Bitcoin Forum

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https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

0.1-1BTC - 3,434,764 Addresses (7.04%)
1 - 10BTC - 858,283 Addresses (1.76%)
10 - 100BTC - 141,001 Addresses (0.29%)
100 - 1,000BTC - 13,819 Addresses (0.03%)

This is some amazing data. Less than 10% (4,447,867) of Addresses are holding between 0.1BTC to 1,000BTC.
Only 4 addresses in the world that holds 100,000BTC - 1,000,000BTC.

Addresses richer than $100,000: 319,763

It does not conclusively indicate personal bitcoin ownership, such as the address of the Binance Cold Wallet which holds bitcoins belonging to thousands of users. Sad to know, it's an indication that centralized entities are still in control of most of the bitcoin circulation.

The data can easily be misinterpreted.

Addresses that hold X number of bitcoin =/= people that hold X number of bitcoin

Let's not forget that a good number of people hold their coins on centralized wallets like Binance/Coinbase/etc. This can easily be misinterpreted as whales holding a huge amount of bitcoin.

This is a lopsided statistic because we cannot distinguish between personal addresses from corporate ones. It is like taking statistics of the dollars in bank accounts without stating if they are individual, corporate, or even commercial bank accounts.

Some of these addresses with high bitcoin might belong to whales but we can assume that the majority of them belong to centralized exchanges. This sad reality also shows that many people have not learned the lesson of not your keys, not your coins. People have not learned much from the fall of Ftx and others.

There is a good possibility of a lot of wallets with small balance might have been abandoned due to loss of Private key or the owners have forgotten about them. Those four with big balance can be of exchanges. I doubt them to be wallets of whales. This my first time seeing such a data, I do know that everything can be seen on Blockchain but collecting such information requires a lot of effort & time. 

This is wrong - According to this site Bitcoin Exchange Balance (https://en.macromicro.me/charts/29045/bitcoin-exchange-balance-total) there are only 2.2 M BTC on exchanges (~15% of supply) and this number goes down starting from 2020 when it hit ATH @3.2 M coins.

Interesting for stats nerds but as mentioned, few conclusions can be drawn from it, as we don't know who they belong to, whether they are institutional or individual investors and how many of those addresses belong to the same wallet.


This is another good point. But there are also addresses with good amounts of Bitcoin whose keys have been lost, especially from the early years.


Yes, I believe that if individuals have large amounts they are more careful with their privacy and they split their holdings in multiple addresses.

Does it mean that some whales are have bigger bitcoin investment than exchanges,I do believe that among those four address containing the huge amount of bitcoin one or more belongs to an exchange. The funny thing is that the bitcoin in exchanges belongs to individuals who choose to use the exchange to keep their coins due to the inability to keep their bitcoin safe. However, one can't really tell whose addresses are those addresses,maybe a corporation or an exchange since then owners can't be known. This shows that some bitcoin investors hasn't understood that bitcoin is decentralized and exchanges are centralized, which is the opposite of bitcoin and they don't have that security that bitcoin gives to its user by elimination of third party for transaction.

It should generally follow a normal distribution, which is quite normal. I expect the trend in the distribution to tend to that as time goes by. I'll expect more addresses in the 50BTC region as well.

However, note that a lot of the addresses can be change address. If you were to send 0.99BTC, you would have a change address of 0.01BTC. With that in mind, you would have a lot of people having the coins separated in this manner.

In addition, a lot of the services tends to move their coins to another address rather slowly. I imagine that would be a non factor.

Its hard to believe, right? Just take a moment to think about the huge difference between these numbers. Less than 10% of all Bitcoin accounts have between 0.1 and 1,000 BTC, which adds to the idea that Bitcoin is becoming an oligarchy. Like most other power systems in history, the elite control the financial structure.

And lets not even talk about the four addresses that have between 100,000BTC and 1,000,000BTC in their wallets. Its upsetting because it shows how unfair our culture is as a whole. These whales dont just play the game; they also change it.

Wake up, people who say Bitcoin is the best way to make things fair for everyone. If you arent careful, you might end up worshiping the same monsters that Bitcoin promised to fight.

you cannot gain any meaningful information about population distribution based on coin distribution

for instance the 3.6m addresses of 0-0.00001 does not mean 3.6m people only own $0.13 of btc on average.
it could be that less people have multiple addresses of unspendable change.
it could be just a couple BRC scammers bloating the blockchain with hundreds of thousands of nonsense utxos of $0.13 trying to sell that crap for stupid amounts to scammed victims.. but yet to achieve their scam results

lets take the category of 10-100btc. the ~140,000 addresses.. did you know that satoshi himself has not touched his over 20,000 addresses of 50btc in 14 years. yep 20k+ of those addresses belong to satoshi. yep one entity

lets take the 1000-10,000btc category the ~1900 addresses.. did you know grayscale has ~630,000 btc all split up in hundreds of addresses of ~1500btc held in keys managed by coinbase..
these coins are held by coinbase, contracted to be permissively owned by grayscale but represent a promise to pay millions of grayscales GBTC customers some time in the future...

as for the top "rich" top 4 addresses. those are exchanges that represent the "promise"(exchange permissioned) of being balance of millions of exchange customers

BTC is money, and the rich will surely have more of it if they decide to have it. It is not a matter of an oligarchy, institutional investors and rich retail investors will surely have more BTC's than an average investor, except the person is an early adopter who mined BTC in the early days and managed not to lose their keys.
BTC was never created to make things fair to everyone, it is just decentralized money that is free for everyone to use. Take note that BTC is permissionless and censorship resistant, so who is going to stop exchanges, institutions and the very wealthy from buying BTC if they decide to do so, that will be censoring and it is against what BTC stands for.

I don't know how accurate these data are, because although 2.2 million BTC does not seem too much compared to almost 19.5 million BTC mined, it still shows that there are still those who do not understand the need for non-custodial wallets. However, I would dare to say that this number is even lower, because we all know that CEX always manipulates numbers in order to show liquidity, so it is a similar story as in the case when speculating about how much BTC is actually irreversible or currently lost.

What is certain is that the number of BTC that are on CEX is decreasing over the years, which is really good news and I hope that it is not only related to the fact that we are still in a bear market.

Very possible, most of the whales are even the ones investing on most exchanges standing as their financial giat investors, yet some reputable exchages also have their asset on a personalized bitcoin wallet on the blockchain, which means the exchanges also are part of those that constitute the number of whales we have because they have their cold storages where they normally store their coins and not on their own exchages as well or using another exchange.


Very possible as long as the address is not an exchange bitcoin address, an exchange could have as many as possible cold storages where their asset are stored on the blockchain.


I logic many don't know is that using an exchange will guarantee you access to loose your coins while exchange you secure your coins to also make use of a decentralized digital cold storage to store both your coins and theirs, which could also mean that at the end, the user will loose his asset while the exchange may not loose theirs.

In the early days, when Bitcoin price was around ZERO USD not many took Bitcoin seriously. Bitcoin was treated as joke in its early days, remember 2 Pizzas were bought for 10,000 Bitcoins in May 2010. Now where are those 10,000 Bitcoins that were exchanged for 2 pizzas? Majority of such Bitcoins are lost as owners never cared about the wallets.
Second type of active wallets are the one whose owner took Bitcoin serious in early days of Bitcoin and that's why they are called whales today.
Still Bitcoin is very much decentralised as compared to fiat financial system.

I believe there is debate between two topics here, whether it’s personal stats or based on the entity stats. I think it doesn’t matter if we look at it based on an address and it’s holdings. Since the data is representing in what slot that particular resides it is fun to watch it and understand the distribution over great range of Bitcoin holdings. In my case it straight away tells me that I’m in the lowest possible category and comes in 7% range (or virtually below that, Lolz). This is ok data for studying various holdings. Hope so there is also another data set where they will segregate the entire entity holdings as well as individual holdings. Though it seem impossible to do and may compromise the integrity of holdings.

Centralized exchanges do not store the coins you hand over to them in cold storage, they won't make any revenue if they do that and we all know that centralized exchanges will prioritize their revenue over the security of your funds. They operate through a fractional reserve system, so your money is being used for gambling or risky trading and the exchange can lose it and go insolvent very quickly. Exchanges also get hacked and lose a lot of customers' funds because they were stored in hot wallets