Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone know if there's a way to measure how Bitcoin is spread out currently?

I mean this in terms of numbers of users with coins. This doesn't mean to show how Bitcoins are spread among various public addresses, but how they're spread among unique users.

If it could be measured, it would be a useful index of how Bitcoin is spreading and becoming 'mainstream' or not.

Eg.

When bitcoin was first created, it would have looked like this:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m296/cjw32/BTCinitial_zps0ea25cae.png


Currently, maybe it looks like this:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m296/cjw32/BTCcurrent_zps79404a36.png


When it's truly become what everyone thinks it could be it may well look like this:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m296/cjw32/BTCfuture_zpsfac5a5a7.png


Perhaps it may look more like the wealth distribution graph:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m296/cjw32/adjusted-income-2013_zpsc5188f2c.jpg

personally i think 10 - 100k in some years could be possible.

10K is not obvious, it's OBLIGATORY, it only depends on the adoption level, BTC price is math: more adoption, higher price.

There have been charts including this one by MIT:

http://newsbtc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/MIT-Tech-Review-Spending-Bitcoins.jpg

Do you what data MIT included and excluded in this study?

I thought that the unspent bitcoins would have been higher in the last years but I was wrong of course.

In 2009 you couldn't buy almost anything with bitcoin so they remained unspent.

Here is the coindesk article on the study:

http://www.coindesk.com/mit-report-bitcoin-more-likely-spent-hoarded/

I think the reason for this change is that people are now spending a lot more to mine bitcoin. As a result they will have bigger bills to pay that they need to sell their mined bitcoin for. In 2009 for example it almost wouldn't even be worth someone's time to sell their mined bitcoin to cover their electric costs.

Another likely reason is the fact that most miners use pools to mine. As a result (with the exception of eligius), the found block will have the block subsidy "deposited" into the pool address, and when it is time to pay the miners the reward will be transferred to the miner's address.

I wonder how much people are holding in 2014...

In 2013 it looks like it increased the amount of users with unspent bitcoins

It is simple, bitcoin is getting more popular. And we get more way to spentit so people are just using it just like normal currencies in real world. Nothing special about it, just simple evolution.

BTC ATMs are getting opened at many places so there is a big chance of a fast users growth soon.

I think this study is flawed. As mentioned above, most people mine via pools today and most pools do not payout directly into a miner's address, but rather mine into a central pool address and subsequently transfer the mined bitcoin into the miner's address.

It would be much more accurate if the study were to attempt to follow the outputs and look at the number of TXs that inputs are associated with. This would likely be a much better representation if the mined coins are actually sold or not.

this thread make me ask a technical question:

is it possible to know if 2 or more addresses are used from the same person? And, if so, how?  ???

Not been found yet. But it is nearly impossible.

Bravo! I've been seeing that graph posted for a while now and you are the only one that actually realizes what's going on. The reason an outside entity like MIT can't just grab the Blockchain and start analyzing transactions is because they really don't know how Bitcoin works or have any involvement in the community of users. It was probably some grad students class paper and he was "guided" (and I'm using the term loosely) by an even more clueless professor.

It's not possible to know for certain, but it is possible to make an educated guess that there is a strong likelihood of two addresses being under the control of the same person (or company).

In order to spend bitcoins that have been received at an address, those bitcoins must be used as an input into a transaction.  Then the transaction must be signed using the private key that is associated with the address.

If bitcoins from two different addresses are both used as inputs into the same transaction, then there is a very high likelihood that the same person owns both addresses since the transaction needs signatures from the private keys of both addresses.

thanks for this reply, it's very usefull.

Just one think, that maybe is very simple but i don't understand: in which case "two different addresses are both used as inputs into the same transaction"?

Maybe like 20 years id say :o

Here is an example:
https://blockchain.info/tx/0dc6416fc7c2db6167212bc50a6d3d940c3d40d1e3a4067b9194ae45256c6cae

In that transaction we see that the spender spent 0.0020125 BTC that were previously received at 1MxwKaCRWQnVseef7K8K93HgV6dr1dtSdP and 0.00022488 BTC that were previously received at 1AiWaZrV1ge1twKZUXHSb2WMThWEPaTeaZ.

Since, in order to be valid, this transaction must have signatures from the private keys that are associated with BOTH of those addresses, we can say that it is very likely that both 1MxwKaCRWQnVseef7K8K93HgV6dr1dtSdP and 1AiWaZrV1ge1twKZUXHSb2WMThWEPaTeaZ are under the control of the same person (or company).

Look at this shit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnm4xFC2xNo

not if they are as shitty as this, we need non ID and non scanning fingertip shit otherwise no one will give a flying motherfuck.

We need to teach people about btc, most people i talk to dont know about it yet.

What they should do is try to figure out the average pattern of the "route" of a deposit into an exchange account, and then compare that route to the routes of found blocks. This would get a much better picture of how much of the miner's earnings are actually spent in economic terms.

Purely out of curiosity is there a reason someone would want to or need to do it that way?

That would still give you a massively incomplete picture.

At one point I was mining at three pools at once. I learned not put all my eggs in one basket the first time Deepbit was DDoS'd. I was mining at Graet's pool, Tycho's pool and Slushes pool at the same time. I moved the coin to three different addresses every day to keep track of my earnings. Once a week I moved all of it to one of four cold storage addresses which I kept evenly balanced. I also kept some coin for almost two years at three different exchanges moving it in and out. I was mining Namecoin and LTC for a while on the free CPUs and selling the Namecoin for BTC at CryptoXchange and the LTC at BTCe for BTC and moving that coin to a separate address to keep track of that amount. I was trading heavily at BTCe and moving coins in and out of BTCe almost daily. I've moved coin in and out of Tradehill multiple times in a short period of time. I also had investments that paid dividends and moved that coin around. In one month I moved 1800 BTC between four addresses to set up permanent cold storage for them. I kept a separate address that I used for SpendBitcoin Amazon cards to replace failed hardware. I never mixed coins so I won't even get into that. Are you starting to get the idea that tracking addresses doesn't show expenditures?

I think it would give a better picture then what the MIT report does. The MIT report considers a mined coined "sold" when it moves from the address it was mined into. I am trying to think of a way to get a more accurate representation of the percentage of mined bitcoin are sold by the miners. I can't speak for other miners, but it appears that you are more active in the bitcoin world then most other miners. This is speculation but I don't think most miners (or even bitcoin users) move their bitcoin around that often. I would imagine that the typical user to acquire some amount of bitcoin and then not move it until they are ready to spend (in an economics term, not as in spending an input) it and would spend inputs such that part of the inputs would go to the merchant's address and part would go to a change address. I don't see a lot of users moving the coins around just so each address has an even amount (although this would help with privacy).

I would argue that tracking addresses does not show economic expenditures. As you stated above it is possible to move your own coins around and it would be difficult to know if you are sending the bitcoin to yourself or if you are spending it (as in giving someone bitcoin and receiving either fiat or goods/services in return).

If they don't have enough inputs to cover a transaction they will need to use two (or more) addresses to be able to send the amount of bitcoin to the address(es) they need to send.

You may be able to devise some kind of way to monitor the economy but tracking addresses would be the absolute worst way. I can see tracking business sales directly as the best way, if you can get the data. I didn't even mention the times I sold a few coins locally through in person exchange. That's not a transfer for goods or services any more than all of the day traders and hobby speculators are. I'd be willing to bet that a good chunk of the $1.6 million Overstock reported in Bitcoin sales were miners replacing failed equipment or buying new cabling and equipment to make more coin just like I used to do at Amazon. Which is just a return to more mining not the support for a thriving economy. But how do you really tell? I can't think of a way.

I see. So it is like paying for something at the store with checks from two accounts. Thanks!

 :)

Don't push it, only teach when they ask.
Bitcoin should spread like a natural virus, not like synthetic cancer.

If it spread naturally, it will succeed.

i agree that we don't must force people to use btc, but teach about it for me it's not a bad idea. How can they ask if they even don't know that btc exists?

That's true, maybe I'm traumatized by my evangelist parents ;)

I have doubt about this part: more adoption, higher price.
In some days, we see a big web site declares that it will accept bitcoin, but the price goes down without any significant bad news at the same time. Maybe the reason is that the web site dumps received bitcoins as soon as possible to lower its risk. I think the most important factor of the price is market manipulation at the moment.

I definitely agree with your opinion. A lot of people don't know anything at all about bitcoin. Maybe some promotions in TV shows would help.

I wouldn't be surprised if this study was done by some clueless student/professor.

What I would argue this graph/study does prove is the fact that solo mining is more or less dead and does not happen anymore. Even miners with the fastest (in terms of hashrate) equipment are going to have to use pools in order to minimize variance in their earnings. 

That's a fair assessment. I guess there was some useful data gathered.

 I moved 1 BTC from my online wallet to a paper wallet to hold long term but that graph would have added me to the spent immediately section.
  :o

I would think the best way to do this would be from reporting from payment processing companies like coinbase and bitpay. Granted you would not capture P2P level trades. If bitcoin adoption become widespread enough then this could potentially be gathered via government household surveys, in a similar fashion to how the employment report data is gathered (although people would likely be skeptical about giving this kind of information to the government).