Bitcoin Forum

How can we know that bitcoin isn't controlled by only a few who have lots of them?

How can we know that USD isn't controlled by only a few who have lots of them?

We know Bitcoin is controlled by tens of thousands of people the same way we know God exists.

We know Bitcoin is controlled by ten people the same way we know God doesn't exist.

is this really the place to talk about god?

look at the fourms from early 2010-2011, those people have the most coins

Or the most dollars???

We KNOW that it IS controlled by few, thats old news!

one of them is The Flying Spaghetti Monster ; )

I think it's one of the beauties of Bitcoin that nobody knows how many coins anyone has unless you choose to reveal it.

I could have a 100.000 or none at all.

Amen!

HE BOILED FOR OUR SINS!!!

It's Ramen!

It is my belief that 10 people on this forum hold a combined 10,000,000 BTC. It could be seen as "not fair" (to a socialist) because it creates the same system we're trying to get away from in many ways (the overly wealthy 1%), but cause != effect. They're rich because they did it before you. You can still get rich with the remaining 10,000,000 BTC.

As for "control" in the sense of protocol and procedures, it very much is under the influence (if not outright control) of literally 5 dudes.

There might be a couple of people with a million coins each.  There are probably a few with 500k.  There are a bunch with 100k.  If you add up, perhaps, 25 of them, you might get to 50% control of Bitcoin.  So, yeah I guess that qualifies as a "few" controlling Bitcoin.  But what kind of control do you think they have, really?  They probably just conspire to hold in order to push the price up.

I think the term you're looking for is "manipulate", and I could be wrong but I think that's exactly the thing many people moved to Bitcoin instead to avoid.

All this talk of being "backed by math" and "unhackable" doesn't matter when the social influence inside bitcoin controls everything. I feel the good aspects are wasted on the current "regime" of users and wannabe leaders and bitcoin has not at all reached its potential to be actually free. Can't wait until the whole world starts using it so we can get rid of this early age of Bitcoin. When that happens, it doesn't need to seek to "replace" anything, it just needs to function.

I think at this point it is fair to say that most of the people moved to Bitcoin to manipulate/test/etc.
Maybe ~1% uses it as currency to pay for services.

Lol is this conspiracy Keane?

Only around 10% control something like 90% of USD, so eventually it probably will be only a few people controlling the majority of bitcoins, but currently, anyone can create bitcoins and the currency is pseudonymous not anonymous. All the transactions in bitcoins are public. So we know or we can make very good estimates of how many bitcoins each wallet has.

Now of course there is no rule against owning more than one wallet, but there have been millions, if not billions in money worth of bitcoin transactions which suggests that a lot of people own a few or a reasonable amount of bitcoins rather than a few own a lot.

It does not suggest anything cause -


F.e. I have more than a thousand addresses.

what would be the point of constantly making transfers to yourself? Moreover, with the need to secure your bitcoins, people would but them and put them somewhere safe, maybe even offline.

So although some transfers would be between accounts owned by the same person, many more would be between accounts owned by different people.

The point is to keep all your funds in one place.
For some ppl it is easier to maintain/secure/backup one BTC address not a thousand.
However it is much easier/safer to receive payments on multiple addresses.

Wallet

Its certainly is a few people who own a large % of bitcoins.  Now doubt about that.  This is the nature of nearly any commodity or anything involving money.

Just the other day the facebook twins came out and said they invested $11milllion dollars into bitcoin back when it was still cheap. It'd be naive to think they aren't the only ones who have done that,  or that the earlier adapters/miners don't have huge stash piles of bitcoin as well.

And of-course some of the early miners and "contract" miners have tons of coins too. remember the story where one of the early guys got hacked and lost 55000 coins am sure there are more.