user44935: How many different individuals in the world own bitcoin?
I.e. John owns .5btc, Michelle 300btc, Al 4000btc : the answer would be 3.
I am interested in the percent of the global population that owns bitcoin as it would be a good indicator of the potential (and value) further for bitcoin as it is educated to more and more people and eventually reaches mainstream (hopefully).

user45212: Of ~16 million coins out there, as much as 2.2 million have never been moved or have fallen out of circulation. We're looking at maybe 14 million coins.
Then there are people who for one reason or another have much much more than others. 
If there are 11.4 million wallets I'd be surprised if even 1% contain any value. Let's say 10 percent of wallets are a coiners main wallet.
11.4 million wallets
10 wallets/person
14 million bitcoins (unevenly distributed.)
So out of ~1.14 million coiners, they each could have at maximum 12.3 bitcoin, but they don't. I'm sure there are much less than one million souls with at least one bitcoin.

user29432: This website shows statistics about the number of addresses containing amounts in specific ranges: 
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html 
The sum of all addresses containing 0.01 or more bitcoins is only 3.884.657. Even assuming that all the addresses containing 0.001-0.01 bitcoins would cointaing 0.01 bitcoins only increase that number by at most 23.819 individuals controlling at least 1 bitcoins. So I think it is save to assume that no more than 4 million (probably much less) control 1 or more bitcoins.
But I am not sure how accurate the website is.

user5406: There's a hard limit on the amount of people that own one bitcoin: There currently are only 16.1 million bitcoins in circulation, so there can't be more more than 16.1 million people with one bitcoin. However, there are a number of individuals that control much more bitcoin than that, so it is safe to say that the actual number of users that own one bitcoin is much smaller, I'd guess less than one million people.
On the other hand, the number of users that own any bitcoin at all is very hard to estimate as well. There are currently 46 million unspent transaction outputs, so if we'd assume that every user maintains their own balance that would be a strict upper limit. However, many users leave their coins to be managed by online wallets or exchanges, so it's not a reliable limit. On the other hand, the number of people is probably even much smaller than that, because few people own many of those UTXOs. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that there are fewer than five million people in the world that own any bitcoins.

44935: <p>How many different individuals in the world own bitcoin?</p>

<p>I.e. John owns .5btc, Michelle 300btc, Al 4000btc : the answer would be 3.</p>

<p>I am interested in the percent of the global population that owns bitcoin as it would be a good indicator of the potential (and value) further for bitcoin as it is educated to more and more people and eventually reaches mainstream (hopefully).</p>
 45212: <p>Of ~16 million coins out there, as much as 2.2 million have never been moved or have fallen out of circulation. We're looking at maybe 14 million coins.</p>

<p>Then there are people who for one reason or another have much much more than others. </p>

<p>If there are 11.4 million wallets I'd be surprised if even 1% contain any value. Let's say 10 percent of wallets are a coiners main wallet.</p>

<p>11.4 million wallets
10 wallets/person
14 million bitcoins (unevenly distributed.)</p>

<p>So out of ~1.14 million coiners, they each could have at maximum 12.3 bitcoin, but they don't. I'm sure there are much less than one million souls with at least one bitcoin.</p>
 29432: <p>This website shows statistics about the number of addresses containing amounts in specific ranges: 
<a href="https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html</a> </p>

<p>The sum of all addresses containing 0.01 or more bitcoins is only 3.884.657. Even assuming that all the addresses containing 0.001-0.01 bitcoins would cointaing 0.01 bitcoins only increase that number by at most 23.819 individuals controlling at least 1 bitcoins. So I think it is save to assume that no more than 4 million (probably much less) control 1 or more bitcoins.</p>

<p>But I am not sure how accurate the website is.</p>
 5406: <p>There's a hard limit on the amount of people that own one bitcoin: There currently are only 16.1 million bitcoins in circulation, so there can't be more more than 16.1 million people with one bitcoin. However, there are a number of individuals that control much more bitcoin than that, so it is safe to say that the actual number of users that own one bitcoin is much smaller, I'd guess less than one million people.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the number of users that own any bitcoin at all is very hard to estimate as well. There are currently 46 million unspent transaction outputs, so if we'd assume that every user maintains their own balance that would be a strict upper limit. However, many users leave their coins to be managed by online wallets or exchanges, so it's not a reliable limit. On the other hand, the number of people is probably even much smaller than that, because few people own many of those UTXOs. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that there are fewer than five million people in the world that own any bitcoins.</p>
