It doesn’t seem to be too egalitarian, especially when you realise that the same person could potentially own multiple wallets. Now, of course, a number of these wallets belong to exchanges who are holding Bitcoin on behalf of their customers.
Still…
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If we generously assume that that no one holds more than 1 BTC on an exchange, which is the cut-off to be included in the Top 2% and thus…
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We allow ourselves to discount all the Bitcoin held by exchanges (around 2,000,000) we still end up with…
The Top 2% of wallets holding 84% of all the Bitcoin out there. To put that into context, people say wealth inequality in the United States is bad.
Great, I suppose it is, but the Top 2% only hold 40-50% of all wealth in the US.
What I wanne know is how many of those big wallets are dead and the coins never to be recoverd
Not really, c’est la vie.
Wealth distribution is not fair or equal. You know what happens when you try to enforce it?
Scarry scarry stuff.
Best way to bring equality is through technology advancement. The day we find cheap renewable energy that could replace all current sources will be the day humanity makes giant leap to equality.
Not really as long as I can still buy
Nono, BTC is perfect, it’s a hedgehog against inflation and it will democratize being you own bank! It has super cheap and fast transactions! /S
For something trying to replace gold/fiat, btc specifically and crypto in general seems to suffer from the same kind of hoarding/greed issues as fiat.
I don’t think there’s really anything you can do about it, either. Those with more resources have the ability to accumulate more, and it snowballs from there. Retail is never going to catch up.
Nah, already go used to it. BTC is just like any other form of finance. It’s hoarded by the very few at the top. We can only ride the wave with big whales and hope to earn some crumbs along the way. People who think that BTC will change the way things are run in the financial world are delusional.
Our laws make it so the wealthy can do this with pretty much anything.
Centralization/Decentralization doesn’t fix that.
Well the whales have cash to splash so you can’t do much about that better to manage our own holding.
Isn’t this the norm for most cryptocurrencies?
What am I, a socialist?
It bothers me that I’m not one of them
Isn’t it the reality in every markets?
That’s on us for being poor
Everyone praises “Free Market” until something they don’t like happens.
This is what free market means.
Are we eating them?
Its the way of the world
Just a little bit.
We get this question coming up a lot. How many of those 94% are exchange wallets, wallets of greyscale and Michael Saylor and ARK invest, ETFs etc. These all hold large amounts of coins that are owned by large numbers of investors. Just because a wallet has a lot of coins, doesn’t mean it is owned by 1 person.
Just the free market free marketing
Nope. It’s a free market and BTC never promised to solve wealth equality. It promised self ownership.
No, it’s and will always be like that. Nothing we can do about it
Other people’s wealth doesn’t bother me at all.
I focus my time increasing my own, instead of complaining and blame shifting onto others.
Assuming BTC steadily becomes a currency, then there will be REALLY FUCKING LARGE market corrections in the future when whales start to sell and people start to buy. It’ll probably destroy the current bull/bear cycle we know. But this should be really far ahead and I guess in the end, something has to give. Either people stop selling their btcs and start using it as a currency or btc stays volatile af and never really gets out of its speculative shadow.
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That’s what I can see tho, but obviously there’s a high chance that I’m wrong.
Not in the slightest, because unlike in real life, the 2% of top wallets have no greater control over things than the bottom 2%.
This data doesn’t remove exchanges either.
Kind of alarming there’s so little connection between this sub and r/bitcoin
Considering how easy it once was to get BTC, I assume a bunch of those wallets are lost/inactive. Which sparks joy.
Most ‘em are exchanges, so they basically belong to the masses. Some of ‘em are uberwhales, but you have the superrich in every system.
Centralised exchanges hold the top 3 wallet spots, with others holding whale wallets down the list. The real percentage of individuals is less.
Rich people are rich and have more shit, confirmed
Riot!
Hello
Yes. This extreme lopsidedness is antithetical to WHAT MANY SAW AS BTCs socio-economic and monetary design intention. It also, imo, serves as a suppressor of its overall value and market price— as do Bitcoin futures, derivatives, and surrogates that the profiteers have created to generate more volume, volatility, speculative interest, opacity, and trading fees. Maybe there will never be a unit of economic value that is “fairly” created and distributed— because that would require eliminating the human instinct to get ahead of others by finding ways to take their value (money, labor, time).
edit: Added “WHAT MANY SAW AS” to qualify the affected sentence, since the original Nakamoto white paper makes no such claim.
Who sold you on the fairy tale that it was going to be egalitarian?
What should bother you is, that I hold the remaining coins.
Nah, I’m sure they are kept in the safest Cheetos tins.
Those are exchanges usually holding peoples funds.
Yes, it’s also a major reason why bitcoin will never gain mass adoption. Rich people already own the majority of real wealth, they aren’t going to sell productive assets just to become a majority holder of a digital token nobody uses or produces value.
Also halving btc rewards instead of doubling ensured that bitcoin would always have a centralized distribution.
Yeah it bothers me that the elites control everything, even the currency system intended to balance the playing field
Rich people hold most of the world’s wealth so it’s no surprise with Bitcoin.
I’m more bothered that the Federal Reserve can print as much money as they want and bail out whoever they deem is important. This unlimited printing is a hidden tax that I didn’t get to vote on. Bitcoin is capped at 21 million.
it bothers me, a lot.
what bothers me even more is that this is not limited to btc, but to all kind of wealth!
We’re still in a capitalist system. Wealth concentrates and we know that. The good thing about crypto is that it could work in a better more egalitarian system (not advocating for anything in particular, maybe we haven’t even invented that system yet). But yeah, this is the reality of every asset apart from what, oxygen?
What you do if satoshi come back? 👀
Kinda like our other kind of money huh?
All I’ve learned is if money is involved then a very small amount of people are always going to own the vast majority
I mean those are probably exchanges, companies and the occasional gigawhale.
Considering how easy it is to creat a wallet and there are tons of empty wallets you probably need to exclude wallets with a tiny balance and in active wallets. Like below .001 doesnt seem like someones savings
The top wallets are generally exchanges that hold on the behalf of their depositors or publicly listed corporations like Microstrategy which are owned by shareholders. The Pareto Principle then applies to the rest. There is no escaping that the worlds wealth is held by a minority.
75% of bitcoin users hold their bitcoin with custodians and exchanges. Coinbase custody alone holds 2 million for millions of customers. There are also some unidentified exchange addresses, funds like GBTC and other types of custodians including collaborative custody services, not to mention public companies like MSTR and TSLA.
What’s critical is the number of addresses with 1 bitcoin (∼1 million), 0.1 bitcoin (∼6 million) and 0.01 bitcoin (∼15 million) are all trending up parabolically year after year and more and more people are taking self custody. Bitcoin continues to be become better distributed over time and always will. Miniscript, BIP 85, OP_VAULT will make self custody grandma friendly.
Everyone in the world having the same amount of money is not equality, that would be unfair to people offering more value. Equality is everyone playing by the same rules on a level playing field including banks and governments. Free money for elites from the money printer created at no cost is what drives inequality which only gets worse and worse over time with perpetual stock buybacks and bailouts (Cantillon Effect). Those who have money can spend it once in a bitcoin standard and they have to earn it back by providing value. Bitcoin is pure value for value without exception, without privileges.
Bitcoin pros & cons with related info are in the collapsed comments below.
I remember the time when BTC was at $3k and my colleagues were saying it is too high, doesn’t make sense to buy it. Look at it now…