Bitcoin Forum

I think I understand that the BTC blockchain can't be corrupted, because it would be too difficult to do.  But can't the 99% be exploited the 1% that own 99% of BTC?  BTC is a transfer of wealth to a different system.  Won't the 1% be able to exploit the 99%?  Capitalism centralizes wealth

Tks!  

Uhhh 1% does not own 99% of Bitcoin. No idea where you got that idea from.

Exploit what?

Who does exploit others?

In fact, you can check the Top 100 richest Bitcoin addresses (https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html) and I am sure there is no information that 99% bitcoin belongs to 1% addresses. Remember, we can not identify what addresses belong to a specific owner.

There is a Pareto principle that says 80% of assets belong to 20% richest people. It is biased by lost BTC in early days when people considered it is a joke and did not back up their private keys.

Power, I guess you implied about power on the network, by owning hash rate. You must have 51% of network total hash rate to attack their network. It's impossible. Cost is expensive and community, nodes, exchanges will do react to this very quickly.

How many Bitcoin confirmations is enough (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5443953.0). Read it first and experience the calculator there https://jlopp.github.io/bitcoin-confirmation-risk-calculator/

Well, you have to go back to the reading, the 1% that was claimed to control the 99% is not based on your disposition. Still, they are the ones with the coin and they are at some times giving it away or selling it at their discretion.

He might be right, but it's according to some of the articles and general saying on the internet. Is this really true? I don't know, but the myth is verifiable. However, their point is that 99% of Bitcoin addresses don't have the coin in them or have so little to be recognised. Nonetheless, this is an old saying which might not reflect the present-day status of Bitcoin.

You can read more here: ‘1% of 100% (https://www.ccn.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls-99-bitcoin-wealth/#:~:text=1%25%20of%20the%20Bitcoin%20Community%20Controls%2099%25%20of%20Bitcoin%20Wealth)

Sorry - assumed a few wallets held most BTC, I see now I was wrong.  However, doesn't the point still stand?  Under capitalism wealth centralizes, won't the same happen with BTC?

Thanks

Well, if you consider statistics, it is really difficult to say that 1% own 99% of BTC, because the top address holds BTC for thousand of people. Surely the most rich owner has more bitcoin than the other one and with this

they can have an high power on the community, but, Bitcoin born to be decentralized, so, this power as you say is relative to itself. You should worry about USD, EUR, where in that currencies only 1% of people has more

than 50% of total world wealth.

The blockchain is truly secure and nobody can penetrate it.  Those 1% who own most Bitcoins will not be able to exploit other 99% of holders. Even if those 1% are willing to do so they will have to sell their BTC at a very low rate which can create fear in market for short term.

Blockchain is a well secured technology that is immutable which means that the network cannot be altered by anyone no matter how as long as you're connected to it, this is why many organizations and industries now key into this technology of blockchain becau they want their privacy to be secured and unmanipulated by any means, thoughyou need to understand that blockchain is open to the public but can't be altered.

OP was merely illustrating a hypothetical situation in which, yes, Bitcoin would have failed if 99% of the supply is HODLed by 1% of the total participants of the network. I also brought up a shower thought before, and asked that "If there's enough Bitcoin under the custody of centralized entities, and the only way to use Bitcoin is through their services/applications, would Bitcoin have failed"?

Only 21,000,000 bitcoin will ever exist, you can get a head start on people a lot richer than you by stacking as many says as you can right now. Sure people will have more than you but you can offset the divide in fiat wealth by buying as much bitcoin as you can whilst it’s still relatively cheap.

And socialism and communism flood the world with poverty!

Bitcoin is pure capitalism, no matter how many scream in agony and try to find it a messiah role of getting rid of the world order and poverty and some other total fantasy-like role in the economy, Bitcoin is the true essence of capitalism, where you have capital you are able to invest, the ones that don't have, they will never have sone satoshi! Bitcoin doesn't follow and can't follow the rules of a socialist country with wealth redistribution, you can't force people to give their coins to the poorer you can't even tax differently because you have no idea what to taxon the chain!
So with the death of fiat, there will also be the death of any kind of socialist or communist society if we embrace crypto!


BTC is not PoS it's PoW!
Owning 10000 or 1 coin doesn't change anything in how things work!
Besides, you don't need money to exploit others, look at NK! No trace of capitalism and you have 100% -1 of the population being exploited!

Bitcoin is free enterprise money. This means that it takes the power from the state and it gives it to those who own bitcoin. Is this fair? Debatable. In some sense, it's not fair that a small minority is liable for the most part of the economy. In some other sense, it's fair because every other alternative is less fair. And in fact, there aren't lots alternatives. For the most part, if you don't let the market free, you need to introduce means of force to acquire money you don't think that is distributed fairly.

Is it possible to define a universally objective standard for fairness in all contexts? Food for thought.

This is the right answer.


First off as I said above, 1% don't own 99% of BTC, because that would mean the tens of millions of bitcoin owners in the 99% combined own less than 200k Bitcoin, which is obviously absurd. If that was the case I'd probably be in the 1% lol cuz that would mean I would have thousands of times more Bitcoin than the average of the 99%, and that would also mean the average holding of the 99% would only be a few dozen dollars worth of Bitcoin and that is probably more like the bottom 10% not the bottom 99%. This is all to point out that 1% does not own anything remotely close to 99% of BTC.

And naturally people who were already rich or who got into Bitcoin extremely early (like those who were mining 50 BTC at a time back in 2011 or buying it at $1-$10 back then) are going to have a lot more Bitcoin than the average person. That's natural. But as DeathAngel here says, anybody in the 99% can get a head start now buy accumulating Bitcoin because plenty of those 1%'ers from outside Bitcoin aren't even gonna get into it for many years and they'll be buying in at far higher prices, and thus supporting your wealth gains with their wealth.

Finally, Bitcoin isn't PoS, and it isn't run by politicians or a company. It is decentralized. So no amount of wealth in Bitcoin can be used to exploit the network. That's one of the beautiful things about PoW - supply ownership and mining ownership are two entirely different things that each require significant capital investment. And that's also the beauty of Bitcoin being decentralized. In the fiat system wealthy individuals have sway over politicians who control the fiat system, but in Bitcoin you have no say over the network no matter how much Bitcoin you own.

From Varoufakis! ;D

I think, @LoyceV had a data of all addresses that hold bitcoin, he may sort it and confirm whether that information is true or not.
But in case of bitcoin, we have to keep in mind that there are a lot of lost bitcoins, for example:
Address - 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF with 79957 Bitcoin.
Address - 1LdRcdxfbSnmCYYNdeYpUnztiYzVfBEQeC with 53880 Bitcoin.
Address - 12tkqA9xSoowkzoERHMWNKsTey55YEBqkv with 28151 Bitcoin.
Address - 1PeizMg76Cf96nUQrYg8xuoZWLQozU5zGW with 19414 Bitcoin.

So, if, for example, 0.5% of 1% who hold 99% of bitcoins are lost wallets, then we can't say that 1% plays the game because proportion will be different. Also, we have to keep in mind that around 2 million bitcoins are left to be mined and we don't know where will these two bitcoins end up.

Also, stronger or richer will always outperform weaker or poorer, it's just a rule of nature.

It might if people use Bitcoin incorrectly.  When people leave funds in exchanges and webwallets, that does effectively centralise wealth.  But those using Bitcoin in the intended fashion are helping to keep wealth more evenly distributed.  That's how it was designed to be used.

Even if big players gain control over large amounts of bitcoin, they don't begin to control it. Decentralization protects the rights and opportunities of small bitcoin holders. And the big ones, especially if they invest heavily in bitcoin, will be interested in supporting bitcoin, not harming it, in order to increase their capital, not lose it. So I don't think big investors coming into bitcoin will be very negative.

You can't escape this pattern. Bitcoin is not really built in a way where it can become a people's currency. The POW algorithm and the increase in difficulty, make it the game of riches. If you can invest huge money in mining rigs, then only you have access to such decentralised system and mine bitcoin. Otherwise you have no choice than to buy from open market. That's what the bitcoin capitalism is. Whales indeed controls the market.

I personally feel that POS is much better than POW if the entry barrier is reasonable. That's what something truly makes a coin people's money.

New coins are mined and distributed to existing and new holders. Existing coins in wallets who hold the most will always be traded or spent in the future. Considering that Bitcoin's supply is limited to 21,000,000 and it is impossible to centralize or manipulate its creation and distribution, it is unlikely that a small portion of holders will control its supply for an extended period of time, or even if so, at least some of the supply will always be in the hands of a free market.

The reason why wealth centralizes under capitalism in fiat money is because there are so many flawed concepts which fail to make it fair for everyone and viable in the long term. That and there are weaknesses that are constantly exploited which only makes fiat money even weaker.

huh????

Bitcoin is far more spread out in the population than any PoS crypto where they do pre-mines and wealthy people are able to get large chunks of it usually before the public at the lowest price possible. There is nothing about PoS that makes the supply more spread out, and nothing about it that stops whales from controlling the market. In fact it is worse in PoS cryptos.

I have, and it's sorted already. See blockchair_bitcoin_addresses_and_balance_LATEST.tsv.gz (http://addresses.loyce.club/blockchair_bitcoin_addresses_and_balance_LATEST.tsv.gz).
Out of 46 million funded Bitcoin addresses, the top 1% holds 1728674692971682 out of 1933935229497096 sats. That's 89.4%.
This data doesn't mean much though: many Bitcoin users own more than one funded address, and many people (think they) own Bitcoin held on an exchange, while the exchange owns one or more addresses with large amounts of Bitcoin.
On the other end of the list there are many addresses with dust amounts of Bitcoin.

A percentage divide would always exist with the more wealthy filling up the higher percentage holders. The ration could be:

• 1% - 99%
• 10% - 95%
• 20% - 80%

But the reality is there would be an uneven distribution of an asset between the wealthy and the masses.

---

The depth of an investor's pocket determines how much Bitcoin they can purchase or mining equipment they acquire, effectively meaning that wealthy individuals would own more of Bitcoin and with time the divide would widen. You can choose not to sell yours to the whales and hodl through, there would be others that will.
 
Take a look at the early days of Bitcoin and you notice something curious, early birds who adopted it early, started mining and investing early would have a chunk of Bitcoins now, without being particularly wealthy at the time. Would you classify them to be among the 1% or the 99%?

- Jay -

Op your thread is confusing, where did you get all these percentages to analyze  the exploitation in the Capitalist Economy? From economics perspective your analysis with the percentage is wrong. What does the 1% stand for? Is it the bourgeoisie or the lower class? That 1% must stand as a person to control the 99% and the same goes to the 99% as well. Who are the 99%?  BTC is not own by 1%. And the 99% you are talking about is over populated the 1% so they can't control it.

Mention any system that does not centralize wealth, do not worry I can wait, if your answer is socialism or communism that is false, they centralize wealth on even a smaller number of hands while everyone else lives on absolute poverty, at least under the capitalist system those which are not at the top have better living standards and the possibility of joining those at the top, is it perfect? No, but if given the choice I prefer to live under a meritocracy.

The top earners will always generate the vast majority of income in a free market. Bitcoin doesn't have anything to do with that. If there's exploitation by the 1%, that's an indictment of the political system, not the economic system. The political system comes first and will always dictate the economic system, not the other way around. Bitcoin doesn't cause wealth inequality nor does it inherently solve wealth inequality. Free market capitalism solves wealth inequality.

You could solve wealth inequality in a Bitcoin economy under communism and everybody would still suffer despite crypto currency.

This seems to be your mistake, you are making a wrong assumption!
Bitcoin is NOT a distribution of wealth system. Bitcoin is simply a decentralized payment system, how it will be used and how this currency is going to be distributed has nothing to do with the design and it was never the goal of bitcoin.
The goal was to create an alternative currency that can not be censored. And bitcoin does that well.

A video that says that switching to a BTC based economy would stop war.  https://www.bitchute.com/video/AWGB6rfMmYKt/  I haven't watched the video/I want to believe, but I'm skeptical.  There was a system previously backed to a finite asset - gold - + there wasn't an effect on war.. 

Yes, I think you are correct on this one. While it may not be 1% to 99%, those who have more wealth are more capable of investing a lot of money to generate even more wealth, which means that there's a small minority that is very wealthy and capable of getting more wealthy, while the vast majority are not. Of course, this could be mediated in some ways by very high taxes for the very rich and/or other programs that motivate or require those who are really wealthy to give some of their wealth to those who aren't wealthy at all. This could be done in general and with Bitcoin as well, and that could help make a less centralized system where wealth is more dispersed, but we're not there yet and many people won't even agree we should be getting there.

Bitcoin can be used for many purposes, a payment method, a method for storage of value and more. Basically and initially, it is a mean of payment and I agree with you that it is a most important use case of Bitcoin. Other use cases are like derivatives from the initial one.

By design, it is decentralized. In reality it is decentralized too and Marathon Miners Have Started Censoring Bitcoin Transactions (https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-have-started-censoring-bitcoin-transactions-heres-what-that-means/) and failed, is a good example that censorship attack on Bitcoin network and transactions can not be successful.

Great job from Satoshi Nakamoto and great practice from Bitcoin miners globally.

He tried to define some other things,but described with different tone is my opinion.Thd correct tone is huge amount of bitcoin in the circulation was hold by the whales.He tried to define thd whales here,but his emotions over write his words  ;D ;D


This have some good sense of describing the exact key point.The capitalism plays huge role in the crypto currency trading too.The world population had little amount of the rich people,So they hold huge amount of bitcoin by quantity based on their wealth resources.The whale still act like secret society and manipulating the price of bitcoin with huge variation.Because we know the price of bitcoin had raised to 68k dollars and fall back to 20k dollars.Then the market price of bitcoin circulated below 20k and now the same price of bitcoin back to 28k dollars.This may be due to the first financial quarter of 2023.Now the taxes was made on crypto currency all over the world.It’s additional reason for the stagnation of crypto currency market now.

That's true about BTC not being corrupted but to some extent only, as you mentioned the one with more BTC supply has more power in the market and they can manipulate the market in their own favor, Some thoughts of it is impossible as I thought Like i covered a topic on Four Sentiments we should avoid saving our BTC, and one of them was Pump and Dump Scheme, Many members said, P&D schemes are not applicable on BTC and I was also satisfied.

But think about it for a second, If big authorities and celebrities can not P&D BTC then why BTC always shows high spikes whenever a celebrity like Elon Musk shares news of buying BTC as a payment method why when he sold that BTC while saying we can not accept BTC as payment method the price of BTC fell from $69k to lowest of around $16k. Is it not a P&D scheme?

So overall, it is possible to manipulate the market as I also recently covered another topic on this query here, in which i asked again the same question Is BTC P&D Free really? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5446064.msg61963283#msg61963283) while I represent some of my points and many of the members replied positively. So yes, Capitalism is everywhere but it can be decreased if BTC remains on POW as it has effects but lowers than POS protocols.

The exchange addresses basically make it impossible to tell how bitcoin wealth is spread. Adding to that are addresses that are owned by financial investors, that sell paper bitcoins and other certificates. In general I feel that bitcoin wealth is spread more evenly around the globe then other wealth. This may be because bitcoin is rather new, and can however change in the future.

This is difficult but not impossible for the distant future because we are in a free market and anything is possible here. So we have to ask ourselves: What do we need to do to get inside the 1%?

- We should get more Bitcoin while everyone is creating FUD about Bitcoin.
- We should see altcoins as a tool to have more Bitcoin.
- With our savings, we should buy Bitcoin little by little every month.

Of course, even if we do these, we may not be in the 1%, but we can approach them and gain status in every field. Of course, there is another option like crying and complaining all the time, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. :)

1 person doesn't only have 1 Bitcoin address and 1 Bitcoin address doesn't mean it's owned by 1 person.

You, me and everyone else can create Bitcoin address as much as we want and there's no limit from the wallet.

A Bitcoin address which have a lot Bitcoin doesn't controlled by 1 person, it could be a centralized exchange hot wallet where it's a funds of a lot customers.

There's no evidence until someone sign a message from those rich addresses.

Indeed, one person can have many bitcoin addresses, but if there is an owner of some bitcoin address that stores not only his bitcoins there, then he still controls them and, thus, can influence the system as if they were his . We all know that not your keys means not your bitcoins.

However, I don't expect anyone to grab too many bitcoins and endanger the existence of the coin.

It's actually way worse if you count on the number of users compared to the world!

I don't understand why everyone is focused on the number of coins being distributed amount addresses, this is the wrong approach if you compare it to the current wealth distribution. If in the current fiat world, we say 1% hold 99% of the wealth we do include in the 99% of the rest of the population the ones that have a big flat zero, because otherwise we would say that the 1% have more money than the 45% that have something and 54% have nothing. When analyzing Bitcoin the same way we should do the same, because at no point in our lifetime will there be a moment when everyone holds at least one satoshi, some will never have a single unit of it!

So, applying the same metrics we should look at how many own 99% of the BTC compared to the world population.
And if we bring that 1% here it means that to match evil capitalist wealth hoarding we would need 80 million people to hold 99% of the current Bitcoin supply, which is more than possible!
So, is 1% of the world population holding close to 99% of the total Bitcoins ever mined? Highly possible!

Just because right now 13981 addresses hold 59.37% of the total coins it doesn't mean that with x100 more users those numbers will also split by 100 and all the coins will be distributed equally!

Equal distribution is a myth.

Ever heard of Pareto principle?

Also it sometimes feels like they want to turn bitcoin into a solution for everything so I wouldn't be surprised to see someone claim that "bitcoin cures cancer" too! Basically people have been making weird claims like this for nearly as long as bitcoin has existed. Whoever made the claim about Bitcoin stopping wars has no idea how the world works and has probably never read history.

Nahh, I don’t think that hypothetical situation is even possible in dreams. It’s just does not fit the maths. How can 1% have all the 99% bitcoins? If they own it then eventually the value will decrease a lot. Considering the demand is not getting fulfilled there would be no one left to buy it anyways. Who would invest on something which can not be possessed smoothly AND most important which should have been DECENTRALISED asset. That changes everything for the bitcoin. The current market is moving with billion dollars volume all the time throughout the globe and that’s why it has value, it has that liveliness. I think what said in OP or above just doesn’t make sense.

The difference is that there is no more btc printed over 21 million, whereas there are more fiat printed everyday. The logic of OP is that the rich always gets more money, and when they get more money they can spend it on getting more BTC and that means they can buy all the btc available on sale and they can own most of it.

But the truth is that we have only 21 million, even leaving aside all the burned and gone bitcoins, the rich can't buy them all because we just wouldn't sell it to them. Right now, they can get more because more money is printed and even if you do not give your dollars to them, they can print more and make yours less valuable and own more, but with bitcoin they have to buy yours, and if you don't sell, they can't.

Exactly.

Don't sell and Bitcoin will skyrocket.

A small percentage of individuals indeed hold a large portion of the total Bitcoin supply, and this concentration of wealth could potentially lead to power imbalances and exploitation.
However, it's important to note that Bitcoin operates on a decentralized system, meaning that any central authority or group of individuals does not control it.

We are nolonger in the period where any kind of money is equal to power. That period is gone and those who benefited from it lost. The current method has been recalculated and is based on clean money or good reputation/trustworthiness equal to (=) Power. And those with this power currently rules.

Now, it's very possible for the ones with Power to  work against or takeover the bitcoins from those with the most amount  (by influencing the price for example) and reallocating/redistributing them to the Bitcoin community assuming the ones with most bitcoins got the bitcoins unfairly, don't deserve or are misusing them. It's a hidden justice system that can take effect pretty quickly and resolve issues within a short period of time. In such condition it will feel as if Bitcoin and the whole cryptospace is working against them.

By the way, 1btc is not always equal to 1btc in the current cryptocurrency space and recalculation. If you start acquiring most of the available bitcoins, it's expected that price will increase due to high demand, but tainted coins will be less valuable and won't have much effect on the price. So this should discourage people from hoarding or holding for the wrong reasons. No intention will be hidden from the ruling System as it watches everything and will dispense justice immediately. If hoarding or dumping won't have much effect on price, it won't be attractive to the wrong people. They are attracted to power but there is no more power in tainted coins.