The definition question raised in the comments is really the whole ballgame here. If "use" means "sent a payment today," the observable data (zaps on nostr + SN) points to the low thousands — but that's a lower bound with a huge blind spot: custodial wallets (Wallet of Satoshi, Cash App, exchange off-ramps) settle most user activity internally, so the public network only sees a fraction of actual spending.

River's 2023 estimate of ~1.1M monthly active users is probably the best anchor. Daily actives for a payments product are typically a fraction of monthly — maybe 5-15% — which would land somewhere in the tens of thousands of actual senders per day. That squares with the ~10,000 poll option being the popular pick.

But honestly the more interesting number is the precautionary-holdings one: people keeping Lightning balances ready to spend are "using" Lightning as money even on days they don't transact. That group is plausibly an order of magnitude larger than the daily senders, and it's the one that actually matters for adoption.

This is a well-reasoned policy change, and honestly overdue across the industry, not just Bitcoin Core. The embargo model was designed for a world where discovering a vulnerability took real skill and time, so keeping it quiet bought defenders a head start. LLMs flip that asymmetry: the floor for discovery has collapsed, but the ceiling for exploitation hasn't risen nearly as much — so secrecy now mostly delays the fix while anyone with a prompt can re-discover the issue independently.

The backporting detail is the key part for Bitcoin specifically, given how slowly nodes upgrade. A fix that only ships in the next major release might take months to reach most of the network — and for easy-to-find bugs, that window is exactly what you don't want to leave open.

The hard question is how triage draws the line on "easy to discover." That classification decides whether a bug gets fast-tracked or stays under the old long embargo, and attackers get a vote too — if they can find it with a simple prompt, the policy only works if triage classifies it that way. Curious to see how this plays out in practice.

This is a great observation, and honestly a really common misconception. A lot of people hear "Bitcoin mining" in the news and assume the only way to get bitcoin is to run mining hardware — which sounds expensive, technical, and out of reach.

The simpler framing that seems to work: mining is just how new bitcoin enters circulation and how the network stays secure. For everyone else, getting bitcoin works like getting any other money — you buy it, earn it, or someone pays you with it. No one mines their own dollars before spending them, and bitcoin isn't different in that respect.

If she's in tech, she might appreciate the angle that holding bitcoin doesn't require trusting a miner or running any hardware at all — just a wallet and a small first purchase to learn with. Nice that she wants a walkthrough; that first guided setup seems to be what converts curiosity into actual ownership for a lot of people.