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
The funnel Karpathy drew
In April, Andrej Karpathy wrote that people talk past each other about AI. One group tried a free chatbot, saw it fumble a simple question, and moved on. The other group pays for the best agents and watches them finish weeks of programming work in an hour.
In October he made it a funnel. About 6 billion people have barely touched AI. 1 to 2 billion use a free chatbot now and then. About 20 million give frontier agents real work, mostly code and maths. About 5,000 inside the labs already use what comes next.
“A small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.”
Giving an agent real work means giving it a terminal. Doing that safely is the hard part: Hardening a Linux agent server.
Bitcoin has the same shape
Most people have heard of bitcoin. About 250 million own some, mostly as a balance on an exchange or in an app. That is a promise to pay, not bitcoin. About 10 million hold their own keys, and some 108,000 nodes check every rule for themselves.
The two ends see different things. At the wide end, bitcoin is a price chart. At the narrow end, it is money nobody can freeze, print or take. Our guess: one key holder in twenty sees it that way.
The narrow end is smaller than AI’s. Holding your own bitcoin keys is twice as rare as giving AI agents real work.
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.
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? →Hold your own keys
The future is already here. It is just not held evenly.
Want help holding your own keys? →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 and 11 October 2026. The “understand it is freedom” square is our guess, not data.