If you’re a Millennial, you are more likely to own cryptocurrency than your older peers. If you are a woman, you are three times less likely to hold crypto than a man. We know this, and more, thanks to a recent poll conducted by Finder.com.
The Finder.com poll was conducted among 2100 users of Pureprofile. Pureprofile is a website where people opt into surveys for rewards like cash and points. The pool of respondents may skew the information because users of Pureprofile are likely to be relatively tech savvy in the first place.
According to the poll, 5% of Americans own Bitcoin, and an additional 3% own some kind of cryptocurrency. If anything close to accurate, this information would mark a huge increase over the Pew Research Study conducted in 2016, which found that only half of Americans had even heard of Bitcoin, with only 1% investing or trading in the asset. Now, 8% may not be a high number, but it does mark an increase in trend, and the number of people this represents (some 26,000,000) is significant.
Overall breakdown
Of the rest of the poll participants, 40% answered that they didn’t see any need for the cryptocurrency, or they were just generally disinterested in the topic. 35% hadn’t invested in crypto because the risk was too high for them.
Some respondents felt that crypto was either too complicated to understand, was a scam, was a bubble, or was too difficult to use, with 27%, 18%, 17%, and 11% of respondents answering respectively. The remaining 6% of respondents said that there were too many fees involved, which means that they at least looked into the prospect of investing to a serious degree.
A deeper look at respondents
Like any good survey, the results were broken down by demographic. As mentioned above, Millennials were the most likely (at 17%) age category to hold crypto assets. Oddly, Millennials are also the category that reported cryptos to be too difficult to understand and use, with 15% and 31% of respondents answering respectively. Gen Xers actually answered far lower on those questions, with only 9% reporting that crypto was too difficult to use, and 26% saying they couldn’t understand it.
So, which currencies are Americans holding? The survey says that Bitcoin is the clear leader, with 5% of respondents reporting holdings. Next up is Ethereum, with 2%, then Bitcoin Cash and Ripple tying up third at .9%. Reportedly, users own approximate averages of $3500 Bitcoin, $1200 Ethereum and $600 Bitcoin Cash.
Confidence is soaring
Coinciding with the trend of increased ownership in cryptocurrency is an uptick in people’s confidence in it. Another study, published by Lendingblock, says that most people predict that retailers will widely accept cryptocurrency by 2025. Whether the average American chooses to invest in cryptos or not, they seem to believe that the digital assets have staying power in the overall economy.
Backing this idea up, a study from Nomura indicates that 60% of merchants using the Square mobile payment app are open to accepting Bitcoin as payment, in lieu of fiat money. Most of the merchants who said they would be comfortable accepting Bitcoin make less than $100k a year, suggesting that your average Joe seems to believe in the stability of Bitcoin.
