Bitcoin Forum

Here is an interesting chart (as of 2/6/2014):

http://i1328.photobucket.com/albums/w523/kkeithers/Bitcoin-Address-Distribution-Block-280000_zpsa3f41411.jpg (http://s1328.photobucket.com/user/kkeithers/media/Bitcoin-Address-Distribution-Block-280000_zpsa3f41411.jpg.html)

Obviously most people (myself included), that hold a decent amount of BTC are holding them in different wallets, however the above chart shows that if your btc wallet address holds more than 0.01 BTC, that you are currently in the top 1% of the bitcoin richest addresses.

This is an interesting distribution chart, as the number of addresses holding 1k or more bitcoins is very small in comparison to the world's population.   Where do you sit?

Does the stats strike a resemblance to something that is extremely familiar?

Sort of resembles how wealth is distributed in fiat currencies

As more things are purchasable in Bitcoin, these numbers will begin to change dramatically.

Pretty sure if I was an early adopter with 20,000 bitcoins, I would begin spending some of it once I can "buy anything under the sun" with Bitcoins.

In other words, as commerce increases, the distribution will even out a bit, and hoarding will decrease a bit.

Gotta say, those numbers are VERY surprising.  I would have expected way more holding 1000+ BTC based on early adopters.  I guess I'm not as late in the game as I thought.  8)

Very interesting chart!  Where did it come from?  It would be nice to see a new chart every month to see how wallet distribution is changing.

Wow, very sad news. Essentially this is one big game for a very small group statistically speaking and likely much less considering the multiple account holding.

Meaning it is more likely a big game for XX,XXX or even X,XXX people world wide and no more.

Essentially this could be devastating.

And I have to disagree with the redistributing via commerce, sorry but when you have the next largest group with $60-$600 worth on average and only a couple hundred thousand people , SO WHAT! That is 3% of the lions share, you do not help spread wealth with 3%.

Truth is if I saw this graph before hearing anymore about bitcoin to start I would laugh at the idea of a revolution with such an idea. This as far as I can see is an elite scheme now or a matter of pumping before dumping to the masses, the one's who usually are left holding the bag (taxes).

It also explains why we haven't heard hundreds and thousands of average Joe's complain about MTGOX, they likely do not exist in any number worth mentioning or lost much of anything worth complaining about.

If you steal from large holders you get large problems, when you steal $$$-$$$$ from thousands of individuals, you get a slap, watch.

Throw out at least 95% of those addresses. They're junk, abandoned or never used.

Wrong.  A never-used address never ends up in the blockchain and no one will know about it, thus wouldn't be included in these stats.

My guess is almost 1M BTC is lost, unrecoverable, or wont ever become an output (sent or spent), particularly if you agree that Satoshi wont ever use 99% of his coins.

The problem now is BTC is fairly pricey compared to 2013 prices, so not many people can buy 100+ at a time. Most will buy in the 1-10 range. I tell everyone, just start buying one BTC.

If you look at how hard its going to be to mine one BTC in a year or two, especially when the block reward halves, it stands to reason BTC will be very valuable and hard to obtain.

When all the bears go home and these storm clouds blow over, and companies like Circle make BTC easy for everyone, the rise vs the USD will be fast and furious.

Conclusion: scoop coins now, even at $600-1000 per its still the best investment out there looking at the next few years.  

And how's that sad news?
A lot of wealth is owned by a couple of people,
how's that surprising?

Why's that?
What has the idea todo with others owning more than you do?

If you own a lot of $s, you can own (or mine) a lot of bitcoins too,
if you don't own any $s, you probably can't afford any bitcoins.
What's new about that?
And how is it different from any other currency?

You answered all your questions you had of me yourself with this last question.

Welcome to no advancement apart from gov/central control, for now.

The fact is the coin as of now has done good for who exactly, drug dealers, mobs, money laundering etc...I mean real impacts, real change, who tell me who if not these people for the most part. Has it made a XX,XXX  people a few bucks, sure, is it worth investing in more, absolutely, good investment when you look around. But do not think I kid mysef to believe this will in any way ever end differently then fiat. Now that I have seen that chart my heart sank. If anything it may be the same fiat rulers who hold those coins, one more big money game to screw the average guy, make more money themselves and cement paper as real money...again, sad.

This is not about control,
it's about distribution of wealth.

For everyone,
that obviously includes drug dealers, mobs, money laundering etc.

I personally never bought or sold any drugs with bitcoins,
I never laundered any money,
yet it has done good for me.

I don't doubt is has done good for some people (people have made a few bucks, sure) outside the shady world but when you want it to have a global impact and in the same breath say that is what it will or has done all while stating it has nothing to do with control and if centralization or not...shows you do not understand. I am sorry you just do not understand what I am trying to say, you cannot have another version of fiat and expect a change, period. Right now bitcoin offers a handful of advancements and differences, payment method, no government control, tax evasion op., investment and so on but you cannot over look what will ultimately strangle growth. As you stated based on that chart it is no different then any currency in the grand scheme of things.

No one can look at that chart and say, oh good!

You're mixing up something here.

I'm not saying Bitcoin has nothing todo with control and/or decentralization,
I'm just saying this thread has nothing todo with control and/or decentralization,
that's 2 completely different things.  ;)

No matter how much bitcoins you own, if it's millions of bitcoins, or just a single satoshi,
you don't have any more, or less control over bitcoin, than anyone else.

Address, wallet, and person are all very different things and have very different distributions. That chart is for addresses and very little else can be determined from it.

You misinterpreted the chart. Addresses with more than 0.01 BTC are in the top 3.3%, not the top 1%. Addresses with at least 1 BTC are in the top 1%.

those that hold a combined value of 1000+ coins.. spread it out into addresses of 10-100 btc

i know on of my high value wallets contains a few addresses of even smaller amount balance splits than 10btc per address, yet if i combined my  address balances and then combine the wallets holding all those address balances, then it would show something different..

remember also when you spend 10btc of 100btc for instance. the other 90 then moves to a new 'change address' so you end p having more addresses in your wallet then you thought you had.

which basically means that the chart is meaningless. exchanges have hundreds if not thousands of deposit addresses, savvy savers have dozons of addresses. so there is no way of knowing true 'user numbers' based on that chart.

is the concentration of bitcoin among a few people the reason for its high price.

I bet quite opposite, the more people using bitcoin, the higher value.
And I bet bitcoin is more evenly distributed now than one year ago.

franky1, it would appear if what you say is right (more mid to upper range accounts belong to people holding multiple accounts to cut up large accounts) that would actually make it worse.

Those numbers don't look good at first sight or cut up the way you mention either.

true but only if it becomes a major currency. Right now if the OPs numbers are true its still very concentrated and whales can influence price in the short term, by hoarding and creating artificial scarcity.

Yeah exactly. We don't know how many addresses people have. But we do know that, excluding multi-sig addresses, an address belongs to one person or one organization.  So looking at this table it seems 100k addresses hold 96% of all bitcoins. If we assume, conservatively, that a person has 10 addresses that means just 10,000 entities own 96% of all bitcoins. I bet the real number is even lower than that. Maybe just a few hundred.

Exactly!

I am starting to wonder what kind of game this was or is...satoshi is such a humble, secretive and noble man since he hasn't spent any coins and he gave us this new form of currency, ya sure.

So far he and a handful at best of others have not really given the currency freedom to make significant impact, why, time will tell the real plan. And no social media hype, news and a few dollars in the pockets of a few is not significant impact.

No, we don't, not in the sense that we could say "there must  be one person that (thinks that he) owns all the coins in this one address". The Mt Gox incident showed very clearly that a lot of people (far more than I imagined) are totally ready to give control of their coins to some other entity that typically will consolidate the coins to a small number of addresses.

Yes. Many of the largest addresses are owned by exchanges and hold bitcoins for thousands of people.

You can see it daily at http://www.klmist.com/keysreport.html :)

It seems that while we are focusing on the asymmetric distribution of bitcoin, everyone is ignoring the histogram that shows the distribution  of population size relative to their overall contributions to the quality of life and standard of living of others.

This is an interesting topic, I am just not convinced that BTC's wealth distribution is going to be problematic in the years ahead, the full explanation is here:

http://bitcoinreflections.com/2014/02/wealth-distribution-and-bitcoin/

thx

I found it on one of the financial webpages.   I should have sourced it, but I forgot to when I posted it, and now I don't remember where I got it.   I definitely did not crunch the numbers myself...

To me it tells me I'm still an early adopter.  Im in the richest 1% and only 100k or less people have more btc then me.  And I only bought 10 btc for fun.

You don't know that. You are looking at statistics for addressess, and not people. Because a single address can hold bitcoins for multiple people and a single person can control many addresses, All you know is that there must be less than 1.25 million people (12.5 MBTC / 10) with more bitcoins than you.

Your Bitcoins	Maximum Number of People With More Bitcoins Than You
1	12,500,000
10	1,250,000
100	125,000
1,000	12,500
10,000	1,250
100,000	124
1,000,000	11
10,000,000	0

Yes, that is true, but even holding 10 btc is a pretty decent sized holding given how many bitcoins are actually in circulation in comparison to the world's population.   There aren't even enough bitcoins for each person in my state to have just one

I like to track this distribution.  30.63% of all bitcoins were in addresses with between 1 and 100 bitcoins on 2/6/14.  Today, 5/2/14, 31.58% are in addresses with between 1 and 100 btc in them.  So they are slowly getting dispersed into addresses with lower balances.

Hmm... So there are two wallets which contains more than BTC100,000. The first one might be the DPR wallet (Silk Road) which was seized by the FBI. Which is the second one? Any exchange hot-wallet?

Would you happen to have an updated graph?  I am curious to see how the wealth has shifted around in the past few months.   My default assumption is that when the prices crashed recently, most of the small holders panic sold, whereas the larger holders scooped up more...

Is it possible that it is one of the "missing" Gox wallets?

Forgot about this thread.

Firstly even if a handful are exchanges, it makes little impact over all.

Secondly if Satoshi had his heart in the right place or where everyone wants you to believe he did, he would slowly sell off his coins at market prices and help distribute. Not give away, not impact prices but a slow steady market sell out. Why one individual would need so many bitcoin is not justifiable. Priee up or down it doesn't matter, you hoard for one reason maybe two, it's MINE or that will be worth more one day and thus wanting more riches. But riches of what, fiat because at this rate of distribution it will not become fully integrated enough to enjoy billions of bitcoin worth.

He isn't doing this, why, my thinking is it isn't their plan. This group of top account holders, government or mad men are hoarding for a reason, control!

Ill play the market, have fun and ride it while it lasts but end of day, there needs to be change and soon or it may be one of the biggest booms and busts in tech we read about.

what i mean to say is that PEOPLE owning 10,000-100,000 bitcoins are not all holding their hoard in a sole address purely for them.

infact i bet that atleast 80 of the 96 addresses in that category are cold store for exchanges. where the 10k+ addresses are all mixed coins of many users stored offline.

the other 16 will b people like early adopters (2009 era) that never touched their hoard.

and as for the 2 million addresses with small amounts in them. i presume they are deposit addresses for customers that are using services.

in short the numbers in the OP are meaningless unless you put them into context. there are not 96 super rich people that have there whole hoard in one address. and there are not over 2 million people with only 0.0001 to their name

No. The wallet which was labelled as the stolen gox coins was later found out to be the centralized wallet of some Bitcoin mining pool. Also, the Gox thief never kept all the coins in a single wallet.

There were two, but now there's only one.

The chart is always available at http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address

You can view the past by adding ?atblock=(BLOCK NUMBER) to the URL.

I am not interested in the distribution itself, but in seeing the wallet sizes whose proportion of bitcoin grows or shrinks.  The distribution is largely opaque in terms of useful info for the reasons CryptoDomains mentioned, but the changes over time are telling.

There are 31,601,626 holding less than or than 0.001 at at Block 295,000. That is a bit surprising.

you are going to see the number of sub 0.001 wallets increase to hundreds of millions.. purely due to merchants that implement 'use once' addresses.

these millions of addresses wont tell you how many people have any coin. or how many of the addresses belong to how many bitcoin merchants. thus useless trying to analyze it for any useful info/statistic

thus the topic title
"Bitcoin Distribution of Wealth Detailing the BTC Holdings of Wallet Addresses" is erroneous

Shouldn't the merchants (or coinbase/bitpay if merchants use them) "consolidate" the btc?

Im sure they will once they feel there is enough value in doing so, anyone have an updated chart?

As dscotese suggested, the site (http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-address) provides an updated chart every 5000 blocks, and the latest one would be at block 295000 (Apr 9).

Or you can see the daily data on the following site.