---
title: "Self-custody is rarer than AI agents · Bitsaga Insights"
description: "One person in 830 holds their own bitcoin keys. One in 415 gives AI agents real work. Bitcoin and AI adoption drawn to scale, with multisig counted on our own node."
url: "https://bitsaga.be/insights/self-custody-is-rarer-than-ai-agents"
language: "en"
---

> One person in 830 holds their own bitcoin keys. One in 415 gives AI agents real work. Bitcoin and AI adoption drawn to scale, with multisig counted on our own node.
[Insights](https://bitsaga.be/insights) · Data

# Self-custody is rarer than AI agents

Everyone has heard of bitcoin. Almost nobody holds it. **Drawn to scale**, next to AI.

October 12, 2026

Everyone alive is in each square. Each pixel stands for about **7,100** people.

Bitcoin

AI

The bottom-left corners, enlarged 16 times:

The square of people who hold their own bitcoin keys has half the area of the square of people who give AI agents real work. Self-custody is twice as rare.

### Bitcoin

- **The rest** have not heard of bitcoin

- **4.5 billion** have heard of bitcoin

- **600 million** own some crypto

- **250 million** own bitcoin

- **10 million** hold their own keys: one in 830

- **500,000** understand it is freedom (our guess)

- **108,000** run a bitcoin node

### AI

- **The rest** have barely touched an AI

- **1.6 billion** use a free AI chatbot

- **20 million** give AI agents real work: one in 415

- **5,000** inside the labs use what is not released yet

## Multisig, counted on our own node

We read every block on our own node and counted every wallet that spent from a 2-of-3 or wider multisig.

**258,139** walletsto **1,567,362**

Wallets that spent from multisig in 2025. Two ways of grouping addresses into wallets give the range.

**88.5 million** 2-of-3 addresses have been spent from since 2012.

[What is multisig? →](https://bitsaga.be/insights/what-is-multisig)

## Hold your own keys

The future is already here. It is just not held evenly.

[Want help holding your own keys? →](https://bitsaga.be/contact)

Giving AI agents real work means giving them a terminal. Doing that safely is the hard part: [Hardening a Linux agent server](https://bitsaga.be/insights/agent-server-hardening).

Sources. People: UN World Population Prospects 2024, for 2026. Heard of bitcoin: our estimate from 6.0 billion internet users (ITU, 2025) and an 88% awareness survey (Block and Wakefield, 14 countries, 2022). Crypto and bitcoin owners: Crypto.com (first half of 2026, a ceiling) and River (2023). Own keys: our estimate from 24.9 million addresses holding at least 0.001 BTC (12 October 2026), at 2 to 5 addresses per person. Nodes: Luke Dashjr’s node count, 12 October 2026. Multisig: our own node, 12 October 2026. AI: Andrej Karpathy on X, [9 April](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2042334451611693415) and [11 October 2026](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2109361546505966046). The “understand it is freedom” square is our guess, not data.