
Richest Bitcoin Addresses - cfontes
http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100
======
chrisacky
Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever.

Look at this address:

[http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5...](http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi?charttype=balance)

The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins
(back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in
what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a
few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and
deleted everything from his system.

[1]: [https://blockchain.info/charts/total-
bitcoins?timespan=all&s...](https://blockchain.info/charts/total-
bitcoins?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

~~~
cromwellian
This seems like a fundamental flaw in the currency that makes it's
deflationary properties worse.

Let's say bitcoin is to last a century, over time, there will be gradual
losses to all kinds of problems, like hardware failures, owner errors, etc
that cause lost of wallets, and thus, coins, forever.

There's no way to replace these, so over time, the total number of coins it
not only limited, but after the last bitcoin is mined, it must decrease.

This suggests to me that bitcoin is a marvelous experiment that finally proved
that such a currency is possible on a wide scale, but as a foundational
currency, it has serious flaws, and it sounds like it needs to ultimately be
replaced by a Bitcoin 2.0.

However, creating a new Bitcoin that is incompatible with the old would
massively destroy value in the old system, so it's an interesting proposition
as to how you can 'version' the Bitcoin protocol over time while not causing
great upheaval.

~~~
Ellipsis753
In theory there's no limit to how much a bitcoin can be divided. Currently
0.00000001BTC is the smallest amount possible. But if there's only 0.00001
bitcoins left in the world then the program can be easily updated to allow
0.00000000000000000001BTC to be sent and used. Bitcoins are a bit like gold,
you can just keep dividing a bar up smaller and smaller into dust. Of course
if all bitcoins in the world vanished after the last block (with a reward) had
been mined then that would be the end of bitcoins but that seems pretty
unlikely right now.

------
res0nat0r
Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on
a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want
to do for New Years.

It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to
realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?

~~~
fat0wl
The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep
buying. It's the result of a bidding war.

There is an article here about that basically explains (this is my
interpretation not his words) how the price of BTC is kindof like the sticker
price on an item in the store. It doesn't represent the real value, it's
simply the value as perceived by consumers and is, in a way, fixed --
[http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast-
overvaluation-...](http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast-
overvaluation-seems-to-be-caused-by-usually-illegal-price-fixing/)

But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing
is... one of the many signs of a flawed system. Basically if everyone started
selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change
& I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they
can unload most of their stack.

EDIT: Since I was immediately downvoted, please note that this happens
regularly any time you speak ill of Bitcoin's pyramid scheme aspects and is
completely expected/anticipated when I post these responses. It's a public
service that I will drop eventually, but think about this -- even people who
own a ton of BTC (article I linked to) criticize it as being insanely flawed.
They only stay with it because as they point out, they believe the price will
continue to rise. Speculators love it because they KNOW it's flawed, but still
feel confident in a bet that the price will rise. I think it's why ultimately
it will take gov intervention or a market catastrophe that screws over all the
speculators to finally destroy such interest in Bitcoin and finally give it a
chance to start over again... as a currency.

~~~
im3w1l
Falkvinge thinks they will be worth 100k-1000k in the future. If we accept
that (which I don't btw) is it so weird that people want to spend 700 today
for something that might be worth 100k in a few years?

~~~
nilkn
It's not weird. The problem is that at some point bitcoins must acquire an
unambiguous intrinsic value which is not related so much to their possible
future value. If they don't, that's the definition of a bubble--prices that
are considerably higher than intrinsic value.

Consider tulip mania from the 1600s. Speculation drove up prices of tulip
bulbs to the point where the only people buying tulips were other speculators
who were willing to pay the high prices because they thought they could sell
it for more later on--the exact reasoning you just posted. Speculators were
just trading tulips--or worse, tulip futures--amongst themselves. When the
time came to sell the tulips to people who wanted them for decoration, it was
discovered that none of them actually valued tulips that much, and the bubble
popped.

There _are_ arguments for a bitcoin having an intrinsic value of $100k. If
bitcoin were ever used for, say, something as large as the real estate market,
it would be hard to imagine the price being any lower than that. But bitcoin
is _extremely_ far from being used as the dominant currency in any market that
large.

------
stereo
This analysis linking the richest address to Silkroad’s DPR is interesting:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0)

------
taude
I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to
the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter?

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/11/09...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/11/09/the-11-million-in-bitcoins-the-winklevoss-brothers-
bought-is-now-worth-32-million/)

~~~
josephagoss
It's likely the Winklevoss brothers have all their coins spread over many
addresses. Their wallet will show 100,000+ coins but you can't tell because
they are spread among many addresses inside the single wallet file. If they
use a brain wallet seed they can create unlimited deterministic addresses but
only have to remember one key, and you won't see large accumulations of coins.

~~~
pa5tabear
What's the point?

Spreading the risk of loss by hack? And reducing their visibility as a target?

~~~
josephagoss
The reason is privacy. It's not going to spread the loss of a hack because if
the hacker gets the wallet they own all the addresses.

One of the core developers theorized that memory corruption at the exact time
you sign a transaction could lock away all the bitcoins in a single address.
However this has never been observed. (remember every transaction spends the
entire balance of an address and returns your coins to the same/or change
address, if that change address has 1 bit wrong the entire balance would be
lost)

------
retube
I sure hope those guys are keeping their keys safe.

Also - there's 4 addresses with almost exactly the same number of coins
(40000) who all last transacted on april 9. Surely connected.

Also also: why do so many btc balances end with ".0411"?

~~~
gizmo
There are 10 in total in the top 100 with their last transaction on April 9th.
I agree that can't be chance.

And 6 blocks of 10.000 bitcoin with a last transaction on the 4th. So it looks
like that there are far less than 100 players in the bitcoin top 100.

------
eonil
I really don't understand how BTC make better world. I mean, it monopolized by
a few people from FIRST. And the monopoly will sustain forever.

If someone else make another BTC?

~~~
oleganza
Suggest a better way to distribute new asset "fairly". Facebook shares are
also distributed unfairly. And gold. And dollars. Also, something that looks
fair for you, wouldn't look fair for another person.

What's important to me is that money is _hard_. If you have it, it can't be
printed out of value. It should not be very costly or risky to store or
transfer (like gold or USD). I want to be sure that even the richest guys
can't simply extract money from me. That they have to earn it by doing work.
Or earn service from others by paying them, not forcing them. Bitcoin allows
us to get to that kind of protection closer than ever.

Consider this: gold was always as hard to protect as to confiscate it. It's
symmetrical. Therefore, most powerful and brutal were accumulating gold over
time. Gold is now owned massively by largest governments and banks. Regular
people can only own as much gold as they can hide in their pockets. Extra gold
is too easy to take
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102)).
Bitcoin is much cheaper and easier to store and transfer than to extract it.
It's asymmetrical. Now big guys with guns would have to work more and steal
less to get some money, then before. Stuff that was stolen or destroyed will
never come back to you, but at least, over time, distribution of wealth would
match more closely actual merits of market participants, than amount of
gunpowder that they have.

------
antonios
Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and
one can have many addresses.

~~~
asdfaoeu
For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably
owned by the same person.

[http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png](http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png)

------
darkmethod
Back in early 2011 I ran a BTC miner for awhile on a spare system and
generated around 18 BTC. I bartered them later in 2011 for a pair of movie
tickets to take my wife out to see Moneyball (ironically).

------
unethical_ban
You got hellbanned, saneshark.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning)

~~~
unethical_ban
I know. I disagree with the practice, especially when I look through the
history of the account and see no flagrantly offensive remarks. HN mods might
think this site is a temple, but it's disrespectful to waste someone's time
and mislead their expectations of feedback for months at a time.

~~~
user24
Agree. I saw some guy's hellbanned account who was happily commenting for over
a year on HN - again nothing abusive I could see.

I tried to message him on twitter but no reply.

------
wdvh
Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets
using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting
visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic
in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be
useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing
this.

~~~
sktrdie
No IP address is saved in the block-chain. You would need to trust the source
of this IP listing service, and still you wouldn't be able to actually prove
people's real IP address if they were using systems like TOR to send money.

~~~
wdvh
I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and
listen in on transactions.

And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive
logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.

------
cfontes
I wonder if Satoshi is amongst those...

~~~
shawabawa3
afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched.
Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big
one.

Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the
mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person
who mined the first block, all unspent.

~~~
josephagoss
Thousands of separate addresses, most of those coins still sit in their mined
blocks. However it is likely Satoshi has all the addresses in one single
wallet so that he could move them all at once if he wanted to. Satoshi's
estimated wealth is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 coins.

~~~
Torn
1,000,000 coins is ~10x the top person in that rich list i.e. 840 million USD
going by that page's prices

~~~
josephagoss
Yeah, right now Satoshi is worth at least 100k btc up to 1,000k btc. Some
analyses has found that perhaps 2,500k btc are controlled by the same group
but that was highly speculative.

I would think Satoshi is getting close to becoming the first Bitcoin
billionaire.

------
csomar
Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own
a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of
addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned
by even less people.

~~~
gwern
Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that
we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has
been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their
holdings.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all
belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across
wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...

~~~
josephagoss
They may have all the addresses in the same wallet.

------
tracker1
The most surprising thing to me is the number of those addresses that haven't
had a transaction in several years now... how many of those people lost their
"wallet" so to speak?

------
drchiu
I don't see btc as being able to retain its hundreds of dollars in exchange
currency value. Imagine you have 1 mil usd worth of btc, and then imagine
trying to dump it all on the open market. You would probably find a widening
gap in the bid-ask as your position is liquidated. In other words, there isn't
likely enough buyers.

Someone is probably manipulating the supply and demand to serve their own
purposes. You might as well day trade something more liquid.

------
NickSharp
How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC? That's significantly
more than the #1 address on this list. Am I missing something?

------
sktrdie
What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will
be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to
Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could
fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will
always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?

~~~
cma
Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the
coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?

~~~
mcherm
Yes, that would work.

And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like
the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created
containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich.

And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use
it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green
slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only
because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind.
We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a
transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as
collector's items).

The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which
Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things
about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and
secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.

~~~
penguindev
That is a very interesting idea, it makes the fungibility of BTC seem highly
questionable, if you can look at its history forever and do an arbitrary
'blacklist'.

------
chrislomax
Why when you click on the wallet does the last transaction on some of them go
to 2013 when the list says 2010?

[http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS...](http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS78k7WMkVq?charttype=balance)

------
knowaveragejoe
Interesting that many of them were last used within a few seconds or minutes
of each other. Indicates to me that one person or party is controlling quite a
few big wallets.

------
sbjustin
Top 100 richest people using bitcoin control 20% of bitcoins.

~~~
dustcoin
Some of these addresses are cold storage addresses controlled by businesses
that are holding BTC for a large number of individual customers.

Some of the richest holders own multiple top addresses.

------
joeblau
Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?

~~~
rtkwe
Probably holding accounts/cold storage for a single group or a small number of
groups using a similar division plan, say an exchange. I bet the idea is keep
them in separate wallets to ensure that one compromise doesn't lose their
whole investment.

All just wild conjecture though.

------
C1D
Needs an update, currently the largest wallet know is this one
12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. It's holding about 200k btc.

------
TheSisb2
I don't think this richlist is a list of different people. Look how many have
10k BTC flat. A lot of these are spare wallets.

------
dangoldin
Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it
looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.

------
exit
doesn't the fbi haul belong on at the top of this list?

[https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...](https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH)

~~~
josephagoss
Top of the list for single address, most people in Bitcoin have their wealth
in one wallet but many addresses inside that wallet.

------
loceng
Who are these people? And if any of them are out there reading this thread --
reach out to me and let me know if want to invest in something that will help
adoption of Bitcoin, which will result in its value continuing to go up...

------
Siecje
Litecoin doesn't have this problem.

~~~
josephagoss
Whoa, you sure about that? I recall several million ltc are controlled by a
handful of people.

------
FridayWithJohn
Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash
number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.

~~~
elux
See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph”,

a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".)

Preprint available here:
[http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf)

(The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)

~~~
nullc
The original Bitcoin "Rich List" predates that paper by years.

Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin
isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without
being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.

