The State of Bitcoin Adoption | Troy Cross & Ella Hough

23:16Ella Hough:We still think some of them might have forgotten it or still might not recognize it. It's Andy, my co-author, Andy Perkins, was saying Bitcoin is the Kleenex of cryptocurrencies. The name for the brand has become the name for the segment. And that makes affinity scamming very easy. You know, the Kleenex executives are probably really pissed off when people buy Puffs and say, yes, I got some Kleenex when you had Kleenex on the to buy list. Right. And the same goes for Kodak or Xerox or any of these other kind of market leaders. It's the blessing and the curse of being the segment leader that people just associate you with the whole segment.

24:00Ella Hough:In some ways, that's, you know, brand dominance. But in other ways, it sucks. Yeah. But we did our very best to kind of pare that down. And it might explain the difference between our numbers and some numbers that are even higher than ours.

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26:23Ella Hough:Okay, good. Well, first of all, yeah, we introduced a new method of, a new way of testing for Bitcoin ownership because we also got a critique last year. Last year, we found one in seven or 13 % of people said they owned Bitcoin. And we just asked that simple question, do you own Bitcoin? And we got a lot of people saying, well, maybe more own it than that, but they own it in ways that they're not gonna say yes to that question. like their spouse owns it and they own everything jointly with their spouse, but they're not going to answer yet. Yes. Or maybe they have it through an ETF. So this time we, we asked an open-ended question, do you own Bitcoin?

27:03Ella Hough:Uh, and then we'd say on exchanges in self-custody in an ETF jointly with a partner, um, through a business investment and click all that apply or check all that apply. And then we also had an option that said, none of these ways. And so there we found 18.6 % ownership of Bitcoin, which is between one in five and one in six, which is 48 million Americans. I looked up a Pew research study on Catholics in America, and there's supposedly 50 million Catholics. They're probably also counting kids. So roughly Bitcoin owners equals Catholics in terms of population in the US. Yeah, that is formidable political constituency.

27:54Troy Cross:That's very interesting. And when you like, I can obviously see this here on the ownership exchanges dominating by quite a long way, which is probably not surprising. Yes. Self-custody relatively high, 23%. The ETF thing's interesting because that's obviously, I don't even know if that was around when you did the last report. It was around, but just barely.

28:15Ella Hough:But that's already at 20%. ETF share is almost equal to self-custody. Probably next year, it'll be in the second position behind exchanges. Was there anything in here that surprised you? Yeah. Self-custody, you mentioned it's 22 % of Bitcoin owners that roughly one in five owners holds in self-custody. But what's really shocking is that's 4.1 % of the whole population or 11 million American adults. And this one honestly made me question our data because I thought it just couldn't be true. I thought it was just too high. And I was like, oh no, like, does this doom the whole survey? And I looked up hardware wallet sales.

29:02Ella Hough:Ledger sold 8 million wallets, uh, cumulative, cumulatively globally, uh, Trezor has sold 2 million. Um, you know, those dominate the numbers for hardware wallets. So if every, if every one of those wallets was still in use and all belong to exactly one, one American each, then, you know, that would, that would accommodate our 11 million roughly, but, but we know that's not the case. And, And probably it's more like 1 million out of that 11 million that holds on a hardware wallet. So other possibilities, maybe people just don't understand what self-custody means. We tried to explain it in the question.

29:43Ella Hough:But another possibility is that they hold them on mobile wallets where you write down your keys. And we looked at downloads of popular mobile wallets. And Trust Wallet is 200 million downloads. And it's also a garbage wallet. So if anyone's listening and uses it, do not use it. It's a garbage early wallet that came out of the Binance ecosystem. But Binance is huge in everything. And it's in first place by a lot. So my theory on this is that the 4.21 % self-custody number represents the blessing of crypto. Because I think a lot of people downloaded these wallets because it's a lot easier and cheaper.

30:28Ella Hough:It's free. Cheaper than buying a hardware wallet. And they probably, a lot of people, bought these wallets in order to hold their NFTs and play games on DeFi, Yield Farm, and that sort of thing in the last cycle. And then, you know, as all that stuff crashes, they move into Bitcoin or maybe wrapped Bitcoin because it's the safest and best crypto asset. So I think a lot of people are doing self-custody because they came in through the crypto route. And it's less just less of a big hurdle to have a mobile wallet like that. But yeah, that's a huge constituency, 11 million people who do this thing that Elizabeth Warren and others have characterized as shadowy supercoder behavior.

31:13Ella Hough:Like, no, that's a lot of that's a lot of Americans. Right now, the Roman storm trial is going on. The issues, the three bills that are before Congress, they're debating about whether to be bundled, whether to provide developers immunity from charges that have to do with how their software is used. Who cares about those issues? I think this 11 million, they're a serious, passionate constituency of the electorate.

31:43Troy Cross:Totally. It would be interesting. I don't know if you could do this, but maybe people won't want to share this data, but it would be interesting if you could kind of weight that by how much Bitcoin they actually own and see how that changed the scale.

31:55Ella Hough:Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is a big kind of flaw in our study overall is that what we're talking about is whether you own Bitcoin, not how much you own. And a lot of our results that shock people, I think is that people's opinions are weighted by the whales that they know. And, you know, I don't know how much money is on the typical cash app wallet, but my guess is it's not a lot. So you might have$20 on your cash app and you might have$10 in Bitcoin and you're going to show up as a yes in this survey.

32:29Troy Cross:I would imagine if you did weight it by how much Bitcoin they were going to own, it'd be really interesting to see what went. I assume self-custody would be higher. You'd hope so. But maybe things like the ETF would also be much higher. Ella, I know your survey you did was on a global scale, but does this data match up with what you're seeing? Yeah, it tracks very closely. And I can show you if that's helpful to charts if we want to switch over. But Troy, we have similar numbers on self-custody. It's about like 14, 15 million Americans. Similarly on ownership, we got 49 million Americans. Very close.

33:11Troy Cross:So they're really close to what you found. Wow. I mean, that must be a bit of a blessing to see that the data is actually pretty similar, because otherwise, I don't know who would be wrong. But so Ella, let's go through your slides after. We'll keep going through Troy's first.

33:27Ella Hough:So should we move on to the next one? I'll march us along. I'll march us along.

33:30Troy Cross:Take your time.

33:31Ella Hough:On gender and age, we found the same thing as last year. Bitcoin is a young male phenomenon. And like I said last year, if we want to cross the chasm of adoption, eventually, women need to use Bitcoin as well as men. And also, we need to get the olds in on it eventually at some point.

33:54Troy Cross:Do you know what, just quickly before we move on from that, the interesting thing there is if I compare that to the audience on the podcast, it's actually quite different. Good. So when I was in Austin, me and Marty were both judges on the Pleb Lab Builder Day thing. And we were talking about this because one of the projects that was being pitched was a sort of mobile game app that was trying to get younger people into Bitcoin. And we were both saying that our podcast numbers, it's not young people. Like the Gen Z is a very, very small percentage of who listens to this podcast. And maybe that's to do with it being long form and like to stereotype Gen Z, they have a short attention span.

34:33Troy Cross:But my podcast audience gets older, not younger, which I think is quite interesting and maybe conflicts with this data a little bit.

34:42Ella Hough:Well, I think you're I think that's right. and even last year are under 25. You'll notice a slight drop-off from 26 to 30 and 31 to 35. Those are the highest. Under 25, it drops off a bit. If you look on the female side, last year, the drop-off at under 25 was a little more dramatic. And these are smaller samples within these like five-year range. So my confidence intervals are much wider. I think 18 to 25 is an area we need to work on. Yeah. I think it's an area we need to work on. And also, I just talked to my students about it and none of them are interested in Bitcoin. They might be interested in some kind of shitcoin technology or nothing, but they view it as something where the train already left the station by the time they came along.

35:29Ella Hough:And, you know, they sort of see it as boomer coin. And so I think we need to work on that demographic. It's key moving forward. Well, hey, we got Ella here.

35:39Troy Cross:I know. Yeah. I don't know why I was all I don't know why I'm even talking. But I do think there's an interesting thing there. When I found Bitcoin, I was in my mid-20s, but Bitcoin was, I mean, I had very little money, but Bitcoin was a lot cheaper then. And so it made more sense. But if you're in your early mid-20s now and you're looking at Bitcoin at 120K, that seems like something that's maybe out of reach. But Ella, you should probably talk on this. What do Gen Z think of Bitcoin? I think it's mixed. And I think it's really mixed around the world. I mean, especially because this study, it's global.

36:11Troy Cross:Like there's only three countries where it's really high outliers on the older age ranges. And that is, I believe, Kenya, Nigeria, and El Salvador. All of the other countries, it's not like that when you get to the older age ranges. And I think I have had success introducing the concept of stats and satoshis to younger, you know gen z just the same way we have cents and a dollar you know showing how it is achievable and there are still ways for you to you know get into this space and i'll just say really quickly i think a key conversation that's often not had in colleges in just discussions when you're growing up and thinking about the future is really you know what are we even all here for what are we trying to accomplish.

37:01Troy Cross:For me, Bitcoin resonated because essentially from age 13, when I was thinking about my future, how am I going to take care of myself? What am I going to do? I essentially had to plan for when I was going to die, not to be dramatic. You were thinking about this at 13 hours? Yes. And then when I found Bitcoin, it was literally like the flip of a light switch. Oh, now there is this tool that I can use to help me plan for life and what gives me joy and meaning. And I think that's a message that's also not really translated or told to younger people about what is Bitcoin going to do for your life and what impact can it have?

37:42Troy Cross:That's, I mean, I was definitely not thinking about these huge existential questions when I was 13. I was thinking about football. But it is interesting because like on the older side, I imagine that I can see how that grows with the kind of financialization, monetization of Bitcoin, all these like ETF products. I can see how that grows. I think the younger side is actually going to be harder to grow going forward.

38:04Ella Hough:I agree, Danny. And I think what Ella said is so, so beautiful and appealing. Our kids don't have a lot of things that make them hopeful. They don't have a lot of they don't see a future for themselves. and um what they've been told about bitcoin definitely doesn't help them see a future uh from from the media or from you know the the elites that are guiding them uh in education they've been told that bitcoin is like other extractive technologies like um it's going to it's going to take from the poor and give to the rich it's going to destroy the environment that they live in, and it's going to inhibit the ability of government to operate and work.

38:54Ella Hough:So they don't really see it as hope. And that's where we have a massive educational task in front of us.

39:01Troy Cross:Yeah, totally. Because you can flip all of those narratives on the head. And that is why Bitcoin is hope.

39:07Ella Hough:Absolutely. And it's hope for a much simpler reason that the number is still going up and has a long way to go. And you don't have to have one Bitcoin. The unit bias thing is extreme. You know, we make fun of it in Bitcoin, but I don't buy Berkshire Hathaway stock by the fraction, you know, because it's just such an expensive stock. I don't own Berkshire Hathaway. And there's no rational reason for me not to buy a fraction of a share. You can do that. But I still look at it like it's some kind of luxury thing. And that ship kind of sailed and it would have been nice to be, you know, Buffett's friend 30 years ago.

39:45Ella Hough:but I think for like Ella said, SATs is good. I've heard other proposals, making bits the standard and just listing the price of Bitcoin with bits. I know there's an effort in the industry to do that. I think something like that might be really helpful for Gen Z actually. I like bits and SATs.

40:08Troy Cross:I think they can both work. What I don't like is calling SATs Bitcoin.

40:12Ella Hough:Yeah, I agree. It's just too confusing. Something that in Brent Buchanan's study, signal study I presented with this guy in DC, I did 800 people, likely voters. They had a like, why don't you own Bitcoin question? And I consulted with them before they offered up the alternatives there. And I was like, well, one of the alternatives should be just be, I don't have enough money. You know, I don't have the funds to do it. And sure enough, like that was one of the highest ranking answers, right? people just i don't have enough money to do it and i think it was like 25 or 30 of people who don't have bitcoin just said that's the reason and yeah if you have um if it's a dollar a bitcoin or 10 cents a bitcoin on the way to a dollar uh sorry a a bit uh then maybe that's a little i i always thought just like the exchanges just list another coin called the satoshi and it actually is just bitcoin but it's denominated satoshis right and it's like look at the satoshi coins tracking Bitcoin precisely.

41:14Ella Hough:It's the hottest new thing, but it's actually, they're just buying Bitcoin. And they also, you know what I mean? They can exchange it for Bitcoin and it's just actually just an internal calculation within the exchange.

41:24Troy Cross:I like that.

41:25Ella Hough:All right, let's move on from age. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Race and this data is different from what we found last year. Last year, we found slightly more likely to own Bitcoin if you're non-white. This year, we found Hispanic Latino ownership was considerably higher. And so was Pacific Islander, Native American, Black, and Asian. I don't really count the Pacific Islander Native American numbers too much because that represents very few people who own Bitcoin in our sample and the error bars on those are huge. But I'm confident in the Hispanic Latino one and the Black one as both considerably higher than white.

42:04Ella Hough:And this matches other surveys in crypto. It also matches something we saw in the election last year where Donald Trump gained significantly among young Hispanic men and even young black men from before. Yeah. And it matches, I think, yeah, it matches other data from the industry.

42:23Troy Cross:So tell me why you think that it skews that way. Because like my gut reaction, I actually think is total mid-curve take is that maybe, especially when you look at the Hispanic Latino population, does this come down to maybe at some point they've used it for remittances and then understood what Bitcoin is? What do you think the reason for this is?

42:42Ella Hough:I think it's different reasons for the Black population and the Hispanic Latino population, but both related to financial privilege.

42:54Ella Hough:Friends of mine who are from Latin America or have relatives there have a much easier time grokking the value of Bitcoin because they say, oh yeah, I know when the Argentinian peso exploded or I had a family in Venezuela and they lost everything. Or, you know, they all know that or they've done a remittance. With Black Americans, it's a history of distrust with banking. You know, something else that we showed in the Signal poll really went into this is looking at trust of traditional financial institutions and correlating it with ownership of Bitcoin. And it's just as you would expect, the less you trust financial institutions, the more likely you are to own Bitcoin.

43:32Ella Hough:So Black people trust financial institutions in America less. And that's because a history of redlining, a history of discriminatory treatment on lending and dramatic things like Black Wall Street in Tulsa. So that memory doesn't fade. And I saw in the signal poll, If you say that you're a politician and you say you're supporting Bitcoin, 50 % of Black Americans say that makes them more likely to vote for you. They were the single highest group in terms of expressing political support for politicians who say they back Bitcoin. And I think it's this entire history of mistrust. All right, cool. Let's go on to the next one.

44:19Ella Hough:Okay. Political orientation and Bitcoin ownership. this year's results are very similar to last year's in the sense that bitcoin owners look kind of like the rest of america but on the sort of liberal and somewhat liberal the numbers have dropped slightly and the numbers have jumped slightly on the somewhat conservative and conservative side basically we've had a pivot around the middle left to right and we measured political orientation in four different ways. This is just one of them. The other ones showed at least this much shift, if not more. So we're pretty confident there was a rightward shift among Bitcoin owners.

45:00Troy Cross:Which makes total sense with Trump and everything that's happened there.

45:02Ella Hough:Which makes sense. And here's sentiment. It's just kind of the same theme, except now it's not what you, it's not whether you own Bitcoin, but what you think of Bitcoin, whether you think it's good. You can see in the gray is 2024 data and orange is 2025. Basically, on the left side of the political spectrum, we had a pretty big drop in sentiment towards Bitcoin. And on the right, it holds steady.

45:27Troy Cross:It's interesting, though, that sentiment has dropped pretty much across the board while ownership's gone up.

45:33Ella Hough:Yeah. Well, whether or not ownership has gone up is actually we don't take a stand on that because we changed our question. So we can't actually say whether ownership went up. What we can say is that when we asked the very same question again, which we did, we this time had a new qualifier in front of it, but we got a statistically indistinguishable answer. Where we get the increase from is from asking this question about how many, do you own it in one of the following six ways? And so we don't know what the answer to that would have been last year. I don't think that ownership is really up or we don't have any evidence that it's up.

46:12Ella Hough:And so the interesting is price is up. In March, the average price of Bitcoin over that month was something like 84 ,000. And when we gathered our data before the period over which we gathered, it was around 40 ,000. So price of Bitcoin doubled between our two surveys. Also, ETFs exploded, becoming the best-selling ETF in history, most rapid growth in history. We have the explosion of Treasury Company's micro strategy, ballistic. We, of course, Donald Trump won the election, announced a strategic Bitcoin reserve in an executive order. basically and then operation choke point 2.0 wound down I mean I can't even recount all of the wins it was it's it has been an insane year of winning and what's interesting is that all of that winning did not translate into necessarily broader ownership or sentiment sentiment went down slightly but it went down a lot on the left and among women and and so I think that's kind of I think that's kind of a red flag for us.

47:17Ella Hough:And you might, it might be different now. This was March. Sentiment is not tracking price. And it represents basically the shift of Bitcoin from a popular movement to an institutional and government asset. And some of that energy and momentum of previous bull cycles is not yet here. Maybe retail comes along now and it explodes, but they weren't there in March.

47:46Troy Cross:I do wonder though, if there's another dynamic there. So like, I agree that this probably shows that Bitcoin is moving from like a grassroots movement to institutional movement, but does it, it could also be Bitcoin price ripping and salty no coiners getting pissed off at it?

48:03Ella Hough:Of course. I mean, in another respect, like if we didn't have 2024 data and we were just looking at this, you see a center-right orientation of Bitcoin owners, mostly center and then a little bit right of the country. And then you look at sentiment and you see across the political spectrum, it's slightly below neutral, but not a whole lot of difference between left and right. And I would have said, wow, Bitcoin isn't political. That would be my headline. It's only because I have last year's data that I see the trend is actually negative. And I do think a lot of it is like, yeah, price is going up.

48:42Ella Hough:But if you're not in, which 80 % of the country is not in, then you're like, sons of bitches. They're getting rich and I'm not.

48:54Troy Cross:Yeah, I think maybe sentiment's going to drop for a lot of these studies you do as Bitcoin just goes to a million dollars. All right, let's keep it moving. What's the next one?

49:02Ella Hough:Let's keep going. Basically, we found this last year. We found it again. Whether you trust Bitcoin, know about Bitcoin, think it's useful or think it's good, highly correlates with owning Bitcoin. And those things all correlate with each other. And if you look at politics, it's gray and light gray in this chart. You can see these attitudes towards Bitcoin are slightly different among left and right. And then if you look at owners versus non-owners, which is orange versus gray, you see a massive difference. I mean, a truly huge difference. And this wipes out everything like age, gender, race, even combinations of age, gender and race are still not as powerful a predictor as just knowing about Bitcoin.

49:43Ella Hough:And that's our real, real headline.

49:45Troy Cross:I think that comes down to like, if you own Bitcoin, you probably understand what it is. So you have a better take on like that one makes total sense to me. Yeah.

49:54Ella Hough:I won't rehash the moral foundations profile in depth. Not change a lot. But it hasn't changed at all. What we found last year, we do have a new name for it. We're calling it moral maximalism, where people who are Bitcoin owners tend to care about matters of purity, loyalty, proportionality, equality, just a lot and more than the average person. But they don't match the profiles of either liberals or conservatives. They have their own distinctive profile.

50:25Troy Cross:Bitcoiners are good people.

50:27Ella Hough:Bitcoiners. That's not what I want to say, because I keep getting called on that in the comments. It doesn't mean Bitcoiners are good. It means that they care more. They're just better than everyone else. They care more about certain issues or they express that care. It doesn't mean they're actually follow through on it. finally uh attitudes towards a strategic crypto reserve or strategic bitcoin reserve if you just ask people the question straight up should we start this new thing called a strategic crypto reserve and start buying crypto with your tax dollars they mostly are neutral to negative on it however we also asked people another question which was the government is considering the US government is considering diversifying some of its$800 billion of gold into Bitcoin.

51:14Ella Hough:If you were advising the government, how much gold would you advise them to convert to Bitcoin? And we gave them a slider going from zero to 100. The slider was initially set on 50, but if you didn't touch the slider, your vote was not counted. That was a couple hundred people. So you had to grab this slider and put it on the number you wanted. And what we found was that 80 % of people put that number somewhere other than zero, with a median result of 10 % and a mean result of 20%. So, especially we found young people much more likely to convert larger amounts of gold to Bitcoin than older people.

52:00Ella Hough:But even among old people, we found, actually, the gender thing was slightly reversed. Women in general were very reluctant to go on to zero Bitcoin. and particularly older women were off zero where old men, a lot of old men were just like straight on zero. And we think it's kind of like a risk tolerance or a risk thing flipped because it seems risky to be all in gold and not even 1 % in Bitcoin. Ah, that's interesting. Yeah, so you had these like really confident Peter Schiff type older males who were like zero. But women who in general are less risk tolerant were more friendly to us getting off zero in terms of Bitcoin.

52:45Ella Hough:So our conclusion on this one was like, this issue is really tricky and very sensitive to how we frame the question. You know, if you say like, would you like to be a part of this newfangled thing where we stack Bitcoin instead of gold? People are going to balk. But if we say, should we be entirely exposed with$800 billion worth of gold and no Bitcoin? Or should we get a little Bitcoin? and people want us to get off zero. Very interesting.

53:10Troy Cross:And it also, compared to the first chart you showed there, I understand why people, especially people who don't own Bitcoin, would be reluctant to spend tax dollars on it. But this one makes loads more sense.

53:21Ella Hough:Exactly. It's just diversifying holdings we already have. We're massively overexposed to gold among assets.

53:28Troy Cross:Yeah.

53:29Ella Hough:Cool.

53:30Troy Cross:Oh, is that all the charts? That's it. Right. Okay, perfect. So tell me, what's your takeaway from this, Troy, compared to last year? What do you think is good? What's bad? What would you like to see change?

53:43Ella Hough:I mean, I kept looking for the one-liner, and this is what held me up the most writing the report. I wanted that one banger that was like, the result. And I don't think there is one. I think it's that Bitcoin is here to stay. It has a very large constituency in the US, 48 million adults, it's not going away, and it's a force to be reckoned with politically. I think even the self-custody number was really amazing and encouraging. I think about the percentage of Bitcoiners that we talk to and know. How many people are at a conference? How many people were in Vegas? Like 30 ,000? And that was a huge conference, right?

54:32Ella Hough:30 ,000 out of 48 million is nothing. That's nothing. And that's not a random sample. That's people who can afford a ticket, who want to go to the conference and so on. If we think about the number of people on Bitcoin Twitter who are active on Bitcoin Twitter, I don't know what it is. At the most, it's 150 ,000, 200 ,000 out of 48 million. I think surveys like this are really interesting because they get us to see the people we're not seeing. And we kind of realize that all of our opinions about what Bitcoin is politically or socially, we are all basing ours on the basis of a very skewed and very small sample.

55:15Troy Cross:Yeah, it's really easy to think Bitcoin Twitter is Bitcoin. But there's a lot of people out there who will just own this thing and not think about it all day, every day. And I find that hard to

55:23Ella Hough:understand they own they i do too they own they own a small amount they don't think they know that much about it they don't fully understand it um yeah they're they're busy with life uh don't have strong opinions about it don't want to talk about it uh and and they're they're the ones showing up in the survey i think that the other thing that this data shows us is it's kind of a warning it's like that that dip in sentiment i like your salt theory danny but i think uh it's up it's up to us to carry the message of bitcoin forward to individuals like through efforts like ella's through like the knock what the nakamoto project is doing bitcoin policy institute what bitcoin did like this this culture doesn't um it's it still hasn't found its place in the mainstream media, people are still not telling our stories the way we want to tell them.

56:19Ella Hough:They're still telling them in negative ways. And that's showing up in the sentiment. And the same with a Donald Trump kind of marriage of orange brands, the orange brand of Trump, the orange brand of Bitcoin. That's very powerful. And we are seeing the effects of that. And we want Bitcoin to be, or I want Bitcoin to be anyway, a universal technology. If we understand that we see it's a it's not left or right it's a money for enemies and it's money for everyone and so it's on us to it's on us to uh carry that message forward and communicate it out to people so yeah i i see us like winning on all sorts of fronts but i see these little trends that i'm concerned about and that we're tracking uh you know and that we can take action

57:08Troy Cross:on how funny that there's people out there who own bitcoin who are just like touching grass and living their lives. What weirdos. Ella, so Troy's survey was obviously based solely in the US, but you've done this on a global scale with Cornell. Do you want to run through some of your slides and we'll see what's different? Yes, I will. I'll pull them up right now. I think that report's fascinating, Troy. Thanks, Danny. When's the next one? You said you were going to do these every quarter. Is that still the plan?

57:34Ella Hough:We're definitely not going to do that. Okay. I basically, I didn't pay myself anything for for these. So I'm just doing them on my free time and that's not a lot. And we have to raise money for each one. And so, I mean, I think annually is a much better - Seems more achievable. Yes.

57:55Troy Cross:All right, Ella, you've been out in the cold for a minute there. Let's get into it. Yes. So it's nice that most of our results that I'll share align very closely with what Troy has just shared with their study. Just a quick note of when our study was done. So there's 2 ,108 Americans who were surveyed, and it was done in mid-December 2024. So there is a nice time chunk between, Troy, when your survey was done most recently and when we did our numbers. And we looked at 25 countries across all different regions, status of development, type of government. And when we started this, we looked at 178 different countries.

58:45Troy Cross:And I can't take credit for this work. Three professors, Professor Sarah Krebs and two others, then scored all of those countries across about 15 different factors, ranging from inflation, remittances, civil war, civil unrest, to then get to our 25 countries that we have today. And one piece that isn't going to show up in the data that we'll run through is that in addition to these about 25 ,000 surveys, a little more across these countries, we're also doing about 10 interviews for 250 total across all of the countries to help provide more nuance or stories that might otherwise be lost when we just have the data.

59:31Troy Cross:Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, so it's really nice. And what's also nice about it is that we have about 15 students from the Cornell Bitcoin Club who are actually doing the interviews and getting to talk to people all around the world about how they're using Bitcoin or why they're not using Bitcoin and learning from that. very interesting so just quickly like with these countries that you've picked um have you tried like so obviously the uk the us is in this but the uk is not is that is the thinking behind that that while different they're relatively similar and you want to make sure you hit lots of different audiences yeah and so that it comes up uh like even canada for instance isn't in this um but the us is and so it really comes back to just that scoring of all of the countries across the different factors.

1:00:22Troy Cross:And then it was just basically ranked. And I think there was some tweaking and editing. But yes, in short, we wanted to try to be as representative as possible. And while it's a little different for Europe, we still have a decent number of countries. There's Italy, Poland, and then Switzerland. And then Russia and Ukraine, we added in as well.

1:00:43Ella Hough:Makes sense. Okay, cool.

1:00:45Troy Cross:Yes.

1:00:45Ella Hough:It's a phenomenal data collection effort, Ella. Thank you. I mean, amazing. And also the qualitative part really does is valuable. And I can see that because so many people ask us why people are giving the answers they're giving. And I always have to just say, I don't know. Yeah.

1:01:05Troy Cross:And it's, you know, it's, it's sort of a blessing and a curse because, um, Professor Krebs and I have talked about this a lot recently. We have so much data and we have these interviews and the stories, but we want to be careful as well that we're not telling the wrong story or, you know, overbiasing on one. thing versus another. But I'll show in one of these charts an example of where I think the interviews have come into helpful with that. But maybe just to dive in, this is a chart just showing Bitcoin awareness. So the question was, are you aware of Bitcoin? Yes or no? Then a question about knowledge.

1:01:44Troy Cross:You self-rated on a scale of one to 10 how knowledgeable you are about Bitcoin. And then the final piece that's shown on here, which just for the sake of this chart, I titled Understanding. But the question was basically about, do you know that there's only 21 million Bitcoin, that a supply cap exists? And I'll zoom in right now just to the US, but only about 5 % of Americans know that Bitcoin has a supply cap of 21 billion Bitcoin, Wow.

1:02:16Ella Hough:Jeez.

1:02:16Troy Cross:Which is really low. And so I know we were just speaking about, you know, if you're aware versus if you own Bitcoin. I'm going to show that number too. You know, we thought that owners of Bitcoin might be more knowledgeable about Bitcoin or really understand what they're owning. But as I mentioned, our numbers showed that 49 million Americans own Bitcoin currently, but only 17 of that about know that there's even 21 million. And we're actually doing over the next 10 weeks different data releases. And so tomorrow we're going to release more context on, you know, do they think there's any supply cap?

1:02:59Troy Cross:Do they think it's something else? And it's really shocking. So 128 million Americans who say they feel knowledgeable about Bitcoin are probably lying. And, you know, I think there's that joke, like no one who understands the difficulty adjustment thinks Bitcoin's a bad idea or doesn't want to own it. And I feel we can lower the thresholds a little bit more and just say, do you know there's 21 million?

1:03:24Ella Hough:There's a couple of things I want to interject here. One is that we tested financial literacy through a series of questions, like test questions, but not Bitcoin literacy. So I'm really glad you did that because we just went with basically subjective opinion on how much you take yourself to know about Bitcoin. Yeah, that's great. Because I think we would get a similar, I know a lot about finance would probably be a lot of people, but then when you actually ask them questions, they would fail these basic questions.

1:03:57Troy Cross:We owe a lot of credit to, you know, Troy having your study out before we sent out the surveys, you know, other people, River, the 1A1Z group. Like there's a lot of good work that people have done that we've been able to look at and leverage for how we drafted this. Totally. This chart makes total sense to me, though, because whenever I'm talking to people, if they ask what I do and I tell them I'm into Bitcoin, no one really says, what's that? But I feel like very, very few people understand it. This just shows how much work we've still got to do.

1:04:27Ella Hough:Yeah, one other thing we did was when we asked about the trust, whether you trust Bitcoin, we had four questions. One of them was like, do you trust it as an investment over time to hold value? And another one was, do you trust the truth of the Bitcoin rule record of what exchanges have taken place. And those responses were almost identical in our survey. That's like wildly different. Nobody should distrust on the second one. And the other one is controversial, but they just tracked exactly like people don't know yet, Ella, the point of your thesis that Bitcoin's a language aimed at truth. They don't know that basic point either.

1:05:07Troy Cross:Yeah. And just a quick aside. So we also asked these questions for general financial knowledge. Actually, there was a couple of questions under that. And then we did the same for crypto awareness, knowledge, and then stable coins as well. And so that's just other data that's out there that we can share. But moving on to ownership. And so this chart here is showing current Bitcoin ownership across the 25 countries, as well as have you ever owned Bitcoin across the 25 countries? And the reason I wanted to make sure to include both of them here is that for China and Hong Kong, we could not ask, do you currently own Bitcoin?

1:05:50Troy Cross:And so that's why it's zero here in this chart. But I think it's helpful context to just show where the numbers are under the have you ever owned Bitcoin question. And so if you look at this, the US is over here kind of in the latter right half of Bitcoin ownership, which again is just interesting putting it in context of other studies. The River Report I was mentioning that showed just how much or how dominant Americans are in the Bitcoin ecosystem, or at least how it appears. and zooming in again, currently about 49 million Americans own Bitcoin. But over the course ever, the number is about 95 million Americans.

1:06:37Troy Cross:That's really interesting. The El Salvador one in the previous charts, interesting too. At one point, is it over like 75 % of people had owned Bitcoin and now it's below 30? Yeah. Ben, I think obviously we know some impacts onto why that is. And so that's, again, you know, to why the interviews are helpful. And on that note, if it's in, we can certainly go back. But we also asked about custody and trust. And I'm just going to go out of order for the sake of this. But in terms of trust in Bitcoin. So I think, Troy, you mentioned that your number, was it about 4.9 or somewhere, I think, close to that of trust or how Americans rated their trust in Bitcoin?

1:07:19Troy Cross:And in our study, it came up at 3.43 right next to South Korea. And a couple of the interviews in South Korea, people were saying how they really distrusted Bitcoin, crypto, Web3 because of Do Kwan and Terra Luna and that crash. And so I sort of wonder, and we actually haven't done the US interviews yet, but I wonder if we're going to get, you know, FTX, SPF coming up in those. And if that's, you know, any reason for this. I'm sure they will come up. The interesting thing on this chart, so this is trust in Bitcoin for anyone listening. And we have Japan with the lowest trust, Nigeria with the highest trust.

1:08:00Troy Cross:But you can almost go down this list and be like, how bad is your fiat currency? and the worse the current the fiat currency is the better the trust in bitcoin is with a few exceptions though like it's interesting to see the uae with such high trust in bitcoin yes and just while we're talking that and you know how bad is your currency for the question of you know do you correctly know there's only 21 million bitcoin switzerland was the highest with 25 point something of that nature and you know they have a relatively good currency compared to others yeah Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, they do know money.

1:08:37Troy Cross:And they've been such early adopters in terms of Bitcoin, crypto and regulations, especially. So maybe that's why. And this just gets into the blessing and curse of having so much information in the interviews. And can we do our best job in telling the story accurately? And then the final piece that I wanted to share was custody. And so this chart, it's maybe a little daunting when you first glance at it. But the piece that I think is interesting to focus on is the red. And that's for people that say they hold Bitcoin in a hardware wallet. So self-custody, but with a physical hardware wallet. um and again we don't have this data for hong kong or china but mexico is the highest and then the u.s is a bit in the middle um zooming in though for the u.s uh choice similar to you higher than 11 million but about 15 million americans use a hardware wallet damn which that's wild yeah yeah so there's question on you know of course uh you know troy you brought up looking at the numbers of sales, but I think it's reassuring to know that these studies done pretty close in time together have reasonably close numbers as well.

1:09:53Ella Hough:I just wonder what people mean by hardware wallet. You know, this is the impossible thing about surveys, right? You'd never know if the way you intend the question to be interpreted is the way they're taking it. I think 14.8 million Americans using a hardware wallet, given the ledger has only sold 8 million cumulatively and trezor 2 million and maybe the rest is a million or two that would require that basically all of those wallets in the world are um in america and the one user per wallet and and both of those seem seem suspect and i wonder i mean i'm my first wallet was just my computer because it was just I had a wallet.dat file on Bitcoin.

1:10:44Ella Hough:You're an OG here though, Troy. So, you know, like, was that a hardware wallet? It's hardware. I don't know. I think so. But the term hardware wallet didn't even exist back then. I don't know. If I didn't know what a ledger or Trezor was, how would I interpret that question? Like, maybe I've got it on my phone and I'm like, yeah, phone's hardware. It's a wallet. It's on my phone, right? Anyway, I think it's a great number. It's an awesome number. I really wonder what people mean. Same exact question about our own characterization of self-custody.

1:11:20Troy Cross:Yeah. And I will say part of this other bucket, we asked self-custody digital wallet. And so we at least have that distinction as well. Good, good. But I just lumped that into other because there's, just for right now, how we'll present it, wanted to highlight the numbers for ETF exchange and hardware wallet. But at least we did ask, you know, is it hardware or is it your mobile wallet or digital wallet? Wow, that's really interesting. Can you just go back to that previous chart, Ella? Yes. Which one? The custody one, this one, yeah. Yeah, because this is like what we were talking about before when it's very easy to think that Bitcoin Twitter is Bitcoin.

1:12:03Troy Cross:The thing that surprises me in here is just how dominant Mexico is. Like the vastly more people using a hardware wallet in Mexico than anywhere else. Poland, Kenya, I mean, Switzerland, they love a Swiss bank. But these aren't the countries I would expect to be at the top of that, which is very interesting. No. And you know what's also interesting is that I'm going a little bit off recollection, but I believe Mexico in terms of awareness is very low. Yes. Okay. So if you look over here, Mexico is in last in terms of understanding of the 21 million supply cap. And then this is not ordered, but I believe they're the bottom three in terms of awareness of Bitcoin.

1:12:47Ella Hough:super interesting so you're either unaware of it or you have it in a hardware wallet it's like the divide in the society yeah it's really cool um it's very useful very useful to to know that you know what i what i said to a lot of my critics online was like look i i don't know exactly what people meant by self-custody they took themselves to have bitcoin in self-custody OK, I didn't make up the data. It's 11 million Americans who said I have it in self-custody. Yours are even higher. So that's a that's a political constituency. Even if, you know, if you're a ledger and you're looking at it and you're wondering how many hardware wallets you've sold or can sell, you might not be able to trust it as much.

1:13:29Ella Hough:But if you're a politician saying we're going to treat people who have hardware wallets like their banks and make them collect information on all the transactions that, you know, then, you know, you've got a real constituency. and it doesn't really matter if people don't quite understand it.

1:13:44Troy Cross:I was going to add, we asked, you know, in the most recent election, because this was done after the election, did you vote for Harris or Trump? And I believe it was 47 % said they voted for Harris and 50 % for Trump and 3 % for other. And so it's pretty even split. Yeah, pretty even split. very that is interesting um you know when it comes down to bitcoin is actually holding bitcoin in self-custody is there a way that you could use like on-chain data to substantiate the claims

1:14:16Ella Hough:you're making here we we had that uh criticism lobbed at us by uh some people online and i think uh yeah you can criticize our numbers here because you could just look at the number of wallets that hold non-dust levels of Bitcoin. And I don't know where you draw that threshold exactly, but the 11 million looks like it's a considerable percentage of all the wallets at the non-dust level already. And we know that a lot of wallets are held by exchanges, ETFs and institutions and businesses. So, and we know that people have a lot of wallets, like have more than one wallet. So looking at, I think it's tricky looking at on-chain data to try to determine how many people, you know, hold Bitcoin in self-custody.

1:15:10Ella Hough:Do people consider Lightning self-custody? Well, there are forms of it that are and forms of it that aren't. But things will show up in different forms that are going to be called self-custody or not. But it's another great data point. And once I saw that criticism, I was like, that would have been a really nice part of our report, actually, to put the on-chain data there against the self-reported numbers.

1:15:34Troy Cross:Yeah, because again, it's just down to how people actually interpret the question and their understanding of the question. Yeah. And for ours, what we also asked is what percent of your savings is in Bitcoin, as well as other assets. And then we also have, when did you first buy Bitcoin? And so I imagine compared with on-chain, that would also help us. you know, back into that or get closer to the correct data. Well, this has been really interesting. I think like, again, like I said, just to reiterate the point, it makes it very clear that what I may sometimes think of as Bitcoin is not actually, or as Bitcoiners, is not actually who Bitcoiners are.

1:16:12Troy Cross:It's way broader than I think I probably imagined. I think so. From your takeaway, I asked Troy the same question, like what surprised you in this? What was a sort standout piece of data you collected i mean i was shocked by how many people aren't aware of 21 million because i just for myself i just feel like it was the main point that helped me connect the dots and understand why i why i own bitcoin and to see how few people know that um that was really shocking to me and i think it's also it's so easy to share that and explain it and so again troy was talking about you know what's our responsibility what can we do um you know that that's a very easy thing that we can do to help others understand bitcoin we've got a lot of work to do i think i need to do a podcast with parker lewis on 21 million um but i massively appreciate the time the work like it's incredible the two the two surveys are very very interesting thank Thank you guys so much.

1:17:15Troy Cross:Before we close out, though, where do you want to send anyone? Ella, you kick us off. Sure. Well, for myself, speaking of 21 million, my handle is 2121mm for the 21st. But then for all things for the study, we are open sourcing all the data, everything as it comes out, just on CornellBitcoinClub.org or the Twitter handle. And so over the next 10 weeks, we're going to share data. So if people want to stay up to date to that, then I would recommend checking there.

1:17:46Ella Hough:And Troy? I'm at the TroCro, T-H-E-T-R-O-C-R-O, Twitter. And you can also follow the Nakamoto Project at nakamotoproject.org.

1:17:58Troy Cross:Amazing. Well, thank you both so much for the time. Really appreciate it, guys. And Ella, I do want to do a podcast with you on your thesis. We'll do that at some point. Please send it to me and I'll read it and we can do that. I will. Thank you so much for having me.

1:18:10Ella Hough:All right, cool. Thank you, Danny. I'm so honored to be on Ella's first What Bitcoin Did appearance, which I can hardly believe. There you go. And there's going to be more for sure. Thanks, guys. Thanks. Thank you.

1:18:40Thank you.