Topic: Interesting topic in Economics - page 2. (Read 1841 times)

Nope. The single largest bitcoin balance in an active address is (very probably, not offically confirmed) the internal mixer address for Silk Road.  Satoshi Dice has a long way to go to catch up to them.  Technically, however, no single person "owns" that address, and the value is possessed by a large number of users and dealers on Silk Road.

EDIT: I meant to say pool of addresses, the mixer doesn't untilize a singe address, but a cascading set of addresses.  MtGox's internal wallet service works similarly, but the mixer does deliberately move balances out of and back into the pool in complex ways.  The paper this article refers to fails to consider the existance of this, and other, coin mixers that exist to hide the origin and destination of transactions.  The one at Silk Road is almost certainly still the undisputed king of mixers, but others also certainly exist.  R & S are more likely lesser used, and less well known, coin mixers.

I don't subscribe to this idea. I think that no matter what, Bitcoins will maintain their utility, and that is the most important thing, not the price.

That article has a few points that need addressing,

ok for a start compare that to a wealth distrubution of USD and you might find that that much more of the wealth is in the hands of a few in the case of USD,

Secondly I doubt any of the creators and wealthy early adopters would sell out in one lump, it would be a costly move for them as the exchange rate would crash and they wouldn't get the same amount, if they sold off there wealth in small chunks over time they would get the best price and it is easy to do with bitcoin, I suspect a few slighly less wealthy already are.


Considering there is around 10m Btc in circulation and the richest person owning 2.8M (claimed by the table in your link) it is not that bad, I suspect Satoshi Dice could be A.


Also why would a wealthy early adopter cash out a large sum now if the price is still rising and could be worth $100 or $1000 next year, it wouldnt make sense for them to dump there wealth on mtgox,

As bitcoin is growing it will be able to absorb more and more volume of these "dumps"


really though threats to bitcoin come not from these early adopters (which contrary to this article) may actually have good intentions for bitcoin as a whole. The threats to nitcoin are from the technical nature of it, a hard fork is likely to happen at some point, other technical bugs and community devision could break bitcoin, also government intervention could makes some services unavailible in some countries.


But really these are still early days so you can still be an early adopter, there is no telling what price people will pay for bitcoin if something disastrous happened to there countries fiat supply.

As i'm still a newbie i cannot reply in the original thread (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/worried-about-coins-being-lost-you-have-bigger-worries-152988) so i'll do it here.

The topic is about the millions of BTC the early adopters of Bitcoin have collected and the possibility they cash out someday.
see also: http://newswax.com/2012/10/bitcoin-has-a-kill-switch-and-how-to-disconnect-it/ (also read the paper http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf!)

This is a frightening idea at least. And it looks like some Bitcoin-rich people are beginning to cash out. If you watch the (European) orderbooks of some of the major exchanges you'll find hundreds and hundreds of BTC around a ask price of 37.3 Euro....

Can someone give some insight in how this might develop the days ahead?
short term: the wall of BTC for sale right now
long term: 6 million BTC in the hands of a happy few