I'm guessing he is talking about his "survey" - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/survey-how-much-bitcoins-you-have-1287718 which kinda looked like a attempt to get posts looking at how long it ran, and was all for a pie chart that a very limited number entered into. Also it being in newbie forum had to effect it. But even his own survey does not show 99 percent as poor.
The thing about bitcoins is we cannot tie them to a person easily so we can't say blanket figures like 99 percent are poor. But far less then 99 percent are poor I think. And what do you consider poor? As that term means SO many different amounts depending on where you live.
Well we didnt know who participated in surveys, but lets just assume it was newbies.
But i have fresh data , if you look at the new number of bitcoin users, mostly from Philipines, and SE asia nowadays, then you can correlate that with faucet users and small earning website users data.
You will interestingly find out that almost all new waves of new bitcoin users end up in faucet sites or other earning sites, with small payouts.
That should suggest that most bitcoin users (which are not the core of this forum, the first 10,000 users) are most likely poor as hell.
Also you can look at the address bitcoin distribution, and the mt gox data to figure out the distribution of wealth.
There are several indicators that point out that most of the wealth is concentrated in the top 2% of bitcoin users
The bitcoin elite could hold as much as 65% of the coins.
And the other core users, which is probably not more than 50,000, hold the other 20-25%.
The remaining 10% is then shared by all newbies. I suspect most dont even have 0.2 BTC
I mean no offense I just am not a fan of this tutorial. It suggests buying of accounts, and loans. Things I think new users should stay away from. I think account farmers give signature users a bad name due to quality of posts. As even if buyer does decent posts chances are the farmer had sub-par posts with a beginnner signature campaign.
I don't think you should count the "You will interestingly find out that almost all new waves of new bitcoin users end up in faucet sites or other earning sites, with small payouts." These are users who are brand new and are spending hours for cents. Which is horrible. A lot of these I don't consider users as they think it's get rich quick... try faucets... and leave after making cents.
Yes whales own a lot of BTC, but any fiat there is not a even distribution of wealth. So I think bitcoin is the same as any fiat money. But I don't think you can say "since 99% of bitcoin users are poor, we need to give them incentives." I just don't believe this number.