About one month ago, a Reddit user named Tricky_Troll decided to do some research about the cryptocurrency community. He created a survey with over 40 questions and posted it to a range of different cryptocurrency subreddits, asking users to provide him with a wide range of information.
He asked questions about their demographics, their social media use, their experience and interest in cryptocurrencies, their crypto portfolio, crypto knowledge, and their opinions on various projects out there. Tricky_Troll ended up collecting over 300 results and gained some fascinating insights into this often secretive community.
He was kind enough to provide us with an in-depth report consisting of 25 pages of graphs, statistics, and discussion about the information he gleaned. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting things he discovered.
The Results
According to the survey, 94% of cryptocurrency subreddit users check the price of their cryptocurrencies daily! Over 40% of cryptocurrency subreddit users check the price of their cryptocurrencies over 10 times per day, and 80% check the prices at least 3 times per day.
“I must admit that I was surprised at just how often people check the price of their cryptocurrencies,” wrote the creator of the survey.
It should be noted that the type of people that frequent Reddit probably check their cryptocurrencies more often than the average person. It would be interesting to survey people who don’t use Reddit to see how the statistics differ, as there’s probably plenty of people out there who hold cryptocurrencies for the long term and don’t check the price quite so obsessively.
Demographics
The overwhelming majority of participants in this survey were men, with less than 5% being female.
“Wow. That’s all I could say when I saw the gender disparity. While was expecting a majority of cryptocurrency redditors to be male, I wasn’t expecting as much as 95% of them to be male!” Tricky_Troll said.
This small survey actually matches up with the worldwide statistic: Only 5% to 7% of all cryptocurrency users are women.
Why? Well, there’s already few women in the finance and tech worlds. Cryptocurrency sits at the crossroads of both, causing the disparity to be even greater. Hopefully we will see this gap shrink in size over time, as blockchain technologies become more accessible.
The median age of cryptocurrency subreddit users is between 26 and 30 years old. This statistic isn’t too surprising, and is probably pretty consistent with the Reddit community as a whole.
Over 75% of cryptocurrency subreddit users either have a university degree or higher or are currently studying at a university.
“Another surprising result for me was just how many participants had a university degree or higher with over 60% or participants having either a degree, master’s degree or a PhD/Doctorate. This proportion is significantly higher than it is in the general population of the USA,” Tricky_Troll wrote in his results report.
Apparently, crypto investors are a bunch of smartypants!
As expected, most people that took the survey have jobs unrelated to the blockchain.
But one very interesting bit of info here is that as much as 5%, or 19 of the 331 users, are living off savings acquired from profits made from cryptocurrencies. Now that’s pretty cool!
Experience and Interest in Cryptocurrencies
The majority of users surveyed are holding their cryptocurrencies for the long term.
This most likely means that the majority are confident that cryptocurrencies are going to continue to grow in popularity, become stronger and more successful, and be around for many years to come.
Decentralisation is the main ideological reason cryptocurrency subreddit users got into crypto and blockchain tech. Only about 18% said they aren’t in it for any ideology. It’s heartening to know that so many cryptocurrency holders aren’t strictly in it for the money, but also for helping improve the financial world.
Most users got into cryptocurrencies during 2013 and 2017. The peaks unsurprisingly follow the growth of the cryptocurrency market, with the two biggest years being 2013 and 2017 by a significant margin.
In 2013, we saw Bitcoin spike in growth from just $12 to $1,242 over the course of the year — that’s a 10,250% gain. This year, the price has surged to over $17,000, causing mainstream investors and the media to take note.
Crypto Portfolio
The median cryptocurrency subreddit user has somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000 invested in cryptocurrencies.
The results from this question are very interesting. The two largest groups are on opposite sides of the spectrum—most people answered that they have either invested less than 10% of their savings in crypto or over 90% of their savings in crypto.
The survey creator explained in his report:
“This says a lot about the types of people who are investing in crypto. I believe that the people who invested more than 90% will tend to be less financially responsible since many of them are trying to get as rich as possible from crypto and don’t really have a backup plan if crypto were to fail. Within this group, I think that many are comfortable with the risk of such a risky investment while others may be desperate and understandably caught in the FOMO and hype behind crypto. While this size of an investment is financially irresponsible and I personally couldn’t put so much of my savings into a market as volatile in crypto, I genuinely feel that if these people were to hold a diversified investment which is primarily made up of large cryptos, then the chances are that cryptocurrencies will treat them well and the gamble will pay off. On the other hand, I imagine that the bottom 10% are more financially responsible, many of whom are probably experienced investors or people casually investing who are hoping for a comfortable profit a few years down the line.”
This is a nice result to read, knowing that over 80% of people that have put their money into cryptocurrencies have already made a profit!
Most users own between 1 and 3 different cryptocurrencies. It’s intriguing that nearly 15% of participants reported that they own more than 10 types of cryptocurrency.
“I find it rather impressive that these people can follow and invest in so many different projects,” Tricky_Troll wrote.
Cryptocurrency Knowledge
Most users surveyed reported that on a scale of 1 to 10, they fall somewhere between a 6 and an 8 regarding their understanding of blockchain technology.
“I am impressed by the overall crypto knowledge of the participants. On the other hand, it doesn’t particularly surprise me that most people rate their cryptocurrency knowledge quite highly,” Tricky_Troll said in his report.
Opinion
Check out the full results of the survey for more graphs and statistics about users’ opinions of various coins.
Almost 75% of cryptocurrency subreddit users have an unfavorable opinion of Bitcoin Gold.
50% of cryptocurrency subreddit users have an unfavorable opinion of Bitconnect while a further 47% don’t know how they feel about it or don’t know enough about it to have an opinion.
45% of cryptocurrency subreddit users have an unfavorable opinion of Ripple.
Nearly 55% of cryptocurrency subreddit users have an unfavorable opinion of Ethereum Classic.
Final Thoughts
This small glimpse into the world of crypto redditors turned out to be very eye-opening and educational. We all now know a little more about the way crypto holders think, their demographics, and their personal opinions on all things crypto-related.
Of course, these results should be taken with a grain of salt, since the sample size is relatively small.
“I think it is important however, to note that many of these may be a little bit inaccurate and misleading since I only collected just over 300 responses,” Tricky_Troll pointed out. Nevertheless, it was really fun getting to know the crypto community a bit more.
Big thanks to Tricky_Troll for putting in hours and hours of hard work to provide us with all this information. If you’d like to donate a bit of Ether or Bitcoin to Tricky_Troll, he provides his addresses in his post.
Compiling all that data isn’t easy, and cryptocurrency aficionados can be a secretive bunch. As Reddit user whatsausername90 quipped, “The impressive part is that you convinced a bunch of privacy geeks to give you information about themselves.”
