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> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today

> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said: > 1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.4% of all household wealth in the US. * Francisco Blanch, with Savita Subramanian, Philip Middleton, et. al. "Bitcoin’s dirty little secrets". BofA Global Research, 17 March 2021. Probably not even Russian oligarchs have that much control.

tekproxy 6y ago
What is a bitcoin account?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  An address that owns Bitcoins.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    So that metric is really bad because almost every Bitcoin wallet only uses each address once, for privacy reasons. Most of those bottom 98% of addresses probably have very small amounts and are just a small part of someones wallet.
  - gruez 6y ago
    An "address" can mean anything - a person can have a wallet with multiple addresses, or an address could belong to an exchange with holds it on behalf of multiple people.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    Most BTC is held by an exchange, like Coinbase, Binance, etc... so this statistic is about as meaningful as pointing out that 95% of US dollars are stored at a bank.
    - sellyme 6y ago
      A lot of BTC was held by an exchange like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex, too. With banks I can trust that I can actually get my money bank. BTC isn't decentralised, and the central actors controlling the system are far less reputable (which is saying a lot, when they're being compared to bankers).
api 6y ago
Many of those Bitcoin "accounts" (addresses) are probably exchange wallets that actually hold the Bitcoin of many users. Since Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous it's hard to actually estimate its GINI coefficient. I agree that it's probably not great, but I'm not convinced it's this bad.
neckardt 6y ago
> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of money. I could easily move far more money into my wallets, but I choose not to. On the other hand, when we're talking about non-bitcoin wealth the numerator is much larger (everything you and me have as assets could count as wealth, not just what we've invested in a specific thing) and the denominator would be much smaller (every one of us only counts as one person, while bitcoin wallets could be created on the fly) In other words, the above is quite the apples to oranges comparison.
- canadianfella 6y ago
  What’s the point of multiple wallets?
- yellowapple 6y ago
  To expand on this, quite a few wallet apps nowadays default to using a fresh wallet per transaction as a privacy measure, further inflating the number of wallets relative to the monetary supply.
  - sennight 6y ago
    No, you are confusing "wallet" with "address". A wallet is little more than a seed for an RNG and a log of transactions. Every new transaction starts with a source address and results in two destination addresses: the primary destination (payee) address and the address where the remainder of the source balance goes. You definitely want to maintain control of your change, so your wallet uses the seed to deterministically generate a keypair for a new address and that is where your change gets sent. I've got no interest in digging into their methodology, but feel pretty comfortable assuming that they've grossly misrepresented all of the above as "accounts".
  - CobsterLock 6y ago
dillondoyle 6y ago
Is there a similar statistic that only looks at 'active' coins. E.g. like giant giant blocks from the start that have never moved wallets.
Nition 6y ago
I wonder what percent, of that 2.4%, have lost their password. Satoshi's accounts alone supposedly contain nearly 6% of all bitcoin.
petertodd 6y ago
> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts Bitcoin doesn't have accounts. It was txouts, which have addresses attached. AFAICT they're counting this by address, which is silly: most wallets use each address once. So in practice, this means an average person who uses Bitcoin regularly will have lots of small value txouts as coins get split up. There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people. On top of that, there have been spam attacks in the past that created large numbers of very small value txouts.
- runako 6y ago
  > There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people. That may be true in general, however in the US there are several large companies that manage Bitcoin wallets for consumers that are public or trying to get public. So the US regulators will likely have been able to get aggregate statistics like this for some time. The more nexus crypto has with the traditional regulated finance system, the more ability of regulators to get opaque data from the network.
  - sennight 6y ago
    They've been scrounging for a long time now, but have had little to show for it. Years ago I'd arbitrage between a handful of exchanges, keeping fiat only on those where I'd have a chance of legal recourse - and the bitcoin only showed up just in time to execute the order. So over the years a bunch of those exchanges have gotten popped by hackers, which means those transaction histories got sold on the carding forums. Interestingly enough, the only impact that had on me was a few Wall Street outfits reaching out to buy large blocks off-exchange. How'd they get my number, ya think?
delaaxe 6y ago
Those are exchange accounts that hold BTC for many people

tekproxy 6y ago

What is a bitcoin account?

chrisseaton 6y ago
An address that owns Bitcoins.
- ric2b 6y ago
  So that metric is really bad because almost every Bitcoin wallet only uses each address once, for privacy reasons. Most of those bottom 98% of addresses probably have very small amounts and are just a small part of someones wallet.
- gruez 6y ago
  An "address" can mean anything - a person can have a wallet with multiple addresses, or an address could belong to an exchange with holds it on behalf of multiple people.
- Kranar 6y ago
  Most BTC is held by an exchange, like Coinbase, Binance, etc... so this statistic is about as meaningful as pointing out that 95% of US dollars are stored at a bank.
  - sellyme 6y ago
    A lot of BTC was held by an exchange like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex, too. With banks I can trust that I can actually get my money bank. BTC isn't decentralised, and the central actors controlling the system are far less reputable (which is saying a lot, when they're being compared to bankers).

api 6y ago

Many of those Bitcoin "accounts" (addresses) are probably exchange wallets that actually hold the Bitcoin of many users. Since Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous it's hard to actually estimate its GINI coefficient. I agree that it's probably not great, but I'm not convinced it's this bad.

neckardt 6y ago

> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of money. I could easily move far more money into my wallets, but I choose not to. On the other hand, when we're talking about non-bitcoin wealth the numerator is much larger (everything you and me have as assets could count as wealth, not just what we've invested in a specific thing) and the denominator would be much smaller (every one of us only counts as one person, while bitcoin wallets could be created on the fly) In other words, the above is quite the apples to oranges comparison.

canadianfella 6y ago
What’s the point of multiple wallets?
yellowapple 6y ago
To expand on this, quite a few wallet apps nowadays default to using a fresh wallet per transaction as a privacy measure, further inflating the number of wallets relative to the monetary supply.
- sennight 6y ago
  No, you are confusing "wallet" with "address". A wallet is little more than a seed for an RNG and a log of transactions. Every new transaction starts with a source address and results in two destination addresses: the primary destination (payee) address and the address where the remainder of the source balance goes. You definitely want to maintain control of your change, so your wallet uses the seed to deterministically generate a keypair for a new address and that is where your change gets sent. I've got no interest in digging into their methodology, but feel pretty comfortable assuming that they've grossly misrepresented all of the above as "accounts".
- CobsterLock 6y ago

dillondoyle 6y ago

Is there a similar statistic that only looks at 'active' coins. E.g. like giant giant blocks from the start that have never moved wallets.

Nition 6y ago

I wonder what percent, of that 2.4%, have lost their password. Satoshi's accounts alone supposedly contain nearly 6% of all bitcoin.

petertodd 6y ago

> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts Bitcoin doesn't have accounts. It was txouts, which have addresses attached. AFAICT they're counting this by address, which is silly: most wallets use each address once. So in practice, this means an average person who uses Bitcoin regularly will have lots of small value txouts as coins get split up. There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people. On top of that, there have been spam attacks in the past that created large numbers of very small value txouts.

runako 6y ago
> There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people. That may be true in general, however in the US there are several large companies that manage Bitcoin wallets for consumers that are public or trying to get public. So the US regulators will likely have been able to get aggregate statistics like this for some time. The more nexus crypto has with the traditional regulated finance system, the more ability of regulators to get opaque data from the network.
- sennight 6y ago
  They've been scrounging for a long time now, but have had little to show for it. Years ago I'd arbitrage between a handful of exchanges, keeping fiat only on those where I'd have a chance of legal recourse - and the bitcoin only showed up just in time to execute the order. So over the years a bunch of those exchanges have gotten popped by hackers, which means those transaction histories got sold on the carding forums. Interestingly enough, the only impact that had on me was a few Wall Street outfits reaching out to buy large blocks off-exchange. How'd they get my number, ya think?

delaaxe 6y ago

Those are exchange accounts that hold BTC for many people