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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.
by 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 agoYou 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 agoSee "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 agoThe 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 agoNo 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.