A recent survey of 3000 adults in the UK reveals that Bitcoin awareness and adoption has increased rapidly since 2019, but from a low base!
And there's some unexpected trends in the characteristics of owners - the millennials seem to be selling off, older people are buying, and there's quite an even distribution of ownership across income bands.
NB this post is based on data from actual crypto owners, rather than being based on what people say they intend to do, meaning it has some, rather than no validity.
Survey Methods
The survey was conducted by the Financial Conduct Authority in December 2019 and went as follows:
- A nationally representative online (1) panel of 3,085 respondents were presented with a question as to whether they had heard of cryptocurrencies.
- Everyone who said they had heard of them (2,258 or 73%) continued to complete the rest of the online questionnaire. Of these 165 identified as having purchased crypto assets.
- An additional boost sample of 493 individuals who were cryptocurrency owners also completed the survey, bringing the total number of crypto-owners surveyed to 658.
This research took place from 13 to 21 December 2019.
The full results are available here.
Headline stats on UK crypto awareness and ownership
- 73% of adults are aware of crypto currencies, increased from 42% of adults in 2019. 'Only' 27% of adults have never heard of crypto currencies
- 1.9 million adults currently own cryptocurrencies, equivalent to 3.8% of the adult UK population
- 2.6 million adults have ever owned crypto assets, equivalent to 5.35% of the UK adult population, and a statistically significant increase of 2.35 % of the population in 2019.
- 50% own < £260 worth of cryto assets, 75% own < £1000, and 1% control 80% of all crypto wealth (estimated)
Cryptocurrencies ever heard of
Of the 73% of respondents who had ever heard of crypto, Bitcoin is by far the most well-known (to be honest I'm kind of wondering how 22% of people who have heard of crypto haven't heard of Bitcoin?!?).
The fact that Libra is better-known than both ETH and LTC suggests most people are still firmly in normie-space!
In terms of awareness of alt-coins, we're looking at just over 10% of the UK adult population that have heard of these according to this survey.
I don't think the survey asked about any other currencies than those listed above (it's not clear from the write up, but I think it was a closed survey).
Distribution of crypto ownership in the UK
And an award for a stoopid way of displaying the data, a bar chart with suitable bins would have been clearer.
Still, we learn that...
- 75% of the population own < £1000
- 90% own < £4300
- 95% own < £7000
I guess that's me in the 5% club then!
Income distribution of crypto-owners
This is one of my 'most valid' indicators for how likely crypto is to reach mass adoption, I want to see a nice even spread of ownership....
This really is most encouraging - a firmly even spread once you get out of the 'only enough money to survive' bottom category.
Even better, we see the lower incomes with a higher adoption rate - what I like about this is that IF crypto moons, then the higher income earners are bound to FOMO and they're the ones with enough money to boost the prices further!
Maybe?!?
Age distribution - Millennials selling out of crypto?
I've read a few things on Hive about Millennials adopting Crypto, but this isn't born out by the British data - they've sold off in the last year.
2020 sees a much older age profile of crypto-owners.
Combined with the previous income chart, this must mean that middle income middle aged people are the ones buying crypto ATM in the UK?
Hmm, that sounds like A LOT of the people I know on Hive!
Why people bought Crypto
This is another of good indicator of the potential for mass adoption I think. What I'd like to see is lots of people buying it because of mistrust of FIAT and in order to hold long-term...
With 25% saying they're buying as part of a wider portfolio, I'll take that, I would have thought the 'gamble option' would be more, it's encouragingly low. (I was expecting 70% or more).
Also, 17% not trusting the current financial system is higher than I thought it might be.
Where did you buy your crypto....?
In a word - Coinbase!
For me, fairly used to flitting between Bittrex, Kraken and now Huobi (I try to avoid Binance) this was a bit of an eye-opener. Clearly the concept of trading on exchanges is a very fringe thing.
OK 
Where do you store your crypto?
People clearly have a lot to learn!
Implications for Hive
Given the responses to the above two questions, I think Hive can have a really valid function in teaching people about where you can buy crypto other than Coinbase, which is pricey pricey in terms of fees, and there's defo an educative function in terms of informing people about hardware wallets and the dangers of exchanges!
A note on the methods
While the initial sample of 3085 is sufficient to be nationally representative, only 165 respondents from that sample identified as being crypto owners, so an additional sample was used to boost crypto owners to 658.
The research flow...
- A nationally representative online (1) panel of 3,085 respondents were presented with a question as to whether they had heard of cryptocurrencies.
- Everyone who said they had heard of them (2,258 or 73%) continued to complete the rest of the online questionnaire. Of these 165 identified as crypto currency owners.
- An additional boost sample of 493 individuals who were cryptocurrency owners also completed the survey, bringing the total number of crypto-owners surveyed to 658.
This research took place from 13 to 21 December 2019
Given the low number of crypto owners, a sample of >500 should give us decent representatives, although the survey doesn't say how they got that booster sample.
We should also be wary of comparisons: the survey published in 2019 was done face to face, this 2020 published survey was done online, which means the two surveys don’t have comparable validity.