Centralization of Bitcoin Wealth: 4% of addresses own 96% of Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Centralization of Bitcoin Wealth: 4% of addresses own 96% of Bitcoin

howmuch.net

29 pointsmbgaxyz14 comments

Although the pie chart is a bit skewed because there are many exchanges that hold custody of coins in (multi-sig) cold storage, Bitcoin's distribution is not as dispersed as most would have liked it to be. That's largely because people were able to mine the currency in silence during 2009-10 where adoption and therefore difficulty were miniscule. I think one of the most annoying things people keep coming up with is doing airdrops for their altcoins based on the distribution to registered Bitcoin addresses. Byteball keeps doing this and therefore favors and privileges large Bitcoin holders. That's one of the most unfair ways to distribute a new cryptocurrency, especially for people that haven't had the privilege to have known about Bitcoin early.

This article is an exercise in ignorance. Wallet providers? Does he not even understand the concept of personal wallets? Anybody that keeps a significant amount of money in a hosted wallet outside of specific circumstances (I. E. trading) is not only doing it wrong, they are being extremely foolish. And it looks like he's counting dust wallets and orphaned wallets.

Maybe he should have learned something about the subject matter before writing an "authoratative" article.

Author states that 1 address does not necessarily equals one person, but for some reason does this down in the article instead of an upfront disclaimer.

That's common knowledge, both for Bitcoin and elsewhere. How could any digital asset (Bitcoin, email account, social media account) guarantee a 1:1 mapping to humans?

Haha. As if there was any realistic link between addresses and people. They're even designed to be one-time-use..

Wouldn't that imply we should see significantly less centralization than this? At the very least 4% holding 96% implies something isn't being used right..

Doesn't explain what set of addresses they actually looked at. All addresses ever in use? All addresses currently holding value?

Also not sure what that's supposed to mean:

> And that’s the issue. There’s only a very limited number of bitcoin wallet providers out there.

Might be confusing exchanges and wallets?

You don't have to look at each address, you can just trace which addresses have been used through the block chain.

... yes? It's still relevant and missing info which of the addresses that have been used they looked at.

Is this a pie chart??

This looks pretty bad, but I would like to see how it changes after subtracting Satoshi coins, exchanges, etc. I'm sure it still wouldn't be that great.

If this is even remotely representative of how Bitcoin wealth is distributed amongst individuals (not addresses)...

It's not. Many addresses are single use

Jesus, who thought that chart was a good idea?

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