How Many People are at BitShares?

How many people are really at BitShares? 5,000 to 30,000. There has been a lot of confusion around the number of people or accounts on the BitShares platform. Let's clear this up.

I first brought some clarity to this about a year ago when I marked it at 33,000.
https://steemit.com/bitshares/@cryptick/bitshares-has-about-33-000-active-users

There were a lot of people, that -for good reasons- thought this was wrong.

There has been a lot that has happened. Here I also took a look at some of the competition.
https://steemit.com/newdex/@cryptick/activity-at-some-of-the-decentralized-exchanges

The counters, which worked until recently, showed about 4,000 to 5,000 a day.

There are other ways we can look at the numbers, like looking at BitCNY holdings.

BitCNY is the top stable coin on the platform. While there are about 31,437 accounts that are shown holding a balance if you cut through those numbers looking at accounts that have enough balance to potentially buy lunch you get about 5,000 accounts. This chart is helpful.

And then we can look at the BitUSD; you can see there are 8,410 accounts; but really a more realistic number is 2,700.

Now there are other ways to count.
Cryptofresh has a nice page which shows the number of asset holders.
https://www.cryptofresh.com/assets

This page can be a bit buggy at times. It did not appear to load volumes.

https://bitsharescan.com/

Here is another block explorer. This one count holders differently. (It has to do with low balance holders.)

But as I just showed on CNY and USD almost all of these numbers need to be reduced.
In the case of CNY the real number was about 16%. In the case of USD the real number was about 32%. Likewise it is best to assume that all of these assets the numbers show be reduced by a large amount of 50 to 80%.

Let's just take a look at another one. Here is Open.BTC.

It shows about 8,000 holders but really that number should be about 4,000 to 5,000. (about 50%)
In one of the above charts it is counted at 13,000, but it is 5,000 it is 38%.

Now let's look at some of the wrong ways to count users. All BitShares accounts are numbered. They started at 1. Recently, account 1,680,000 was registered. Yes, there are 1.6 million accounts but really more like 30,000 active users. There are bots that register accounts and inflate the numbers. That does not mean they are real people or active or have ever traded, but technically, an account exists.

One can also look at registrations… to see who has referred or registered people. These numbers are basically bogus and useless as well.

Anyone can set up a bot and get to the top of the list. I am not quite sure why there are all these automatically registered accounts, but there are.

Now one can also look at markets. I have done a number of reports on markets.
I have done several liquidity reports.

https://steemit.com/bitshares/@cryptick/bitshares-dexbot-liquidity-report-on-bridge-btc-and-bridge-alqo

https://whaleshares.io/@cryptick1/bitshares-dexbot-liquidity-report-on-bridge-rvn-and-bridge-btc

Here we see there are 175 accounts with active orders in the market and 195 accounts with active orders in the market. Let’s just call it 200 to keep it simple. With 200 people in each market and with 50 markets with more than $1,000 a day in volume or with 106 markets that have more than $100 a day in volume you could see numbers in the
50 markets times 200 people equals 10,000.
106 market times 200 people equals 21,400.

Another way, one might could would be to look at the proxy numbers. Who has voted?
Now about 60% of accounts have not been used for a while (like in the last 6 months to a year)
And only 27% are votings.
https://bitsharescan.com/voting

But there are about 16,800 accounts that have set up a proxy.

Some accounts (on open ledger by defaulted proxied open ledger. )
If we only count people who have voted or proxied we get about 17,000. One could also argue that since that makes up 27% of accounts then the number would give you a total of 62,000 accounts.
This might not be an unreasonable argument, but it helps to be clear and transparent about how you are getting there.
One might also argue that if you remove the auto-registered from open ledger then multiple by 4 to represent 100%
If we remove the 11,000 of open ledger, that would give us about 6,000 and times 4 would give us a number in the area of 24,000. That might not be unreasonable either. As long as we are transparent about how we get there.

Many organizations like Facebook and Twitter constantly delete “fake” accounts created by computers to keep the numbers real. Facebook has deleted billions of accounts. At BitShares we also need to be “real” with our numbers.

We need to have a real conversation about the number of people who are here, and how we can get more.
Liquidity is heavily based on the number of people who at BitShares and we want those who are here to be able to trade and have a good experience.

There are a lot of different ways we can look at these numbers, but let's be fair and transparent. If the numbers are falling in line with this data, hey that is a good sign, if not, you may need to take a look at the data a little more closely.

I find it troubling when bad data and bad numbers are thrown around.

There really are a lot of different ways to count users at BitShares. The context of how you use the data may dictate how you count the number of people and or the number of users. It is wrong and deceitful to count the numbers in such a way as to make BitShares appear to be bigger than it is. A lot of us want to grow BitShares and make it more successful, if we are constantly fighting lies about basic numbers, or the number of people here, it is hard to have a talk about what we must do to grow that number.

This post hopefully will help provide some clarity on the ways we can count numbers and what is realistic. My personal favorite data is the number of active users in the last 24 hours. This is around 5,000 as of a few days ago. It has been as low as 4,000. It was about 12,000 about 7 months ago. If you look at the number of users active in the last month, that is usually around three times the daily. 10-15K. If you want total with holdings in some of the top assets, well those are in the 2,000 to 5,000 range.

It should also be noted, many people have more than one account. These numbers assume that each account represent a different person. We know that is not the case, but I don’t know how to estimate that.

To me the next question is how do we grow, and how do we get more users?

It has been a hard and cold crypto winter. Users have been trending down. Hopefully, markets will turn around.

What are we doing to develop new cutting edge technology to attract them?

What are we doing to get new users?

Are we being transparent with yourselves about the data?

Are we fooling ourselves?

There is a lot to consider, but once we take an honest look of where we are at; then we can formulate plans to move forward.

The DEXBot is a market making bot you can run to help increase liquidity on markets and hopefully make some money.
www.dexbot.info
BitShares is a Decentralized Exchange where you can trade coins. It is a blockchain based exchange -like bitcoin.
www.bitshares.org