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Richest Bitcoin Addresses

172 points by cfontes 13y ago

FridayWithJohn 13y ago
Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  You can see every single address on the blockchain, just not peoples wallets (Because the wallet contains address but most of the time no obvious link between those addresses can be made). You can see these addresses and speculate. Also some members of the community keep track of famous Bitcoin users that are known to have accumulated over 100,000 coins.
- elux 13y ago
  See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph”, a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".) Preprint available here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf (The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)
  - nullc 13y ago
    The original Bitcoin "Rich List" predates that paper by years. Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.
- rtkwe 13y ago
  No the entire history of bitcoin transactions is public that's the only way the whole thing works because that allows anyone to validate that a given account has enough coin to settle a given transaction.
tracker1 13y ago
The most surprising thing to me is the number of those addresses that haven't had a transaction in several years now... how many of those people lost their "wallet" so to speak?
stereo 13y ago
This analysis linking the richest address to Silkroad’s DPR is interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0
retube 13y ago
I sure hope those guys are keeping their keys safe. Also - there's 4 addresses with almost exactly the same number of coins (40000) who all last transacted on april 9. Surely connected. Also also: why do so many btc balances end with ".0411"?
- gizmo 13y ago
  There are 10 in total in the top 100 with their last transaction on April 9th. I agree that can't be chance. And 6 blocks of 10.000 bitcoin with a last transaction on the 4th. So it looks like that there are far less than 100 players in the bitcoin top 100.
saneshark 13y ago
So some of these guys who jumped from 20,000 to 80,000 bitcoins virtually overnight -- is it safe to assume that they are hackers in Russia? It would be interesting to see an overlay of known bitcoin exchange hacks. For example: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/17UUsmejDsjJEtbRcotd289ADp7ZdanH5k?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/17UUsmejDsjJEtbRcotd289AD...
exit 13y ago
doesn't the fbi haul belong on at the top of this list? https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...
- josephagoss 13y ago
  Top of the list for single address, most people in Bitcoin have their wealth in one wallet but many addresses inside that wallet.
res0nat0r 13y ago
Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want to do for New Years. It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?
- otoburb 13y ago
  Once you complete the transaction, there are also tax implications. An attorney wrote up a description with some broad strokes: http://www.bitcointax.info/ http://www.bitcointax.info/ Useful if you're a US citizen or resident and have bitcoins you want to sell.
- lukev 13y ago
  No. The market just isn't that deep. I really doubt there are people looking to spend 10 million (or even 1 million) dollars on bitcoin in any normal time frame. Most of the bitcoin super-rich are the early adopters, who mined hundreds of bitcoins on their personal PCs while that was still possible.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    One million dollars is less than 1400 BTC on gox at the moment. There are several transactions a day in this range. And contrary to the popular folklore, you can get USD out of gox, it just costs you a fair amount to do so. If you're dealing in million dollar transactions, it can be arranged.
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      How much would it cost to convert an amount of bitcoins valued at one million dollars ?
    - gwern 13y ago
      And as a matter of fact, the guy who broke the back of the most recent surge to $900 on MtGox was selling something like $5m and is doing just that.
cfontes 13y ago
I wonder if Satoshi is amongst those...
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched. Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big one. Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person who mined the first block, all unspent.
  - cLeEOGPw 13y ago
    Either he didn't want to reveal its identity, because he (they) knew well that the history will remain for a long time, or he simply lost access to those bitcoins.
  - josephagoss 13y ago
    Thousands of separate addresses, most of those coins still sit in their mined blocks. However it is likely Satoshi has all the addresses in one single wallet so that he could move them all at once if he wanted to. Satoshi's estimated wealth is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 coins.
    - Torn 13y ago
      1,000,000 coins is ~10x the top person in that rich list i.e. 840 million USD going by that page's prices
      - josephagoss 13y ago
        Yeah, right now Satoshi is worth at least 100k btc up to 1,000k btc. Some analyses has found that perhaps 2,500k btc are controlled by the same group but that was highly speculative. I would think Satoshi is getting close to becoming the first Bitcoin billionaire.
    - 13y ago
unethical_ban 13y ago
You got hellbanned, saneshark.
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
  - grey-area 13y ago
    I'm sure anyone using the term hellbanned knows what it means. Sometimes automatic hell banning makes mistakes or is heavy handed (not sure what the algorithms are); some selective civil disobedience corrects the issue and lets the user at least ask admins to find out why.
  - publicfig 13y ago
    My assumption is that because they have the username 'unethical_ban' they probably understand that they broke the spirit of the Hellban, but did so intentionally.
    - unethical_ban 13y ago
      This account is not intended to be a novelty account; you can see I post relevant discussion most of the time. I am, however, someone who was hellbanned for quite some time for an admittedly less-than-stellar post. One facetious remark got a 900+ karma, 3-year old account banned.
  - unethical_ban 13y ago
    I know. I disagree with the practice, especially when I look through the history of the account and see no flagrantly offensive remarks. HN mods might think this site is a temple, but it's disrespectful to waste someone's time and mislead their expectations of feedback for months at a time.
    - 13y ago
COMS 13y ago
The Last Transaction column is not correct.
dangoldin 13y ago
Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.
JimmaDaRustla 13y ago
Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...
- josephagoss 13y ago
  They may have all the addresses in the same wallet.
joeblau 13y ago
Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?
- rtkwe 13y ago
  Probably holding accounts/cold storage for a single group or a small number of groups using a similar division plan, say an exchange. I bet the idea is keep them in separate wallets to ensure that one compromise doesn't lose their whole investment. All just wild conjecture though.
taude 13y ago
I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter? [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09/the-11-million-in-bitcoins-the-winklevoss-brothers-bought-is-now-worth-32-million/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- josephagoss 13y ago
  It's likely the Winklevoss brothers have all their coins spread over many addresses. Their wallet will show 100,000+ coins but you can't tell because they are spread among many addresses inside the single wallet file. If they use a brain wallet seed they can create unlimited deterministic addresses but only have to remember one key, and you won't see large accumulations of coins.
  - pa5tabear 13y ago
    What's the point? Spreading the risk of loss by hack? And reducing their visibility as a target?
    - josephagoss 13y ago
      The reason is privacy. It's not going to spread the loss of a hack because if the hacker gets the wallet they own all the addresses. One of the core developers theorized that memory corruption at the exact time you sign a transaction could lock away all the bitcoins in a single address. However this has never been observed. (remember every transaction spends the entire balance of an address and returns your coins to the same/or change address, if that change address has 1 bit wrong the entire balance would be lost)
chrisacky 13y ago
Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever. Look at this address: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5... The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and deleted everything from his system. [1]: https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&s...
- taigeair 13y ago
  No way to recover the Bitcoins?
  - josephagoss 13y ago
    You could run vanitygen to guess the private key to any Bitcoin address. It might take a few billion years.
    - hnha 13y ago
      It could also take just one day if you are lucky. It impossible to predict, just like the future of bitcoin.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - dontblink 13y ago
        Equivalent of a bitcoin lottery?
        josephagoss 13y ago
        If you want to play the Bitcoin lottery, it's a far better idea to focus your computing power on solo mining. You have far more chance guessing a 25 bitcoin block than getting a valid private key.
sbjustin 13y ago
Top 100 richest people using bitcoin control 20% of bitcoins.
- dustcoin 13y ago
  Some of these addresses are cold storage addresses controlled by businesses that are holding BTC for a large number of individual customers. Some of the richest holders own multiple top addresses.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sktrdie 13y ago
What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?
- cma 13y ago
  Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?
  - mcherm 13y ago
    Yes, that would work. And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich. And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind. We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as collector's items). The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.
    - penguindev 13y ago
      That is a very interesting idea, it makes the fungibility of BTC seem highly questionable, if you can look at its history forever and do an arbitrary 'blacklist'.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    That would seriously diminish confidence in bitcoin, though it might encourage spending of bitcoins. I suspect the latter will not be enough to overcome the former. The end result would likely be bogus transactions between addresses merely to keep the money "alive". Adding 0 value and potentially negative value as now a set of useless transactions will sit in the ever growing blockchain. Similarly, during the transition of clients accepting to clients not accepting those coins, what happens if there's a transaction from one of them? What if it's only partial, they spent 2k but left 2k, they're active but now out 2k BTC that they can't spend? This is sort of like discussing blacklisting "stolen" BTC. Suppose I figure out 100 brainwallets and steal 1000 BTC. Before I get added to the blacklist, I transfer 1 BTC to each of 1000 addresses. Do you blacklist the whole chain of addresses going back? Do you only blacklist that one amount (essentially reducing the value of those addresses by 1 BTC each)? What if one of those addresses is yours and I'm just tainting every address I can find. You'll have 1BTC that you can't spend, and you don't know to whom it belongs. Which of the original 100 addresses do you send it back to if that's the intent of the system? Do you send it back to a known hacked address? Does the former owner have a mechanism to announce a valid new address for kindhearted souls to return their bitcoins to?
wdvh 13y ago
Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing this.
- sktrdie 13y ago
  No IP address is saved in the block-chain. You would need to trust the source of this IP listing service, and still you wouldn't be able to actually prove people's real IP address if they were using systems like TOR to send money.
  - wdvh 13y ago
    I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and listen in on transactions. And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.
chrislomax 13y ago
Why when you click on the wallet does the last transaction on some of them go to 2013 when the list says 2010? http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS78k7WMkVq?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS...
antonios 13y ago
Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and one can have many addresses.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  And many people can be apart of one address, although that is more risky. One of the top addresses is the Just-Dice investors address, which has between 50,000 and 60,000 bitcoin.
- asdfaoeu 13y ago
  For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably owned by the same person. http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png
darkmethod 13y ago
Back in early 2011 I ran a BTC miner for awhile on a spare system and generated around 18 BTC. I bartered them later in 2011 for a pair of movie tickets to take my wife out to see Moneyball (ironically).
Siecje 13y ago
Litecoin doesn't have this problem.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  Whoa, you sure about that? I recall several million ltc are controlled by a handful of people.
loceng 13y ago
Who are these people? And if any of them are out there reading this thread -- reach out to me and let me know if want to invest in something that will help adoption of Bitcoin, which will result in its value continuing to go up...
csomar 13y ago
Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned by even less people.
- gwern 13y ago
  Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their holdings.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  It should be expected that any changes/disturbances in the financial system (including large scale adoption of Bitcoin) will involve some losses for the common person, while a few people will find a way to make a huge profit from exploiting everyone else in this change process. Just as it has always happened in history.
knowaveragejoe 13y ago
Interesting that many of them were last used within a few seconds or minutes of each other. Indicates to me that one person or party is controlling quite a few big wallets.
TheSisb2 13y ago
I don't think this richlist is a list of different people. Look how many have 10k BTC flat. A lot of these are spare wallets.
NickSharp 13y ago
How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC? That's significantly more than the #1 address on this list. Am I missing something?
C1D 13y ago
Needs an update, currently the largest wallet know is this one 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. It's holding about 200k btc.
drchiu 13y ago
I don't see btc as being able to retain its hundreds of dollars in exchange currency value. Imagine you have 1 mil usd worth of btc, and then imagine trying to dump it all on the open market. You would probably find a widening gap in the bid-ask as your position is liquidated. In other words, there isn't likely enough buyers. Someone is probably manipulating the supply and demand to serve their own purposes. You might as well day trade something more liquid.
eonil 13y ago
I really don't understand how BTC make better world. I mean, it monopolized by a few people from FIRST. And the monopoly will sustain forever. If someone else make another BTC?
- oleganza 13y ago
  Suggest a better way to distribute new asset "fairly". Facebook shares are also distributed unfairly. And gold. And dollars. Also, something that looks fair for you, wouldn't look fair for another person. What's important to me is that money is hard. If you have it, it can't be printed out of value. It should not be very costly or risky to store or transfer (like gold or USD). I want to be sure that even the richest guys can't simply extract money from me. That they have to earn it by doing work. Or earn service from others by paying them, not forcing them. Bitcoin allows us to get to that kind of protection closer than ever. Consider this: gold was always as hard to protect as to confiscate it. It's symmetrical. Therefore, most powerful and brutal were accumulating gold over time. Gold is now owned massively by largest governments and banks. Regular people can only own as much gold as they can hide in their pockets. Extra gold is too easy to take (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102). Bitcoin is much cheaper and easier to store and transfer than to extract it. It's asymmetrical. Now big guys with guns would have to work more and steal less to get some money, then before. Stuff that was stolen or destroyed will never come back to you, but at least, over time, distribution of wealth would match more closely actual merits of market participants, than amount of gunpowder that they have.

172 points by cfontes 13y ago

Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.

josephagoss 13y ago
You can see every single address on the blockchain, just not peoples wallets (Because the wallet contains address but most of the time no obvious link between those addresses can be made). You can see these addresses and speculate. Also some members of the community keep track of famous Bitcoin users that are known to have accumulated over 100,000 coins.
elux 13y ago
See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph”, a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".) Preprint available here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf (The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)
- nullc 13y ago
  The original Bitcoin "Rich List" predates that paper by years. Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.
rtkwe 13y ago
No the entire history of bitcoin transactions is public that's the only way the whole thing works because that allows anyone to validate that a given account has enough coin to settle a given transaction.

tracker1 13y ago

The most surprising thing to me is the number of those addresses that haven't had a transaction in several years now... how many of those people lost their "wallet" so to speak?

stereo 13y ago

This analysis linking the richest address to Silkroad’s DPR is interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0

retube 13y ago

I sure hope those guys are keeping their keys safe. Also - there's 4 addresses with almost exactly the same number of coins (40000) who all last transacted on april 9. Surely connected. Also also: why do so many btc balances end with ".0411"?

gizmo 13y ago
There are 10 in total in the top 100 with their last transaction on April 9th. I agree that can't be chance. And 6 blocks of 10.000 bitcoin with a last transaction on the 4th. So it looks like that there are far less than 100 players in the bitcoin top 100.

saneshark 13y ago

So some of these guys who jumped from 20,000 to 80,000 bitcoins virtually overnight -- is it safe to assume that they are hackers in Russia? It would be interesting to see an overlay of known bitcoin exchange hacks. For example: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/17UUsmejDsjJEtbRcotd289ADp7ZdanH5k?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/17UUsmejDsjJEtbRcotd289AD...

exit 13y ago

doesn't the fbi haul belong on at the top of this list? https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...

josephagoss 13y ago
Top of the list for single address, most people in Bitcoin have their wealth in one wallet but many addresses inside that wallet.

res0nat0r 13y ago

Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want to do for New Years. It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?

otoburb 13y ago
Once you complete the transaction, there are also tax implications. An attorney wrote up a description with some broad strokes: http://www.bitcointax.info/ http://www.bitcointax.info/ Useful if you're a US citizen or resident and have bitcoins you want to sell.
lukev 13y ago
No. The market just isn't that deep. I really doubt there are people looking to spend 10 million (or even 1 million) dollars on bitcoin in any normal time frame. Most of the bitcoin super-rich are the early adopters, who mined hundreds of bitcoins on their personal PCs while that was still possible.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  One million dollars is less than 1400 BTC on gox at the moment. There are several transactions a day in this range. And contrary to the popular folklore, you can get USD out of gox, it just costs you a fair amount to do so. If you're dealing in million dollar transactions, it can be arranged.
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    How much would it cost to convert an amount of bitcoins valued at one million dollars ?
  - gwern 13y ago
    And as a matter of fact, the guy who broke the back of the most recent surge to $900 on MtGox was selling something like $5m and is doing just that.

cfontes 13y ago

I wonder if Satoshi is amongst those...

shawabawa3 13y ago
afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched. Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big one. Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person who mined the first block, all unspent.
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  Either he didn't want to reveal its identity, because he (they) knew well that the history will remain for a long time, or he simply lost access to those bitcoins.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  Thousands of separate addresses, most of those coins still sit in their mined blocks. However it is likely Satoshi has all the addresses in one single wallet so that he could move them all at once if he wanted to. Satoshi's estimated wealth is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 coins.
  - Torn 13y ago
    1,000,000 coins is ~10x the top person in that rich list i.e. 840 million USD going by that page's prices
    - josephagoss 13y ago
      Yeah, right now Satoshi is worth at least 100k btc up to 1,000k btc. Some analyses has found that perhaps 2,500k btc are controlled by the same group but that was highly speculative. I would think Satoshi is getting close to becoming the first Bitcoin billionaire.
  - 13y ago

unethical_ban 13y ago

You got hellbanned, saneshark.

Cthulhu_ 13y ago
And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
- grey-area 13y ago
  I'm sure anyone using the term hellbanned knows what it means. Sometimes automatic hell banning makes mistakes or is heavy handed (not sure what the algorithms are); some selective civil disobedience corrects the issue and lets the user at least ask admins to find out why.
- publicfig 13y ago
  My assumption is that because they have the username 'unethical_ban' they probably understand that they broke the spirit of the Hellban, but did so intentionally.
  - unethical_ban 13y ago
    This account is not intended to be a novelty account; you can see I post relevant discussion most of the time. I am, however, someone who was hellbanned for quite some time for an admittedly less-than-stellar post. One facetious remark got a 900+ karma, 3-year old account banned.
- unethical_ban 13y ago
  I know. I disagree with the practice, especially when I look through the history of the account and see no flagrantly offensive remarks. HN mods might think this site is a temple, but it's disrespectful to waste someone's time and mislead their expectations of feedback for months at a time.
  - 13y ago

COMS 13y ago

The Last Transaction column is not correct.

dangoldin 13y ago

Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.

JimmaDaRustla 13y ago

Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...

josephagoss 13y ago
They may have all the addresses in the same wallet.

joeblau 13y ago

Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?

rtkwe 13y ago
Probably holding accounts/cold storage for a single group or a small number of groups using a similar division plan, say an exchange. I bet the idea is keep them in separate wallets to ensure that one compromise doesn't lose their whole investment. All just wild conjecture though.

taude 13y ago

I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter? [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09/the-11-million-in-bitcoins-the-winklevoss-brothers-bought-is-now-worth-32-million/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
josephagoss 13y ago
It's likely the Winklevoss brothers have all their coins spread over many addresses. Their wallet will show 100,000+ coins but you can't tell because they are spread among many addresses inside the single wallet file. If they use a brain wallet seed they can create unlimited deterministic addresses but only have to remember one key, and you won't see large accumulations of coins.
- pa5tabear 13y ago
  What's the point? Spreading the risk of loss by hack? And reducing their visibility as a target?
  - josephagoss 13y ago
    The reason is privacy. It's not going to spread the loss of a hack because if the hacker gets the wallet they own all the addresses. One of the core developers theorized that memory corruption at the exact time you sign a transaction could lock away all the bitcoins in a single address. However this has never been observed. (remember every transaction spends the entire balance of an address and returns your coins to the same/or change address, if that change address has 1 bit wrong the entire balance would be lost)

chrisacky 13y ago

Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever. Look at this address: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5qkfy4g3Hi?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5... The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and deleted everything from his system. [1]: https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&s...

taigeair 13y ago
No way to recover the Bitcoins?
- josephagoss 13y ago
  You could run vanitygen to guess the private key to any Bitcoin address. It might take a few billion years.
  - hnha 13y ago
    It could also take just one day if you are lucky. It impossible to predict, just like the future of bitcoin.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - dontblink 13y ago
      Equivalent of a bitcoin lottery?
      - josephagoss 13y ago
        If you want to play the Bitcoin lottery, it's a far better idea to focus your computing power on solo mining. You have far more chance guessing a 25 bitcoin block than getting a valid private key.

sbjustin 13y ago

Top 100 richest people using bitcoin control 20% of bitcoins.

dustcoin 13y ago
Some of these addresses are cold storage addresses controlled by businesses that are holding BTC for a large number of individual customers. Some of the richest holders own multiple top addresses.

deleted 13y ago

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sktrdie 13y ago

What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?

cma 13y ago
Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?
- mcherm 13y ago
  Yes, that would work. And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich. And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind. We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as collector's items). The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.
  - penguindev 13y ago
    That is a very interesting idea, it makes the fungibility of BTC seem highly questionable, if you can look at its history forever and do an arbitrary 'blacklist'.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  That would seriously diminish confidence in bitcoin, though it might encourage spending of bitcoins. I suspect the latter will not be enough to overcome the former. The end result would likely be bogus transactions between addresses merely to keep the money "alive". Adding 0 value and potentially negative value as now a set of useless transactions will sit in the ever growing blockchain. Similarly, during the transition of clients accepting to clients not accepting those coins, what happens if there's a transaction from one of them? What if it's only partial, they spent 2k but left 2k, they're active but now out 2k BTC that they can't spend? This is sort of like discussing blacklisting "stolen" BTC. Suppose I figure out 100 brainwallets and steal 1000 BTC. Before I get added to the blacklist, I transfer 1 BTC to each of 1000 addresses. Do you blacklist the whole chain of addresses going back? Do you only blacklist that one amount (essentially reducing the value of those addresses by 1 BTC each)? What if one of those addresses is yours and I'm just tainting every address I can find. You'll have 1BTC that you can't spend, and you don't know to whom it belongs. Which of the original 100 addresses do you send it back to if that's the intent of the system? Do you send it back to a known hacked address? Does the former owner have a mechanism to announce a valid new address for kindhearted souls to return their bitcoins to?

wdvh 13y ago

Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing this.

sktrdie 13y ago
No IP address is saved in the block-chain. You would need to trust the source of this IP listing service, and still you wouldn't be able to actually prove people's real IP address if they were using systems like TOR to send money.
- wdvh 13y ago
  I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and listen in on transactions. And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.

chrislomax 13y ago

Why when you click on the wallet does the last transaction on some of them go to 2013 when the list says 2010? http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS78k7WMkVq?charttype=balance http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS...

antonios 13y ago

Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and one can have many addresses.

josephagoss 13y ago
And many people can be apart of one address, although that is more risky. One of the top addresses is the Just-Dice investors address, which has between 50,000 and 60,000 bitcoin.
asdfaoeu 13y ago
For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably owned by the same person. http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png

darkmethod 13y ago

Back in early 2011 I ran a BTC miner for awhile on a spare system and generated around 18 BTC. I bartered them later in 2011 for a pair of movie tickets to take my wife out to see Moneyball (ironically).

Siecje 13y ago

Litecoin doesn't have this problem.

josephagoss 13y ago
Whoa, you sure about that? I recall several million ltc are controlled by a handful of people.

loceng 13y ago

Who are these people? And if any of them are out there reading this thread -- reach out to me and let me know if want to invest in something that will help adoption of Bitcoin, which will result in its value continuing to go up...

csomar 13y ago

Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned by even less people.

gwern 13y ago
Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their holdings.
PeterisP 13y ago
It should be expected that any changes/disturbances in the financial system (including large scale adoption of Bitcoin) will involve some losses for the common person, while a few people will find a way to make a huge profit from exploiting everyone else in this change process. Just as it has always happened in history.

knowaveragejoe 13y ago

Interesting that many of them were last used within a few seconds or minutes of each other. Indicates to me that one person or party is controlling quite a few big wallets.

TheSisb2 13y ago

I don't think this richlist is a list of different people. Look how many have 10k BTC flat. A lot of these are spare wallets.

NickSharp 13y ago

How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC? That's significantly more than the #1 address on this list. Am I missing something?

C1D 13y ago

Needs an update, currently the largest wallet know is this one 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. It's holding about 200k btc.

drchiu 13y ago

I don't see btc as being able to retain its hundreds of dollars in exchange currency value. Imagine you have 1 mil usd worth of btc, and then imagine trying to dump it all on the open market. You would probably find a widening gap in the bid-ask as your position is liquidated. In other words, there isn't likely enough buyers. Someone is probably manipulating the supply and demand to serve their own purposes. You might as well day trade something more liquid.

eonil 13y ago

I really don't understand how BTC make better world. I mean, it monopolized by a few people from FIRST. And the monopoly will sustain forever. If someone else make another BTC?

oleganza 13y ago
Suggest a better way to distribute new asset "fairly". Facebook shares are also distributed unfairly. And gold. And dollars. Also, something that looks fair for you, wouldn't look fair for another person. What's important to me is that money is hard. If you have it, it can't be printed out of value. It should not be very costly or risky to store or transfer (like gold or USD). I want to be sure that even the richest guys can't simply extract money from me. That they have to earn it by doing work. Or earn service from others by paying them, not forcing them. Bitcoin allows us to get to that kind of protection closer than ever. Consider this: gold was always as hard to protect as to confiscate it. It's symmetrical. Therefore, most powerful and brutal were accumulating gold over time. Gold is now owned massively by largest governments and banks. Regular people can only own as much gold as they can hide in their pockets. Extra gold is too easy to take (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102). Bitcoin is much cheaper and easier to store and transfer than to extract it. It's asymmetrical. Now big guys with guns would have to work more and steal less to get some money, then before. Stuff that was stolen or destroyed will never come back to you, but at least, over time, distribution of wealth would match more closely actual merits of market participants, than amount of gunpowder that they have.