Could zipfs law be used to give a rough estimate of bitcoin distribution/value?

[zimmah]

I was thinking as zipfs law is a pretty accurate indicator of wealth distribution (among other things) if it could be used to make a nice estimate of two things we'd all like to speculate on.

Namely the future distribution and value of bitcoin.

How to do this? Well, it will involve a lot of numbers, so if someone can program this function and chart it, that'd be nice. But here's how I think it would work to give a rough estimate.

Compare wealth distribution (accoring to zipfs law) with bitcoin distribution, assuming everyone in the world owns bitcoin.

With zipfs law and the fact that there will be roughly 20 million bitcoin to divide you should be able to predict how much each person should hold.

Then correlate the chart of bitcoin held to the chart of $USD held to get a rough estimate of would bitcoin would be worth in that scenario.

Obviously the data would not be an indication or investment advice or anything, but it might give some interesting results.

[OROBTC]

...

zimmah

That is a very interesting idea that you present.  I had to go look up the rather obscure Zipf's Distribution (aka Zeta Distribution) in my old Probability text.  Two interesting things:

1)  Yes, re wealth distribution, Pareto used it to model wealth distribution of families in a country, so perhaps it could be used as you propose...

2)  The closely related Zeta Function is closely related to the Riemann Hypothesis, perhaps "The Big Enchilada" left in mathematics (now that Wiles resolved Fermat's Last Theorem).

Bravo!

[zimmah]

I'm really hopeful to see if someone can crunch the numbers (probably with a program) and show the results.