Each month I take a wallet address snapshot and here is my final Bitcoin wallet address update for the year. Some highlights:
  • Saw a 21% increase (isn't it ironic, Alanis?) in wallet addresses in 2023
  • Raced past the 50M address mark this month
  • Saw 3M+ new addresses since November -- 49.5M to 52.6M
  • Surpassed the 1M wholecoiner mark this year
  • Only two levels saw a decrease on the year -- the 100-1000 and 10,000-100,000 BTC levels
An increasing wholecoiner count does not excite me tbh, as it means that ownership is centralising. I'd love to see it actually go down, indicating a distribution into more hands.
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It's hard to have any breakaway from this since we don't know how many addresses are owned by one person.
My first reaction was that's amazing how poor so many people are. But it's actually impossible to make this conclusion from this graph
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The majority of the growth was at the sub 0.1 levels and it would be really poor UTXO hygiene to have multiple addresses at those distributions so I'd place my bets on those being individuals.
I don't sweep anything smaller than 2M sats to cold storage anymore and in doing some napkin math, I'm probably going to bump that even higher in 2024. I had already moved it from 1M to 2M in 2023 and if adoption continues to ramp, mempool continues to be full with fees ramping, it's going to be very costly for those that haven't been on top of their UTXO management.
Hell, I was in a Space yesterday with some Bitcoin veterans and even they didn't quite understand how UTXOs worked because wallets have obfuscated that away under the guise of end user UI/UX simplicity.
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but, but... :)
what if adoption continues to ramp and 1M is not $420 anymore, but $2k ?
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Only two levels saw a decrease on the year -- the 100-1000 and 10,000-100,000 BTC levels
This is good for Bitcoin. :)
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