I created this survey on 12 February 2013 using Google Docs. I posted the link on Bitcointalk.org, Reddit, Twitter, and Google+. From there, the survey was reposted on various Bitcoin related sites. I posted preliminary findings to my blog after 102 responses and 533 responses. In both cases, the results sparked more interest and helped garner more responses.
I closed the survey on 4 April after receiving 1,087 responses, so that I could clean up the data definitively. I expect the surge in interest in early April has brought in new users with a different set of demographics and motivations. That should be studied in later surveys, rather than being included in the tail end of this one.
Analysis of Data
Demographics of Bitcoin part 1 – covering the basics
What do people actually buy with Bitcoins?
Raw Data
The survey itself is here.
The “live” and most raw version of the data is here.
Cleaned Data
The cleaned version of the data, still relatively raw (maybe medium rare) with 1,000 responses is here.
Responses which gave a range (“300-500″) were converted to a mean figure (“400″).
Responses which gave a limit figure (“less than 100″, “500+”) were converted to the limit figure (100, 500).
I deleted anyone who had left four “major blanks,” ie they had not responded to four simple, short, numerical/multiple choice questions which applied to everybody.
I deleted anyone who left the age or gender field blank.
I tried to removed highly erroneous answers. There was relatively little trolling in the survey, but there was some. Sometimes I had to make a judgement call, such as with the Russian who claimed to have over a million bitcoins, or the 13-year-old Shinto girl in Angola.
After all that cleaning, there were 1,011 responses left, so for the sake of clean percentages I used the first 1,000.