
Centralization of Bitcoin Wealth: 4% of addresses own 96% of Bitcoin - mbgaxyz
https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution
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thaytch
Although the pie chart is a bit skewed because there are many exchanges that
hold custody of coins in (multi-sig) cold storage, Bitcoin's distribution is
not as dispersed as most would have liked it to be. That's largely because
people were able to mine the currency in silence during 2009-10 where adoption
and therefore difficulty were miniscule. I think one of the most annoying
things people keep coming up with is doing airdrops for their altcoins based
on the distribution to registered Bitcoin addresses. Byteball keeps doing this
and therefore favors and privileges large Bitcoin holders. That's one of the
most unfair ways to distribute a new cryptocurrency, especially for people
that haven't had the privilege to have known about Bitcoin early.

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K0balt
This article is an exercise in ignorance. Wallet providers? Does he not even
understand the concept of personal wallets? Anybody that keeps a significant
amount of money in a hosted wallet outside of specific circumstances (I. E.
trading) is not only doing it wrong, they are being extremely foolish. And it
looks like he's counting dust wallets and orphaned wallets.

Maybe he should have learned something about the subject matter before writing
an "authoratative" article.

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mkwldbttr
Author states that 1 address does not necessarily equals one person, but for
some reason does this down in the article instead of an upfront disclaimer.

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sowbug
That's common knowledge, both for Bitcoin and elsewhere. How could any digital
asset (Bitcoin, email account, social media account) guarantee a 1:1 mapping
to humans?

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DickingAround
Haha. As if there was any realistic link between addresses and people. They're
even designed to be one-time-use..

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setr
Wouldn't that imply we should see significantly _less_ centralization than
this? At the very least 4% holding 96% implies something isn't being used
right..

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detaro
Doesn't explain what set of addresses they actually looked at. All addresses
ever in use? All addresses currently holding value?

Also not sure what that's supposed to mean:

> _And that’s the issue. There’s only a very limited number of bitcoin wallet
> providers out there._

Might be confusing exchanges and wallets?

~~~
conception
You don't have to look at each address, you can just trace which addresses
have been used through the block chain.

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detaro
... yes? It's still relevant and missing info _which_ of the addresses that
have been used they looked at.

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sogen
Is this a pie chart??

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Zarath
This looks pretty bad, but I would like to see how it changes after
subtracting Satoshi coins, exchanges, etc. I'm sure it still wouldn't be that
great.

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grwthckrmstr
If this is even remotely representative of how Bitcoin wealth is distributed
amongst individuals (not addresses)...

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marcofatica
It's not. Many addresses are single use

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tpeo
Jesus, who thought that chart was a good idea?

