Topic: Distribution of bitcoin wealth by owner - page 14. (Read 153396 times)

Please read the 23 pages of this thread, especially 1-10.

How about people that hold bitcoin indirectly through investments?   For exampe website/company could have 5000 BTC that actually belongs to hundreds of people.    This could range from crypto stocks to cloud mining power than can be sold for BTC.   I don't see how those kinds of people can be accounted for. 

20 pages back in this thread, when the methodology was created, we used the distribution data from a certain company called Silvervault as a basis for some assumptions of this model. Even impaired Mt.Gox data is an improvement. An example problem where we have better answer now, is:

1.0 million coins belong to people with 100-1000 coins
There are 45,000 people with 10-100 coins.

How many people own 100-1000 coins?

The Mt.Gox leak was the data after accounts were frozen right? Considering there were many hints of Mt.Gox's impending failure well in advance (goxing was a verb a long time ago), I expect a large percentage of people withdrew their funds either completely or mostly (my case). Therefore, I am not sure how useful raw Mt.Gox numbers would be for finding the overall distribution.

That's a sane way to do it. I'll accept that number into my worldview.

They count the number of distinct weekly pings of the running software checking for updates.

That number seems rather high to me. How do they even measure it? Do you have a link to the source?

Yes:

probably the change of methodology had more effect than people actually moving between brackets.

When was this updated the last time?
Never mind I am blind. There was a jump of people who own more than 10k Bitcoins.
Who bought so many, I wonder.

That kind of data is impossible to compose, because the Blockchain only contains the information on how many BTC are on each address, but not whether they belong to a person owning a lot of other coins. Also it is not easy to discern the transfer and change.

The distribution of holdings methodology used here, is a statistical formula that does not use the blockchain very much, except as one of the sources for information on the total number of holders. The theory is that the address balances and holders are so convoluted that actual distribution metrics (from the Mt.Gox leak dump, for instance) provide more useful results, which can be used as parameters here.

They are very good questions though, and I would really much appreciate if someone would take the time to try to address them.

It would be interesting to know

(1) how many BTC the BTC users in each bracket have moved.  E.g., "a user who now has 0.1--1.0 BTC has sent 3.14 BTC on average since Genesis."

(2) when have those users used their BTC.  E.g., "50% of the users who now have 0.1--1.0 BTC have sent or received bitcoins in the last 3.14 months."

The way I make the bitcoin slots, does not have interpolation so you have to do it manually. I am currently working on a model that would allow random precision (as long as the law of large numbers holds, naturally).

Also the 2012 world wealth distribution data is given in orders of magnitude precision only.

Ergo, sorry, no. 

Can you rpovide me with similar numbers for other fiat amounts?

Say:

$750k
$500k
$250k
$100k
$50k
$25k
$10k

I'm just curious (and your slots are rather large)

Of course not because if they wanted to sell they would have sell by now 

Similarly none of my friends in the BTC2,000-BTC20,000 range intends to sell bitcoins worth $1M at these prices, so that puts both numbers in the same ballpark

Hey Nikke,

the number is truthful to the extent that you believe the multibit guys. they are reporting the number of unique pings the software hits their server with to check for software updates. so while they have 1.5 million downloads, i guess it means about 250k wallets are running per week.

Banks and Hedge Funds are currently buying up massive amounts of Bitcoins [I predicted last year this would happen in 2014].

That said, I expect [by Christmas] that at least 25%+ of the total Bitcoin supply will be in the hands of a very few select elite banks and hedge funds.

And this will bring about a whole new issue of Centralization [which I again brought up last year] regarding Bitcoin.

Eventually this trend will become self-evident as most banks and funds have to file quarterly statements of their investments.

Despite that Nikke (above) is working hard to find out the objective figures concerning the number of users, I will post new results that pretty much assume that the number of users is 1.0 million (discussion upthread after the Mt.Gox numbers came out). The new information is in the distribution parameters that were updated based on the Mt.Gox data.

22. Apr 2014

#People	#Bitcoins	#TotalBitcoins
70	BTC10k+	3.6M
930	BTC1k-10k	2.2M
13k	BTC100-1k	3.0M
85k	BTC10-100	2.3M
250k	BTC1-10	0.8M
340k	BTC0.1-1	0.1M
230k	BTC0.01-0.1	0.0M
90k	BTC0.002-0.01	0.0M

Total: 12.2M bitcoins (0.5M bitcoins assumed lost)

The changes from previous estimate:

- Total number of holders revised down from 2.0 million to 1.0 million. This did not change much in the distribution of coins. If new users are added, the large holders do sell according to an experimentally derived rate of 17% per doubling in price, but some newish holders also add to their positions. All-new entrants can come to any bracket, because no amount of coins is yet too expensive to buy. The perceived static totals of the analysis hide the fact that Bitcoin trade is quite brisk and the people who consist of a bracket do change all the time.

- Number of 10k+ holders recalculated because we now know better the average number of coins in each bracket (thanks to Mt.Gox data). So the large holders still have the same number of coins in total, but there appears to be more of the holders.

- Same for 1k+ and 100+. More people but approx the same number of total coins.

- 10+ category turned out to be larger than previously estimated. The Mt.Gox data gave us the confidence to use a steeper j parameter, which means a more "equitable" distribution with more coins in the middle brackets.

- 1+ category remained intact, and the fractional categories were significantly sized down. The lower threshold of "owner" was also raised to BTC0.002 because of the decline in price.

- Number of Bitcoin millionaires at this price ($500) is about 400. This means that only 400 people worldwide can raise a $million by selling bitcoins, but about 30,000,000 people can invest a $million to buy bitcoins (without going into debt).

- The Bitcoin millionaires command about 4.9 million bitcoins, which is 40% of all bitcoins. The control of world's gold and fiat currency is more centralized with a smaller number of individuals controlling higher percentage.

Hello everyone! I am a Finnish statistician and student of economics. I am working for rpietila and analyze data related to the distribution of Bitcoin wealth by owner.




Is this data how truthful? The previous upward biased estimates of users where based on false customer data, most notably on the untruthful claims provided by Mt Gox. Therefore we have to be very critical on the information provided by services to avoid similar mistakes.

If we would obtain the real percentage of how many Bitcoin users use Multibit (the actual percentage you are estimating in your poll), we would get the total amount of Bitcoin users. I would say your guess of 25% might be pretty close, but that is entirely based on my assumption that there are 1 million Bitcoin users in total. Therefore, just guessing a percentage is not really fruitful, since it is totally based on a previous assumption.

While estimating the total amount of Bitcoin users is important, the most beneficial data that we could obtain from services such as Multibit would be related to the distribution among their clienteles: we would need detailed data on how quantities of possessions are distributed among their users. In addition, we would need to be confident that the data is real and factual to avoid biased estimates such as the ones based on Mt Gox data.

It is up to the community to get our estimates more exact. Any crumbs of knowledge would help get us closer!