Topic: Only 500 persons owns 36% of all bitcoins? (Read 2538 times)

Not really.  Not only would I have to be able to know which coins are Satoshi's (only the first few hundred blocks can be assumed to be Satoshi's), I'd also have to know that he didn't sell those block reward addresses out-of-band.  Neither of these things are knowable, unless he tells us.  We'd also have to know that Satoshi himself was still alive, and some heir wasn't finally making moves with inherited funds.  Keep in mind that he stopped talking to us shortly before the last Tsunami killed thousands of Japanese in a single day.  If Satoshi is actually Japanese & actually an individual, he might be dead.


Go right ahead.  I don't agree that everyone will sell them, but I'll offer you an early deal.  Get out now and I'll pay you half price on all that you have.

So if the creator and original programmer of bitcoin moves his ,untouched for years coins, wouldn't that raise some flags for you?
I mean most people will speculate that he is moving coins in order to sell them. And if satoshi sells coins then hell i 'll sell to. Every single one of them.

Based upon what, exactly?

If any of Satoshi's btc move i think the price will collapse instantly.

pareto

It is hard to make an estimate.
One person may control 10000 addresses.
One address may contain bitcoin belonging to 10000 persons (eg. Hot/Cold wallet of exchanges and casinos).

I'm curious as to the wealth distribution. Like what's the top 1%? Top 5%? Top 10%? 20%? Bottom 50%?

I m not one of these

You mean the change address?
If then, it depends on the wallet used.

Isn't a new address created for every transaction?

Not necessarily.
You may refer to the following 2 threads by gmaxwell.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-taint-rich-raw-txn-fun-and-disrupting-taint-analysis-51kbtc-linked-139581
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/coinjoin-bitcoin-privacy-for-the-real-world-279249

I bet one of those is Satoshi Nakamoto...

Yes, maybe the numbers are not correct, but bitcoin really is not a way to decentralization of wealth. Just other couple of people would/will become super rich. Litecoin or maybe some other currencies are more "fair". Therefor I start mining and supporting this instead of BTC.

they got in early and held.  more power to them.

Switching over to ltc soon, wouldn't be suprised if this was true.

Pareto principle in bitcoin?

They don't.  There are some guestimates based on average computing power and the relatively low hashrate for the first year but nobody knows for sure.


The QT (reference) client will do this by default automatically (actually this behavior can't be bypassed).  Other clients may behave differently.

With a price tag of 40$. I don't think that it 'll take much longer before companies announce their first scrypt asics. My bet is on KnC for that.

Two questions

1.) how does anybody know exactly how many Satoshi has?

2.) How does one ensure that the change is sent to a new address?  Do you need a non-standard client?

Not conclusively in all cases.   If two or more addresses are used in the same transaction then you can know they are both from the same wallet.  However if Bitcoin intentionally makes this kind of tracking difficult.  If you use a new addresss for each tx, send change to a new address, and don't reuse existing addresses while it may be possible to link some addresses together by analysising the blockchain it is impossible to link all of them together.  If someone cared enough they can make the job much harder but selecting inputs so they don't add additional information to the blockchain, using mixer services, and even used shared wallets (like exchanges) to kill the public trail.

As an example of killing the public trail:
If I deposit 1 input at a time to MtGox using a different address each time there is no way to link those txs together using the blockchain.  You would need a warrant to gain access to MtGox internal database.   I could then withdraw those balances (which will come from totally different random MtGox addresses) to individual addresses.  Making the amounts and number of withdrawals and deposits different and varying the frequency would make even probabilistic (guessing) analysis impossible.  Now imagine doing the same with multiple exchanges and other shared wallet services, cryptostocks, and even altcoins to ensure that the entire trail can't be reconstructed by a single entity even with private information.