Bitcoin users place a higher importance on a politician’s BTC-related policies and agenda than their party, a survey by Bitcoin Magazine has found. Over 72% of respondents said they would vote for a pro-Bitcoin candidate even if they were not part of their preferred political party.
The first edition of Bitcoin Magazine’s annual survey, which collected responses from over 6,600 Bitcoin holders from August 15 to October 19, 2022, also found that the majority of them considered themselves Bitcoin maximalists (56.2%). However, over 68% of respondents also own other cryptocurrencies. Interestingly, 60% said they would prefer to buy products from Bitcoin-only companies.
Intended for gathering feedback from the community on Bitcoin Magazine’s existing content as well as to better understand user’s preferences, the survey shed light on many interesting aspects of the Bitcoin community and its members.
Three quarters of respondents purchase bitcoin through regulated exchanges, with top choices being Binance (34.8%), Coinbase (20.6%), FTX (7.4%) and Kraken (6.6%). FTX’s preference is naturally bound to drop near zero following the exchange’s filing for bankruptcy less than one month after the survey. Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading, which more closely resembles Bitcoin’s intended design of transactions without intermediaries, was shown to be a strategy for only 18.7% of the surveyed users.
Adoption of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s overlay network for faster and cheaper transfers, was found to be strong. Of all respondents, 70.4% shared that they have made at least one Lightning payment. The preferred wallets of users were Wallet of Satoshi (27.1%), Muun Wallet (25.4%) and Blue Wallet (23.7%).
When it comes to mining, participation was unsurprisingly more shy. Likely due to the technical complexity in setting up an ASIC miner at home, only 12.6% of respondents said they mined bitcoin at home. That’s about half of the percentage of those who run their own nodes — more than a quarter of respondents (24.5%).
The majority of respondents self-custody their BTC, the survey found, amounting to 62.3% of users. The preferred hardware wallets are Ledger (43.7%), Trezor (16.4%) and Coldcard (10.2%).
When it comes to learning and consuming industry information, the survey found Twitter as the main channel, with 28.1% of respondents saying that’s where they went primarily. Respondents elected Michael Saylor as the Twitter personality of the year (48.9%), followed by Yellow (10.1%) and Natalie Brunell (8.7%). Podcasts came in close second (26.4%), with the most popular of them being Peter McCormack’s “What Bitcoin Did.” Video trailed in third (22.2%). While not many respondents mentioned books as their main source of information, the most widely recommended text about Bitcoin was The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous.
When the business is passing on Satoshi’s torch, the survey found that most Bitcoin users introduce their friends to bitcoin (70%), while some also share the good word with their parents (31.5%). Only 17.3% of respondents didn’t advocate for Bitcoin at all and preferred instead to keep quiet on the matter.