Bitcoin Rich List

[tranthidung]

Rich List definition

• Rich means address that stores 1000⁺ BTC inside
• It is for addresses, not person or entity. You can not define it with available free tool.
• Even with advanced and paid tools, you can not find/ track all of them

2264 bitcoin addresses that have 1000⁺ BTC as of writing. You can check it instantly with [5] (you don't have to wait for any publications. Check it by yourself with that link anytime)

Given articles and charts can tell you the story. I don't try to paraphrase the opinions that are already discussed in those articles.

Here, I only want to emphasize one point:

• Whales are the game-makers.
• You can follow them up, observe their activities, movements but if you strongly believe in their responses, you will always join the party later than them or you exit the game too late or stucked at peaks/ all time highs.

• Bitcoin’s ‘Rich List’ Shrinks Amid Continued Price Rally
• Bitcoin Plunges Below $55K Amid Weak Institutional Inflows, Profit Taking
• ‘Bitcoin Rich List’ Rebounds to Hit All-Time High (in January 2021)
• Top 100 richest Bitcoin addresses (Bitinfocharts.com)
• https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/addresses?q=balance(100000000000..)#

[Wind_FURY]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people. We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

[mk4]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people.

In general, I agree. Though that could be a slightly inaccurate indicator though knowing that people with huge amounts of bitcoin could simply spread out their coins on multiple wallets.

We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets during bull markets.

It's both a positive and a negative, really. If it's the case:

The positive: It probably means that there are more bitcoin exchanges(services in general) opening. This kinda helps in terms of adoption and publicity.
The negative: It probably means that people are depositing more and more bitcoin to centralized services.

[BITCOIN4X]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people.

Owners of 1000+ bitcoin wallet may be tempted to secure profit by sending their bitcoin to multiple wallet which they can then sell without affecting the market much. This is sure to shrink the list of people who have 1000+ bitcoin in their wallet.

We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

Is that the best way to guard against falling price?
Currently, the total circulating supply of bitcoin in circulation is over 18.6 million or 89%. If the total circulating supply increase significantly then there is something to watch out for and that is the price.

https://blockchain.info/q/totalbc

Code:

Circulating Supply BTC= 18.658.093

[DdmrDdmr]

What would be interesting to see, and I was looking around for, would be a site that would break down those segments (or similar ones) by age (first TX) and last TX, with say a granularity of a year. The idea is to determine how many addresses have been still for how many years since their "creation". There are some sites with graphs by age since last tx, but it’s not quite what I has in mind.

The Rich List site for example allows one to view the above on an address by address basis for a certain number of address, but not overall clusters.

[Wind_FURY]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people.

In general, I agree. Though that could be a slightly inaccurate indicator though knowing that people with huge amounts of bitcoin could simply spread out their coins on multiple wallets.

We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets during bull markets.

It's both a positive and a negative, really. If it's the case:

The positive: It probably means that there are more bitcoin exchanges(services in general) opening. This kinda helps in terms of adoption and publicity.

The negative: It probably means that people are depositing more and more bitcoin to centralized services.

It’s debatable. But personally, the viewpoint should always be not to trust third party custodians. I brought this question before in one topic, “If enough of the coins are in custody of large third parties, that gives them the ability to censor the user, has Bitcoin failed”?

[mk4]

It’s debatable. But personally, the viewpoint should always be not to trust third party custodians. I brought this question before in one topic, “If enough of the coins are in custody of large third parties, that gives them the ability to censor the user, has Bitcoin failed”?

Oh sure, it's hugely debatable. And while I definitely get your point, unfortunately we simply need custodians early on. Not everyone is ready to "be your own bank" right off the bat, because it's undoubtedly going to be a very very foreign concept for most people because everyone has simply gotten so used to custodians. The goal is to just slowly but surely steer people off custodians as they learn more and more about bitcoin and self sovereignty.

[Kittygalore]

Oh sure, it's hugely debatable. And while I definitely get your point, unfortunately we simply need custodians early on. Not everyone is ready to "be your own bank" right off the bat, because it's undoubtedly going to be a very very foreign concept for most people because everyone has simply gotten so used to custodians. The goal is to just slowly but surely steer people off custodians as they learn more and more about bitcoin and self sovereignty.

You are right, the narrative of being your own bank has been so ingrained that we forgot that not everyone has the ability or wants to keep up with the technology that makes them independent of custodians. I agree with the idea of taking it slow because it helps bitcoin seep in to the depths and I don't want bitcoin to become a one-hit wonder.

[aysg76]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people. We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

But in actual the whales of market are increasing with rise in demand of Bitcoin and major portion of supply is being concentrated in few hands which is serious concern.



The increase in prices is decreasing the chance of normal people to afford Bitcoins but we should invest what we can afford to invest in btc which will eventually grow your returns in the long run instead of debating on this topic we don't have any solution to this problem.

[tranthidung]

In general, I agree. Though that could be a slightly inaccurate indicator though knowing that people with huge amounts of bitcoin could simply spread out their coins on multiple wallets.

It is what I noted in OP. That free rich list is for addresses, not for people or entities. The market is manipulated by people, entities, institutes, not addresses. The list can be used as a reference but with some reminders about its potential biases and inaccuracy.

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people. We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

Rich list definition is defined by that site as that but you, me and others can define our own definitions. You are right that the rich list definition will be changed. It can be changed with smaller amount of BTC, down to 500+, 200+ or 100+ or changed to fiat value (USD value).

Owners of 1000+ bitcoin wallet may be tempted to secure profit by sending their bitcoin to multiple wallet which they can then sell without affecting the market much. This is sure to shrink the list of people who have 1000+ bitcoin in their wallet.

Totally correct. It is inaccurate interpretation of big bitcoin transactions from whales bot alerts. We always see big movements at very right time of market decisions. Whales are smart enough to finish their trades silently but they do it noisy. It's just one of tools to finish their plans.

[Saint-loup]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people. We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

But in actual the whales of market are increasing with rise in demand of Bitcoin and major portion of supply is being concentrated in few hands which is serious concern.



The increase in prices is decreasing the chance of normal people to afford Bitcoins but we should invest what we can afford to invest in btc which will eventually grow your returns in the long run instead of debating on this topic we don't have any solution to this problem.

No I don't think so, BTC has many subdivisions and it is well known for that. Technically it's called granularity and it allows users to pay with very small percents of the asset. One satoshi (0.00000001BTC or 1e-8BTC) currently only worths 0.06 cents of one US$, ie one sixteenth of a US¢. I don't think many humans on earth can't afford that. The price of Bitcoin is increasing yes, but people don't talk in Bitcoins anymore as one decade ago but in mBTC or in satoshis.

 

[tranthidung]

What would be interesting to see, and I was looking around for, would be a site that would break down those segments (or similar ones) by age (first TX) and last TX, with say a granularity of a year. The idea is to determine how many addresses have been still for how many years since their "creation". There are some sites with graphs by age since last tx, but it’s not quite what I has in mind.

The Rich List site for example allows one to view the above on an address by address basis for a certain number of address, but not overall clusters.

I think you can scrape data and make your follow-up data. There is available list of top 100 addresses in the rich list

• Rich list from btc.com

My thoughts:

• Whales can do different if they want to take profit: take profit with young UTXOs rather than oldest ones.
• I believe they try to reserve their old UTXOs for price manipulation at right time of market
• I mean, if one whale enriches 1000 BTC to 2000 BTC, 200 or 500 oldest BTC will be reserved for that purpose. Whales are able to enrich total BTC they have and they don't have to move old UTXOs just to take profit

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

You can’t really other than for a few addresses, and my ideal goal would be to be able to do it with all the addresses. I’ve downloaded in the past tables with 30++ million addresses with an associated positive balance, but either they lacked the necessary columns or they seemed to be wrong/outdated. Probably playing around with a full node is the best approach, but I’ll let that slip for now.

What I has in mind would be something along the line of:
BTC amount Segment, Address age (year of first TX) Address last movement (year of last TX), number of addresses that meet the three segments.

[mk4]

You can try to change my mind but that doesn't look like fair distribution.

Bitcoin has one of the most(or maybe the most) fairest initial distributions in the entirety of the cryptocurrency space. As with the current distribution of coins, well, what do you propose then? Not allow people with deep pockets to buy bitcoin lol?

[Lucius]

You can try to change my mind but that doesn't look like fair distribution.

I first heard about Bitcoin in late 2011, but it wasn’t until mid-2014 that I took it seriously - should I blame someone for it? Just because you may have first heard of BTC a few months or days ago does not mean that the distribution is unfair, everyone has had a completely open opportunity from day one to come into possession of any amount of BTC in any way. Gavin Andresen once had a faucet that gave 5 BTC as a reward for one solved captcha, and 5-6 years ago I earned my first BTC literally through faucets.

Instead of thinking that distribution is unfair, try to think about how you can take your share too - there are many ways to do it.

[LoyceV]

I believe the lesser and lesser “> 1000 coin” wallets in the rich list, the more and more Bitcoin is being distributed, and adopted by more people. We should be very concerned if there was an increasing “> 1000 coin” wallets, especially during bull market cycles.

I have some data on older balances:

Code:

wget -qO- http://addresses.loyce.club/blockchair_bitcoin_addresses_and_balance_March_21_2021.tsv.gz | gunzip | grep -v balance | head -n 100000 | cut -f 2 | perl -nle 'print if length$_>11' | wc -l

Addresses >= 1000 Bitcoin
March 21, 2021: 2270
March 20, 2021: 2277
March 19, 2021: 2277
March 1, 2021: 2385
February 1, 2021: 2469
January 1, 2021: 2268
December 1, 2020: 2265
September 10, 2020: 2193

The number of addresses with 1000 or more Bitcoin went up, then down. I can't really conclude anything from this.

What would be interesting to see, and I was looking around for, would be a site that would break down those segments (or similar ones) by age (first TX) and last TX, with say a granularity of a year. The idea is to determine how many addresses have been still for how many years since their "creation".

If you want to do this without parsing the blockchain by yourself, I have 562 GB of block data you can use
This would also allow to make a day-to-day graph showing the number of addresses with at least a certain balance. I'd also like to see a graph showing the number of Bitcoin addresses worth at least a certain amount in dollars.

“If enough of the coins are in custody of large third parties, that gives them the ability to censor the user, has Bitcoin failed”?

No. Some of the Bitcoin users fail all the time (mostly by getting scammed), that doesn't mean Bitcoin itself doesn't work as expected.

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>

I'll skip attempting to tackle if for the time being, but it would be an interesting little project. I’d have thought that there’d be an open site that breaks the data down in the intended manner (probably based on periodical snapshots – i.e. per month at most in terms of granularity).

I’ve briefly seen some interesting old projects that allow one to perform SQL type queries (http[colon]//blockchainsql[dot]io/) on the data, but unfortunately it seems to only provide data up until 2017.

Edit: One can find some datasets to query with Google Bigquery, but you soon encounter free account limits (i.e. a simple select to determine the max TX date of the blockchain costs over 4GB of query data space; all to return a single row of data).

[kryptqnick]

Here, I only want to emphasize one point:

• Whales are the game-makers.
• You can follow them up, observe their activities, movements but if you strongly believe in their responses, you will always join the party later than them or you exit the game too late or stucked at peaks/ all time highs.

Rich addresses aren't necessarily those that make the biggest impact on the price. From what I've seen, some of these belong to exchanges, for instance, so they're not showing where someone very rich is hodling BTC. There are also very rich addresses which, however, don't show much movement over the years. This might be money someone forgot about or lost access to, so this also doesn't affect the market. Also, when someone wants to make a very big buy/sell operations, they're not done on exchanges, but rather OTC, so they also don't affect the prices. Finally, there are those who have a lot of BTC, but the coins are dispersed, so that they are not under anyone's attention (for example, Tesla's coins exist, but the addresses are unknown). I think that instead of following the dynamics of the rich addresses, it's more useful to just follow the news because nothing triggers the price changes more than FUD or hype in the media.

[Karartma1]

The Bitcoin Rich List, as others have pointed out, is misleading since anyone can (and should) hold their funds in multiple addresses. Leaving one's funds in one single address is beyond stupid and very dangerous. Apart from exchanges and custodians who are more or less obliged, other users should have multiple addresses in accordance with their availability. Redundancy rules

[BrewMaster]

You can try to change my mind but that doesn't look like fair distribution.

you are confusing bitcoin with a premined shitcoin that is being "distributed". bitcoin is NOT like that at all. there was no premine, no ICO token sale, or anything like that.

every single satoshi that you see today is earned through performing work by those we refer to as "miners". that makes it a fair "distribution".