219 million women of 562 million owners. Tiles: Pew Research Center, American Trends Panel, 8,512 US adults surveyed 20–26 January 2026, measuring adults who have ever invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency.
The donut and the tiles measure different things, and the distinction carries the point. The donut is a split: the share of owners who are men. The tiles are a rate: the share of all men who have used crypto. A man in the United States is roughly two and a half times as likely to have used it as a woman, and the widest gap sits in the middle of working life.
On the desk
The genesis-block headline through the block-size war, by way of proof of work, private keys, custody, and a valuation argument taken seriously from both sides.
Why an address is not a person, why three defensible counts of bitcoin owners disagree by an order of magnitude, and what a marketing database did that the ledger cannot.
Sources
Every figure here carries a name and a date. Two of the publishers sell services in this market rather than researching it from the outside, which is stated up front rather than left for the reader to discover.
- Pew Research Center, American Trends Panel, 8,512 US adults surveyed 20–26 January 2026.
- Security.org, 2026 Cryptocurrency Adoption and Sentiment Report, 992 US adults of whom 293 owned crypto.
- Triple-A, 2024 global ownership data. Triple-A is a crypto payments company.
- River, Bitcoin Ownership Report 2025, cited in the audio. River is an American company that sells bitcoin services.
- Chainalysis, 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, covering July 2024 to June 2025.