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How much bitcoin in Canada? Are there any sources of data or sites where it says how much bitcoin is in Canada or how many wallet addresses are Canada based?

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How much bitcoin in Canada?

That's a very interesting question:

  1. None of it.
    It isn't always possible to say that an address is based in Canada. Some Canadians might use wallets on mobile phones. If the Canadian visits the USA does her Bitcoin move to the USA? Suppose the Canadian leaves a duplicate wallet with a relative in the USA and returns to Canada? Does electronic money in a globally replicated system have a physical location?

  2. All of it.
    All Bitcoin is in the blockchain. Canadian nodes hold copies of the whole blockchain.

  3. What does it even mean?
    If a Frenchman buys Bitcoin from a Canadian exchange, does the money move from Canada to France? What if he is using a custodial account? What if the Canadian exchange's servers are AWS cloud servers? What if Amazon shifts some workload to Mexico? Does the Frenchman's money move to Mexico?

You might ask how much Bitcoin is under the control of people normally resident in Canada - but how would anyone know? What is the nationality of Satoshi Nakamoto? Where does Nakmoto live? If Nakamoto is dead, where do you consider Nakamoto's money to be? What is the location of money locked in a multisig UTXO?

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  • So if I were to ask how much Bitcoin is owned by Canadian residents, that would be something that can't be measured? I understand how it is difficult to measure and why the question may not be easily answerable. But in general, how are geographical estimates formed for bitcoin and crypto? I came to stack exchange because I googled how much crypto is owned by Canadians, then I searched up the same for the US, and different websites gave different percentages and estimates. Why are they all different and how do they develop such estimates? Are they just educated guesses?
    – eddie
    Aug 10, 2022 at 22:42
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    The coins are just numbers in a "database" (the Blockchain). Everything is distributed all around the world, none of it is in any physical location. No one can determine anything about nationality of "owners" of all the addresses. So yes any estimates are just wild guesses inferred from various players' access to transaction statistics, IP addresses etc
    – HansBKK
    Aug 11, 2022 at 1:22

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