Bitcoin Forum

Objective: Create a confirmed comprehensive list of the community's wealthiest members in terms of Bitcoin assets.

How do you get ranked?

Simply post your current amount of Bitcoins and then divide them among 5 different wallets. Post each wallet in your post through http://blockexplorer.com. This may seem excessive but it prevents people from cheating the ranks.

After I've checked your post, you will be added to the ranks shortly.

Have fun.

The Ranks:

None as of yet.

I would guess most bitcoiners would not be interested in advertising this information publicly.
It would invite all sorts of trouble.
Hackers... Governments... who knows what else....

We'll see. There are some braggers out there. Besides, it can be pretty pseudo-anonymous. Your online identity doesn't have to represent you.

I doubt they'll talk themselves. But we can see who we've got.

Possibly, the #1 is some Lousiana Purchase dude. In Oct and Nov 2010, people solt BTC for ridiculously low prices on mtgox. The trade volume is enormous. A single person with just 100k USD on his hands might have bought a million BTC back then.

Then, there's the developers and early low-risk adopters, who have been mining back in 2010. Until recently, mining BTC wasn't all that hard. If someone just kept a good rig running over the last year, he probably has a good share of BTC today. Also, there's those who take percentages out of large flows: mtgox and the slush pool.

So... ArtForz, slush, exchanges, developers who were with this early... that's where the extreme amounts of BTC are to be expected.

Investors who came later probably make less than 1M BTC in total, judging from mtgox volume and a guess that some BTC were traded back and forth multiple times. But I can't be sure.

I'm not sure I understand the instructions. Are you suggesting that the person announces their balance here, then moves it to 5 other addresses so that they can post links to Bitcoin Block Explorer as evidence?

Apart from the fact that few people would go to that much trouble, there is the downside that by consolidating your coins you link their histories together. Not everyone will want this.

Atlas, why don't you show your own wealth? If no-one else shows theirs, you will be permanently ranked Richest Bitcoiner #1.

i'm unclear on the instructions too: what would verify ownership claims to funds described by a link at the block explorer?

also, unless i'm missing some of the history, i'd have no reason to think the pool operators are fantastically wealthy. indeed, they're charging what i take to be very competitive fees given their costs. for example, slush's pool pulled in 1400 btc yesterday, from which slush earned 28 btc in fees.

I am not interested in publicly announcing my bitcoin net worth onto any public forum, anonymously or otherwise.  I would seriously doubt that anyone else will either.

I can't see anything positive about publicly announcing ones wealth; I can however see many disadvantages:

• Problems with tax authorities
• Increased risk of being exposed to crime, targeted viruses/trojans, hacking attempts, computer theft etc. (And a lot of beggars).
• Bad karma on the forum - many of us do have something against early adopters who "got free money on behalf of the latecomers".
• Other stuff I can't think of now

Was it knightmb who had (at least until last report fairly recently) 370k BTC?  Since that's more than 1% of the BTC that have been mined, he's in the top 100.

[emphasis mine]

not only do you link their history - you damage their value.  my understanding is that solo-mined virgin blocks will always command a premium price over the current market, since they are the most anonymous Bitcoin extant.  the mixer sites need those...  yes?

No.

I would if it didn't require me to take my private keys out of my vault.

Hopefully the rich bitcoiners will also be philanthropers

Simply having that much capital to invest is philanthropy enough. I doubt they will just be sitting on the stuff.

So you'll need to assemble the list based on supposition (like The Times newspaper does for their "Rich List") and let people correct your suppositions if they wish. Here are a few wild guesses to get you started:

satoshi: 500,000
artforz: 400,000
knightmb: 372,000
Legion: 46,850 (claimed here (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6425.msg131291#msg131291))
happyland 14,000 (claimed here (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8714.msg126955#msg126955))
vladimir: 2100
atlas: 1500
uukgoblin: 1000 (offered for sale at #bitcoin-otc)
kiba: 100
Joseph: 0.13

:)

I'm kinda curious about this!

I added you to the list. Feel free to supply a more accurate figure.

Find out who the early gpu miners were and you'll know who has a lot of bitcoins. But even them may have  hard time competing against the holdings of the early early adopters who even with CPUs earned mad bitcoins (to borrow an expression from the hip hop community)!

What's mind boggling to think is how 1000 BTC is now such a large sum of money when last year I used to think I couldn't even buy some bubble gum with that much.

Being an early adopter doesn't necessarilly mean you're rich, you only got "mad coinage" if you didn't spent most of what you've earned

Ahh, the richest bitcoiners!

Rich to buy all this (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade) and dollars too!

Poor to buy anything else.

Don't you think this is better left to the April 2018 issue of Forbes magazine?

I'm kind of interested about the dynamics of the early genesis of the block chain...Satoshi could have been the sole miner for a month before he let anyone else know about it and would have a amassed ~216,000 btc ...what would have been the reaction of the second person?  I think if it were me, I would have said "Satoshi, that's a really nice bit of code you wrote, but how about we start over with a new block chain." ;)   ...Satoshi, realizing there would be two competing block chains and his might lose out would probably have been agreeable.  Then what about the third person that joined two weeks later?  That person might have said, great idea, but I have 5 people ready to start mining on a new chain, so you two might want to consider restarting your mining activities on it.  A fourth person might have advertised among their social network and recruited 25 people to start a new chain.  At some point, you get to a critical mass working on a chain where it is not feasible for new miners to overcome and that chain become *the* chain.  I know it didn't actually play out like this, but it's interesting to think about.

Satoshi annouced the project the same day the genesis block was written, and there were other miners in less than 24 hours.  The data is still there, go check for yourself.