If you're in your 30s, love to shop on Silk Road 2.0 and live outside the US, then chances are, you're a pretty big bitcoin user. That's what a new study delving into the profile of bitcoiners has found.

The study, titled 'Who Uses Bitcoin? An Exploration of the Bitcoin Community' is by Jeremiah Bohr andMasooda Bashir at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bohr is a visiting assistant professor at the university's sociology department and Bashir is director of social sciences research at the university's engineering school. The paper was first presented at the Privacy, Security and Trust conference in July.

The authors use statistical modelling to crunch the numbers from a survey conducted last year by Lúí Smyth, who was a digital anthropology researcher at University College London but now runs CoinJar's UK operations.

Who has lots of bitcoin?

Smyth's survey asked respondents how many bitcoins they held. Bohr and Bashir took this information and tried to find relationships between the number of bitcoin held and other factors, such as age, or whether respondents were active on bitcoin community forums.

Bohr and Bashir found that age was a statistically significant factor in predicting the amount of bitcoin a respondent held. Respondents with the most bitcoins were aged between 55 and 60 years old. Younger respondents had fewer bitcoins, although the amount generally doubled every 10 years. At age 60, bitcoin holdings drop off, which fits the pattern of asset accumulation across other asset classes, the researchers found.

"The marginal effects of age on bitcoin accumulation slow down and then decline," the authors write.

 

source:http://www.coindesk.com/study-bitcoiners-men-30s-shop-illicit-goods/