Topic: Distribution of bitcoin wealth by owner - page 16. (Read 153446 times)

Better yet, they should invest their holdings into new Bitcoin enterprises, or traditional businesses or philanthropic efforts, without converting to dollars. Pay people Bitcoin to do things. The Bitcoin super-rich can gain the tangible benefits of their wealth while distributing it to the wider population. If I had 100 million dollars worth of Bitcoin, I might buy my favorite local restaurant chain and pay all employees a portion of their salary in Bitcoin, offer discounts for Bitcoin-paying customers, source from suppliers that accept Bitcoin, sell Bitcoin at every location, etc. Hopefully the Bitcoin super-rich are smart enough to do things like this rather than just cash out for fiat.

I believe that many folks will spend or exchange their holdings when they grow enough. I will, according Risto's savings plan.

You can't force people to sell their wealth to benefit the masses.

That's communism.

The "lost" Bitcoins on Gox were not lost but bought up by a few banks like JP Morgan and are now being refunded by the Koch brothers.

See my prediction of all this weeks before it happened.  I said all those coins would be refunded before anyone uttered the any words of finding the coins.

So once again, Bitcoin became even more centralized where a massive 850,000 Bitcoins were taken via some clever scheme by probably 3-5 total institutions.

And with the current high price of BTC it's hard to get the masses to buy larger amounts to even out the distribution.

I would think that the top % should sell some of their holdings each time we reach an ATH which changes the distribution of course.

If those coins were still on Gox then they won't have as many now either will they?  I guess Gox might return some of them.

Not sure, I'd guess a few thousand.  Max, 5,000 people.  But as a %, the handful of people at the top who easily own at least 25%, has gone up exponentially given the fraction of supposed accounts on Gox.

Look, I don't have a personal problem with it, you would expect that to be the case given bitcoin was so easy to mine for some 2 years but not many knew or believed in it.  That very nature of the matter created the current distribution.  With time it's possible that will change but right now the super rich are accumulating so that will further centralize the power of bitcoin in the hands of a few.

I'm not sure it can ever be different [in the end] with any popular currency.

A guess how many people have more than 100 BTC?

Translation:  Vlad was right and Bitcoin is very poorly distributed with the large majority of wealth in the hands of a few, thus making Bitcoin very much centralized and eerily similar to a Fiat 2.0.


That's just my guess of course and the true, freedom loving libertarians on this thread will surely delete this message.

Enjoy.

We have run into unexpected difficulties. In short, the fall of Gox and the lies that surfaced, shattered our belief in the data that we used to use. The total number of users I cannot estimate at the moment. The distribution between large and small users is easier to estimate. I await for any contribution from others to get it back on track. Any piece of data, from any country, service, or point of time, as long as it is truthful. We can connect them.

Looking forward to the March stats. Will they be out soon?

That's fairly convincing. Although you are relying on a secondary assumption, that Gox accurately reported their total for BTC obligations in full. They're the sole source of that figure, and they're proven to be unreliable in many ways (most intriguing is the apparent contradiction between how many coins they lost to fraudulent withdrawal claims and the recent analysis that has appeared in the press).

Still, it would be unlikely to remove a significant number of accounts without significantly altering the distribution according to your analysis of the blockchain as a whole. That's the strongest argument that the data is more or less complete, for sure.

- The addresses in the leak contained 0.9 million coins, which agrees well with the general understanding about how much there was at Mt.Gox
- Everybody can check their balance; I haven't heard reports of missing balances, I have heard that the balance has been correct
- Zero balances are omitted, as they are in my "# of bitcoinusers calculation"
- The distribution of coins in the balances (see my analysis upthread) satisfies some intricate statistical requirements that would have been difficult to fake

What evidence is there that the Mt Gox leak was complete? There are a few potential reasons for the hacker to release an incomplete dataset, plus they didn't necessarily get the whole dataset. How many accounts with all zero balances were in the data? Why were transaction history and full personal details not released? Clearly not all types of account data were leaked, which implies either incomplete access or incomplete disclosure.

I am trying to make up something from the current data. But it is hard - Mt.Gox celebrated 1 million users, dataleak revealed 70,000.

Coinbase claims 1 million users, does it also round up with a heavy hand?

How many bitcoins are stored in exchanges and similar services? 3-4 million?

Mt.Gox data shower an average balance of 12 bitcoins. For many, that is not even all, meaning that the actual average is higher. Mt.Gox, because it is an old exchange, probably hosted larger balances than the others, otoh many had withdrawn them due to the problems.

I think the evidence points out to 700k-1M users but would like to hear comments on the methods and not just "voting on the results"

So, you are estimating how many "BTCowner" at this point in time? 111,111?





 

We need to clarify what constitutes an "address":

- The blockchain has 1.34 million addresses with a balance of BTC0.001 or more.
- It has 29 million addresses with a balance of less than that.
- Empty addresses are not counted because it is not possible, and their presence does not change the equation.

So even though you have used 50 addresses, it is likely that your current balance is spread between 2-4 addresses that cross the 0.001 threshold and several, which are less.

ADD: Even though we must revise the BTCowner estimate down, the growth rate in # of addresses has actually been 24.5% over the last 3.7 months, which is on par with the long-term price trend of 23.5% per month.

i personally have two wallets, one on my phone one on my pc, and have somewhere around 50 addresses in total, on a guess.

but currently i don't have even .02 btc. in the past i have had more though, and done a group buy on this forum for some asics, so i have a bunch of addresses related to that.

I got involved with a simple alternative methodology of determining the number of Bitcoin users:

By fixing the number of addresses (on average) used by people in different categories, we can allocate the 1.34 million used addresses to the different people, disregarding the address balances, and just caring about the number of them. Then we allocate the bitcoins with the usual model that ensures the statistical validity of the result.

Please comment on my assumptions:

- Satoshi has 19600 addresses (Sergio's result, they are all 50 coins unspent coinbases)
- 100kBTC+ people have 1000 addresses (some have unspent coins driving the addresscount up)
- 10k+ people have 50 addresses
- 1k+ people have 20 addresses
- 100+ people have 7 addresses
- 10+ people have 3 addresses
- 1+ people have 1.5 addresses
- 0.1+ and smaller have 1 address
- 0.01+
- 0.002+

3 million coins are in exchanges or similar joint custodies, and their wallets are on average 100 coins per address, which is 30,000 addresses total, which is deducted from the amount available for people. The 0.5M lost coins are in 10,000 addresses of 50 coins each.

Thank you for this thread.

Do you think that the two recent bitcoin public donations (first to Dorian and second to Wales) could be analysed to help better understand the distribution of bitcoin wealth by owner ?

Dorian : 1Dorian4RoXcnBv9hnQ4Y2C1an6NJ4UrjX
Wales : 1McNsCTN26zkBSHs9fsgUHHy8u5S1PY5q3

Anybody knows how I could get the raw data values of all the donations to these two addresses, i.e. date time + from address + amount ?

Great work. I'm looking forward to these new figures as a rather fresh bitcoiner, wanting to know its position among other bitcoin owners.

Any chance making the data any more detailed? Like, could you present the data as a cumulative graph, with number of bitcoins as X-axis and percentage of owners as Y-axis.

The end-of-March figures will be out soon.

As I warned, there will be a reduction in the number of Bitcoin owners. The previous total of 2.0 million was based on all kinds of lies, including Mt.Gox claiming that they surpassed 1 million users already last year (they only now only had 85,000 users with balance, of which 70,000 had more than 1mBTC).

As we correct for the exchanges having much fewer customers than they claim, we must turn increasingly to the blockchain to determine the number. The blockchain, as of block 290,000, has only 1.34 million non-dust addresses (+29 million dust addresses). With the new revelations, it becomes necessary that the number of owners is less than the number of addresses, somewhere around a million. My analyst is still working on it.

What the Gox leak provided nicely, is the average balance in each of the cohorts, relative to the % decrease of number of people when going from one cohort to the next, "bigger" one. It is hard for me to even explain what this is but I just say that it is a very important missing piece of information that we can use to construct the distribution.

So this month figures have been totally reconstructed, but will no doubt look familiar, since they have to conform to the unchangeable statistical laws. Only the understanding of Bitcoin economy, and therefore the values of the parameters, have changed.