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Reposting this as pertinent: In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine fo
by nosuchthing 9y ago
Reposting this as pertinent:
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard
- Anm 9y agoFor context, those numbers came from 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1 I can't find any more recent study specific to the Gini coefficient, however these[1] charts show an improvement over this snapshot[2] from May 2015. [1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... [2]: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls-99-bitcoin-wealth/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls...
- nosuchthing 9y agoThe original studies suggests early mining rewards were distributed mostly to a small group of users. It also shows attempts by large stakeholders to hide their large holdings by distributing funds across several wallet accounts. If someone were to have monitored IP addresses in the swarm it may be possible to correlate attempts from single users hiding their funds across many wallets. Simply looking at the blockchain balances of single addresses will not necessarily indicate a single person controlling many addresses.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoHow can they possibly identify 47 individuals and what does that even mean in bitcoin context? Would an exchange fund holding millions of people’s coins be considered a single individual?
- nosuchthing 9y agoIP addresses in the swarm, among other unique indicators of identity.
- mason55 9y agoPlease don’t quote large blocks of text like that, it’s impossible to read on mobile because of HN’s crappy web layout
- tomc1985 9y agoBut on desktop it looks rather nice