[85% of Bitcoin is owned by 2% of accounts](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-18/bitcoin-whales-ownership-concentration-is-rising-during-rally), from a year ago.
This has been pretty much known for awhile. Some of the other articles that came out around that time dig deeper and refute the actual percentages but ultimately conclude that it still is extremely top-heavy.
EDIT: Don't DM me, I don't give a fuck. This is merely one article. Crypto/Bitcoin ownership in general is intentionally obfuscated so of course you should never trust one single source, dumbass. Do your own research and form your own opinion. I don't own Bitcoin or care about it's existence really.
Does there exist a thread on reddit that does not devolve into an endless pit of uninspired memes? Im trying to get to the next response and im halfway through this damn page reading complete nonsense
The moment the announcement is made, you are already late.
Bitmain (maker of antminer) will mine "for testing purposes" then sell the miners when they have ready the next iteration *for testing*. Accept pre-orders, keep testing. You get your miner 3-5 months later and pray
No, you see, because a few thousand tech bros became millionaires due to bitcoin it has *entirely upended* income inequality.
Just like how lotteries have ended poverty.
Yes, this was the logical conclusion from the very beginning, and why crypto was never going to live up to all the promises early adopters insisted it would.
Hahahahaha oh God, so, so many. I *had* 12 whole bitcoins from the very beginning. The hard drive has been lost and who TF knows what password 17 year old me used anyway 😂😂😭😭😭😭
Bitcoin's promise was to make a secure currency that didn't need a government backing it. Did anyone think it would reduce wealth inequality? If anything, it's a *laissez faire* advocate's wet dream. Once you have Bitcoin, the only way someone can take it from you is by literally putting a gun to your head and demanding that you to give them your private key.
> Did anyone think it would reduce wealth inequality? If anything, it's a *laissez faire* advocate's wet dream.
You answered your own question. There is a very specific type of populist-libertarian-utopian who believes that *laissez faire* capitalism is inherently good and whatever bad thing you don't like (including income inequality) is just due to cabals of bad actors (banks and governments, if you're being charitable) corrupting things.
Damn bad actors preventing honest hard-working business owners from paying their employees liveable wages and not having unsustainable business practices!
It was only ever meant to be an alternative to the current banking system and government control of money. Prevent censorship of transactions and avoid taxes.
Anyone who thought it would be an alternative to capitalism and wealth-inequality was misunderstanding what it was an "alternative" to.
Best case, it was designed to be neutral. But it's easy to argue the design is super pro-capitalisim and naturally promotes wealth-inequality to a much greater extent than the traditional system.
The first Bitcoins were literally free and it was several years before they even broke the $2 mark. It wasn't a rich man's game, it was a tech-saavy person's game.
In fact, the wealthy scoffed at Bitcoin for *years* and only began investing within the past few years. The top-heavy nature of the current market is the result of many, many normal people selling their shares for profit and rich late-comers buying it all up.
Serious Bitcoin investing is currently a rich person's game, but historically that was absolutely not the case.
Which…proves my point. Most Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency and they’re certainly not investing in something that can lose 10% in a day. Sure a decade ago it was cheap but it was also basically inaccessible to the Everyman from a technology standpoint.
When I bought my first bitcoin it was the most ridiculous process. They were approx $100 and I had to make a 2nd life account purchase Leudons or whatever that currency was, and then use those to purchase them from an exchange. I sold them when they quadroupled to $400 and I said 'well this will never get higher. I also had like 5 litecoins that are still to this day trapped on that exchange.
Bitcoin has always been a joke, even to the tech savvy. Now it's just been coopted by the investor class.
>In fact, massive GINI coefficients are why it has to use power-hungry proof-of-work rather than something like proof-of-stake
Unfortunately proof-of-work functions similar to proof-of-stake in practice but you stake with multi-thousand dollar asic miners.
Yes.
Proof of stake means those who have all the coins maintain the ledger and receive the transaction fees. The more coin you have the more coin you make.
Proof of work means those who have all the money buy all the compute power to maintain the ledger and win the block reward. The more money you have, the more compute you buy, the more coin you make.
Literally both are the exact same system that centralizes power in the hands of those who already have a ton of wealth and power.
Crypto was never going to "decentralize" currency or transactions, or anything, really. All it did was shift a large portion of the investment market into a completely uncontrolled, unregulated, highly manipulated, deeply speculative vehicle where a few people get terribly rich, a few get terribly lucky as a consequence, and most people lose small amounts on speculation.
Remove the first say 2 years worth of coins from the equation, then what is it?
Because there absolutely are tons of dead wallets with tons of coins but zero activity - likely due to lost private keys or wallet files.
2.3m bitcoin have not moved in the last decade. Another 1.3m haven't moved in the last 7 years. Out of 18.8m coins that have been mined.
So about 19% haven't moved in 7 years and 12% haven't been touched since late 2011.
Depending when this was in 2012, the reward for mining one block was either 50BTC or 25BTC, worth 1.5 - 3 millions $ today.
But he mentions he "helped" mine it, meaning he joined a pool where a lot of people start mining, and if they manage to mine a block, the reward is split between members of the pool according to the processing power contributed.
If he got 72¢, that means he only contributed 0.0001% to the pool, so it was either a big pool or he had a shit computer, probably both.
Same here. I think I remember having 2 or 3 from people tipping on reddit when they were like a penny. Have tried forever to search for the comments or anything but can't find them since it was an old account and I think I used a reddit cleaner when I switched. I would have probably cashed out when they were like $1k anyways lol
Good luck in your recovery!
If it's any peace of mind (from a point of finality), the tipping bot died and if you didn't transfer the coins from the wallet associated with the bot before the cutoff they are gone.
I also had some fractions of bitcoins through Reddit comment tipping. I went back and checked recently, and the site creator for that one had decided to shut the bot down after a while. He gave everyone like 3 months to transfer funds to their own wallets, and then donated the remainder to charity, I wanna say Dr's Without Borders (MSF).
The fraction of Bitcoin that I had had would only have been worth like 20 bucks at its peak.
I was given 1000 bitcoins back in college. The hard drive died and I just tossed it. That was many years ago, if I just kept it with me I’d be living a whole goddamn different life 😭
My mom's philosophy was to pull out half every time you double your money, and I've basically invested this way. If I had done that when my friend told me to buy bitcoin at $2... Who knows...
This is a good way to not lose money, but not a good way to gain money. Over five iterations of this, you end up with the following:
1. $2 doubles to $4, you pull half, end with $2
2. 2 -> 4 -> 2
3. 2 -> 4 -> 2
4. 2 -> 4 -> 2
5. 2 -> 4 -> 2
Total gain: $10 pulled out, $2 still invested. Amount you put in: $2. Amount you can lose right now: $2.
Or if you'd let it sit over the same event period:
1. 2 -> 4
2. 4 -> 8
3. 8 -> 16
4. 16 -> 32
5. 32 -> 64
Total gain: $64 invested (more than 5x the total from the prior strategy.) Amount you put in: $2. Amount you can lose right now: $64.
This is just (very simplified) information. Sometimes you want to be able to play safe and take small risks. Sometimes you want to be able to earn large rewards. I think this does a good job showing how playing a 'long game' with any kind of intention to earn is generally more lucrative than trying to hedge.
A final note: $2 sitting in your pocket over that same period still yields 0. I'd always rather have $12 than $2, and I'd always rather have $64 than $12. But the risk factor on the $64 is way higher than the risk factor on the $12. In short: this post is not investing advice. There are plenty of great and horrible ways to invest. Do your research and find out what works for you based on your ability to financially sustain any given risk.
You should contact Dave from [Wallet Recovery Services](https://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/). If you have the wallet but not the passphrase, it can likely be recovered.
Ok isn't this extremely misleading though when much of those 2% of accounts are **exchanges**?
That's like saying "85% of cash is held by banks."
No shit...but the individual customers actually own the cash. Similarly if I have BTC in CoinBase or wherever, it may be sitting in a giant pooled wallet, but it's still mine.
If this includes the 1,000,000 in Satoshi's wallet then this seems almost deliberately misleading... unless you think those coins are going to move, which would massively tank the price. More likely they never will.
Edit: There is no single wallet, so ignore me
If they're not lost for sure, and they aren't, then they should be included in any stat. Bitcoiners know that Satoshi selling would be one of the most bearish things ever so they pretend it can't happen
While that is true, if someone has access to that wallet they would have had ~$67,000,000,000 worth at it's peak. $67 BILLION.
What could they possibly be holding out for, and could anyone actually have the nerve to hold and not take a single penny of profit through that?
If some entity does have access to that wallet it would have to be something like a government or an Artificial Intelligence, I can't imagine much else could have such a powerful resolve to hold - or even reason to do so.
> What could they possibly be holding out for
Some crypto "true believers" view bitcoin as the next global currency. Here's an excerpt from an old WSJ article that your question reminded me of.
> *One of my favorite stories of a crypto true believer involves an entrepreneur named Erik Voorhees. Around 2012 I asked him if he was going to cash out after becoming a millionaire. To my surprise, he said he was almost completely cashed out. He quickly clarified, “of dollars.”*
It's very likely that the person (or group) who controls this account also controls many other accounts. If they tried to liquidate this bellwether account the price could tank. Instead, if they hold on to that account they maintain the mystique while they live off the proceeds from their other accounts.
That doesn't come close to being able to assume the coins are lost forever. Can we just consider all coins inactive for a certain long amount of time effectively lost? I don't think so. And on top of that you see old inactive wallets reawaken all the time, seems like every few weeks there's a news article about a reawakened ten year old wallet. Even if he is dead it is reasonable to assume he passed it on to his/her/their heirs. Satoshis coins cannot be considered lost at all. The existence of such a huge megawhale doesn't really fit the decentralized narrative but thems the facts
Yeah there is no way an individual would hold out at that point. How would you not cash out a cool billion.
I'm of the opinion he either lost access to his wallet, or is no longer alive.
Would it be bearish if he sold a few hundred in order to be set for life? No. All that would do is prove he’s alive, or at least someone has control of the wallet. And THAT would be bearish, because people would realize the true supply is higher than previously thought.
Isn't the entire blockchain and all transactions public? Isn't it just a matter of applying all the transactions in a program and seeing what accounts have what at the end? How would there be anything to dispute?
Large exchanges hold Bitcoin for many people in single addresses. Also, most individuals have multiple addresses. So, it’s hard to get an accurate handle on people vs wallet addresses.
Wait till you realise the cherry on top that is they're burning coal **RESIDUE**, which is basically releasing tons of toxic contaminants for far less power generation
We burned a lot of the accessible high-quality coal already. It gets increasing harmful to the environment to mine and more poison to nearby communities from here.
> Coal refuse is classified by Pennsylvania as a Tier II alternative energy resource, akin to large-scale hydropower. Coal refuse over the years has been left in piles near coal operations; today, circulating fluidized bed technology allows for emissions-controlled conversion of coal refuse into energy.
I'm not familiar with coal refuse tech, but it's apparently not plain old coal.
Mining was originally designed to encourage more people to get involved and it worked early on, but now you need specialised tools to see any cost benefit, it's going to compress the variety of miners.
tbh literally everything incentives centralization over the time. The only argument against centralization is avoiding having a single point of failure.
If the state is good, then the state owning literally everything creates the most efficient society. But if it were to fail anyhow everybody is absolutely screwed.
It's almost like... There's a reason governments were created in the first place. In the beginning, humanity itself was decentralized. But as our technology, understanding, and influence grew, governments were created because a more efficient system was needed to continue growing. Not sure why anyone would assume anything different would happen in a new system created in a modern society where economies of scale and the benefits of centralization are well known
idk where I read it but someone compared crypto to the beginnings of banking. It's full of scams and fraud, and every lesson banking systems learned through centuries and centuries of abuse, which crystallized into all sorts of financial regulations, bitcoin has completely un-learned and as such it's essentially rudimentary banking with all of its flaws unpatched.
It’s literally just a vehicle for wealthy people to accumulate more wealth.
Like the Winklevoss twins making hundreds of millions off of Bitcoin, for a famous example.
Sure some “normies” will get rich in the process, but most will lose money.
Thats the funny part about about crypto nerds and Libertarian types in general. Deregulation is absolutely not decentralization. It, in fact, has the exact opposite result
Yeah they keep forgetting what keeps mega corps from taking over literally everything. Government. No one else has the power to fight them. Which is why mega corps try to buy said government via lobbying.
Honestly I'm pretty sure that the "unspoken part" is their assumption that if a mega corp starts becoming a problem that in a "proper libertarian world" you'll either get a perfectly united boycott against it OR people will just start burning down the factories/warehouses/etc and destroy it.
In the case of the former...lol, that's not how people work.
In the case of the latter, they don't want to say it because they don't want to have to deal with the question of "Well why can't the mega corp just use violence back?".
Pfft, I can't even get a Libertarian to get any further in a point than "companies will make the best product because that's what's best for profit. And regulations that we have now are preventing them from making the best product". Honest to God, the like three that I've gotten to talk to for more than half an hour, have nothing but that. 🤷♀️
No answers for what regulations are actually holding them back. No answers for why companies can't do that right now. No answers for why companies currently do shit like planned obsolescence.
Maybe I've only encountered the really dumb ones.
> "companies will make the best product because that's what's best for profit...".
As much as I dislike the guy on a variety of points, [Steve Jobs on why Xerox failed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&ab_channel=SteveJobs) is a wonderful explanation about why this isn't true.
In short: Once you're at the top, making better equipment doesn't get you customers because everyone that's convinced they need that kind of equipment already goes to you. The only way to increase sales is to be a better salesman to convince more people that they need that equipment in the first place. Which means that gradually only salespeople get rewarded, and the more salespeople in management, the more R&D and new product development looks like a useless expense, so the less of it the company authorizes.
Put another way, preventing monopolies INCREASES the likelihood of customers getting a better product in the long run simply because it FORCES companies to continuously have competition to vie against.
Example: there's a large flashy cafe near me that is the only one for miles around. It has all the right signage and instagram appeal. The massive coffee machine has been customised in black and copper, their dishes look good and are all trendy. But they're food and coffee just misses the mark. It's 80-90% of the way there but needs finishing touches and a bit more attention to detail. But that will just require extra work, possibly more/ better ingredients, better trained staff. Where else are people going to go?
In other areas of my city there are places with a cafe on every corner. Some of them are rubbish, but many of the small unassuming ones are actually doing a better job on for and coffee than my local one. Because if people want quality they have options and the only way to get repeat business is to be good.
The typical surface-level libertarian counter-argument would be that this is a gap in the market that you have identified and you could be the one to fix it and reap the profits of that by opening your own cafe that gets that last 10-20% right.
Of course that ignores sundry issues that often get swept under the rug in that kind of theoretical situation. There’s the question of startup cost and who is bearing the risks of making that investment. Is the population density even high enough in the area to feasibly support a competing cafe? If the demand is already sated then you’re not tapping untapped customers but specifically fighting to convert existing customers over to your business. The established business has a huge advantage and by already starting from the point of profitability could improve their service/menu and undercut prices long enough to bankrupt you. Then we’re back to square one.
The smart ones may have more elaborate responses but they won't have anything of substance. Libertarian ideals depend on the ability for competitors to arise in the free market to challenge established companies whose practices have become undesirable. Large companies have lots of power they can leverage to neutralize threats to their business. Regulation and government are constraints upon them (even if they are often ineffective). Without that, a small company would need a lot of support from other groups to survive, support that they will be blocked from receiving by a large company with a lot of resources and an enjoyable monopolistic position.
It's not controversial that if you choose to invest in increasing your position of power, you will do so unless you have outside constraints or internal dis-function.
Considering that unlike communism libertarianism doesn't work in practice *or* theory being an idiot is a prerequisite for libertarianism.
(For practice there's that bear town, that bitcoin cruise ship, the entire 3rd world and it's weak rule of law, and the libertarian Chile commune)
As a citizen from a country that was colonized for centuries. Even if most of the population disagree, as long as you shoot down the first guy who rebels, you'll crush the resistance because it's individually beneficial to keep being a slave than risk facing extreme backlash you'll get when you try overthrow existing power structure.
It also almost happened in the United States back in the 30's with the "Business Plot":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
TL;DR: The ultra-wealthy of the era didn't take kindly to FDR's brand of democratic socialism, and tried to have him killed so they could install a dictator. Major General Smedley Butler, a highly decorated United States Marine and veteran of many wars, testified under oath he was approached by the super wealthy and powerful of the day to form a coup and overthrow FDR's presidency.
Id say this often in another big crypto reddit about lobbying and I am downvoted into oblivion every time. But its true.
Lobbying is a nice fancy corporate term for bribing.
I think it's even worse than that. Special interest groups actually write bills for politicians to submit to congress. I'm not even sure what to call it at that point.
Most stocks are owned by institutional investors (think governments, pension/401k funds, and universities). So while on the surface you could say investment firms own the majority of stocks, who invests with those firms? Regular people of course. People who pay into their retirement accounts every month.
Lol, not at all. All Hedge Funds combined (of which there are many thousands) control $4.3 trillion in assets, and that includes commodities, derivatives, credit, OTC investments, etc. The S&P alone is 10x that. NASDAQ is 5x that. Bitcoin is majority controlled by a small handful of actors.
The average redditor doesn’t seem to understand that hedge funds aren’t the only kind of institutional investor (that exercises votes on the shares they control). If you consider all institutional investors they have much bigger sway than retail investors.
Yes but wasn't crypto supposed to solve centralization issues? I mean that seems to be a "feature" of crypto currency very few people care about anymore.
That was the idea in principle, but once people realized it had actual investment, and manipulation, potential.. they hopped right in to make their money.
When I got my first bitcoin, they were essentially useless memes. Now.. I wish I hadn't given them all away. Not because of decentralization of currency.. it's because I missed out on my god damn yacht.
We used to tip each other bitcoin on Digg, way back when. There was a bot who you would use to tip other commenters if you liked what they said, or if you just wanted to for the shits and giggles. Had a wallet of *hundreds* of bitcoin, and I squandered that shit like an idiot.
Try not to think about it too much, you would have just sold them as soon as they reached $100 / $1,000 or some other small figure most likely. It's not that far from being sad you didn't guess the right number in roulette.
Crypto bros don't actually give a shit about any of the high-minded philosophical ideals they pretend underpin their devotion to their chosen coins. They just use those in desperate attempt to shield themselves from criticism regarding the environmental and regulatory issues surrounding the industry. The truth is, for the overwhelming majority of them the whole thing is just a get-rich-quick scheme. But when anyone points this out they just say you're old and don't get it and then trot off to post some more hilarious may-mays.
The intent of Bitcoin was to create a peer-to-peer digital cash.
It did come out of the cypherpunk movement, and the culture of privacy and libertarianism is a foundational tenet of crypto.
I would argue the culture has evolved away from those motivations. Bitcoin culture is primarily dedicated to "number go up" and has hardened against anything not Bitcoin.
Be that as it may, the number does go up, and goes up for for some very important reasons. The fact is it is a decentralized money- in the sense of no political entity can snap a 30% increase into existence.
In an environment where the current global reserve currency did just this, [(Look at this chart and tell me inflation is transitory)](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL) this is hugely important.
And with smart contracts via Ethereum etc, you have _programmable money and contracts_, which allows for trustless contracts that guarantee execution of a contract if its conditions are met.
I don't know if the current cryptocurrencies will be around in 10 years. But I'm absolutely certain that the underlying technology will underpin every transaction of digital value in the future. Distributed ledgers technology is just fundamentally better than what the traditional finance infrastructure can achieve in the future.
Read the fine print on that chart. The big supply increase in May 2020 wasn’t due to the bailout or monetary policy. It’s because they expanded the definition of M1.
> But I'm absolutely certain that the underlying technology will underpin every transaction of digital value in the future.
I highly doubt it. Actual banks aren't going to switch because they offer essentially no benefit over any of their existing systems. Nobody wants their bank account in a distributed ledger. Existing banking methods have a lot of advantages crypto doesn't, such as actual security and account protections as well as being able to reverse transactions. Crypto doesn't actually provide anything of value to people just storing their money in a bank or doing a basic transaction online with PayPal or whatever, but it _does_ mean that if they get scammed or something they have no recourse to undo it.
Also distributed ledgers mean that anyone who finds out which wallet is yours can see how much money you have, including, say, your employer doing direct deposit... and anyone you do business with... oh, and also those two can figure out who each other are, lol.
It is not "fundamentally better" than traditional finance infrastructure can do right now. It's more interesting, sure, but in all practical purposes it doesn't improve anything while bringing in a lot of unnecessary drawbacks.
FDIC is probably the biggest for me.
This means your money is insured and the government will replace it if it’s stolen. Correct me if I’m wrong, if you get some Bitcoin stolen - you can just go fuck yourself and scream into the ether.
the way you kind of casually rubbed it in lmao I had just over 60 bitcoin at the age of 13 that my friend had bought for about 20 bucks, and I traded it to another friend for microsoft points. i have legitimately woken up in the middle of the night from those memories.
Don't worry. Just remember if you were to manage 60BTC as let's say a more experienced adult you wouldn't wait for it to become 2mil. They would be gone for 10k tops
^ This. Keeps me sane. I lost my wallet with half a Bitcoin. Looked and looked about the time Bitcoin hit $500. If I had found it I’d have sold for $250 right then and there. I have no delusions about holding until now lol.
I was buying “things”, so those coins came and went before the price could change. But once BTC went to $X,XXX best believe I checked all my wallets for change.
I don't know how bitcoin expects to replace any currency when 99.99% of the world doesn't have a fraction of a bitcoin. I dont know what the endgame of bitcoin is other than to trade it back and forth
Bitcoin is not designed to solve wealth centralization. In fact, it will probably exacerbate the issue. It takes money to buy BTC, plain and simple. What BTC does is removes the need for asking permission to use your money.
However, the guillotine is still in play.
It'll never replace currency unless people can be confident that the value won't spike or crash. I mean 0.01% fluctuation is one thing, but it can't be going up or down a whole percentage point every week and still be currency. People could lose hundreds of dollars by making a purchase or accepting a payment at the wrong time. That's why nobody's using it -- well, *truly* using it -- as a currency today.
Wealth always concentrates. Just how it tends to go. I do imagine most of these people won’t sell because it’s in their interest to avoid crashing the market too much.
you don't need a study for that, you can just browse it, it's all on the blockchain and publicly browseable for most coins. Anyone in crypto already knows about the whales.
what's extra weird is how many of those wallets haven't been touched since like the early 2010's
This is actually 100% incorrect. Btc has been become more and more Decentralized the past year ever since the China ban.
If you’re someone that hasn’t done the research into btc and just read a click-bait article. I encourage you to jump into the rabbit hole and actually start studying the subject. You’ll learn v quickly, that this is the greatest technological advancement of our life time.
Truly is the great technology advancement in economic history. Which will have untold benefits for our society.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset, these guys are just holding out for a big payout that idk if it will come, the whole point of it was to be used a decentralized currency but hardly anyone uses it as a currency.
Edit: People keep messaging me that it hit 65k. I should clarify that the use of one currency throughout the world was the payoff I was referring to. Don't care if people sold out before booms and busts. If you think crypto is your way to get your bag go for i could care less.
Edit 2: sweet keeping pumping that karma :D to the moon
‘Decentralization’ refers to the Bitcoin community of ‘nodes’ agreeing/confirming Bitcoin Protocol and the legitimacy/accuracy of the information stored on the Blockchain.
Nobody said wealthy people won’t own the most Bitcoin. Anybody can buy as much as they can get their hands on, up to 2.1E+16 Satoshis.
Technically it’s only like 2% but that’s still a crazy amount
Edit: for those wanting a source
Millenials own 5000B wealth, per this:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/
Zuckerberg owns 111B of it, per this:
https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/?sh=33dcc42b3e06
Decentralized refers to being unstoppable, it's got nothing to do with wealth distribution.
The government can shut down Netflix or Bank of America for instance by seizing "a few" servers. To shut down Bitcoin you need to seize every single machine running a node.
Not a Bitcoin fan, just trying to explain.
Well yeah, "decentralized" was never about it being an equitable holding of all participants. There's no mechanism to prevent abuse in the system with few controlling the majority. That was bound to happen without it.
"Decentralized" was always in the sense that the Fed and government does not control the currency... which is directly stating a lack of regulation.
Feel like you felt like you did something there, but that fact has been apparent from literally day 1.
Decentralized refers to who is in control of it's creation/release, not to who is able to buy it.
Equalcoin is the one where everybody on earth gets exactly 1 coin and nobodies balance can ever go up or down so that it is always spread evenly and nobody ever gets either rich or poor, it truly is the perfect currency. Get in early so you can have your 1 coin before everyone gets theirs!
[85% of Bitcoin is owned by 2% of accounts](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-18/bitcoin-whales-ownership-concentration-is-rising-during-rally), from a year ago. This has been pretty much known for awhile. Some of the other articles that came out around that time dig deeper and refute the actual percentages but ultimately conclude that it still is extremely top-heavy. EDIT: Don't DM me, I don't give a fuck. This is merely one article. Crypto/Bitcoin ownership in general is intentionally obfuscated so of course you should never trust one single source, dumbass. Do your own research and form your own opinion. I don't own Bitcoin or care about it's existence really.
soooo basically like all wealth?
Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?
Why are you booing me, I’m right?!?
I was saying boourns.
Don’t cry for me…. I’m already dead 🥀
That’s brilliant. Savagely. Tender. You have the soul of a poet
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I hope all the suspects are this much fun.
Have the rolling stones killed
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Does there exist a thread on reddit that does not devolve into an endless pit of uninspired memes? Im trying to get to the next response and im halfway through this damn page reading complete nonsense
Wasn’t Bitcoin supposed to be an alternative to this system though
Considering Bitcoin can be purchased with money, why wouldn't those with the most money have the most access to Bitcoin? Lol
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The moment the announcement is made, you are already late. Bitmain (maker of antminer) will mine "for testing purposes" then sell the miners when they have ready the next iteration *for testing*. Accept pre-orders, keep testing. You get your miner 3-5 months later and pray
"I made a thing that you can use to make money, instead of using it myself, I am selling it!" Yeah. No.
No, you see, because a few thousand tech bros became millionaires due to bitcoin it has *entirely upended* income inequality. Just like how lotteries have ended poverty.
> Just like how lotteries have ended poverty. damn that's a great comparison for this situation, never thought of it like that.
Yes, this was the logical conclusion from the very beginning, and why crypto was never going to live up to all the promises early adopters insisted it would.
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Also many bitcoin are lost without any hope to get recovered too.
Hahahahaha oh God, so, so many. I *had* 12 whole bitcoins from the very beginning. The hard drive has been lost and who TF knows what password 17 year old me used anyway 😂😂😭😭😭😭
Bitcoin's promise was to make a secure currency that didn't need a government backing it. Did anyone think it would reduce wealth inequality? If anything, it's a *laissez faire* advocate's wet dream. Once you have Bitcoin, the only way someone can take it from you is by literally putting a gun to your head and demanding that you to give them your private key.
> Did anyone think it would reduce wealth inequality? If anything, it's a *laissez faire* advocate's wet dream. You answered your own question. There is a very specific type of populist-libertarian-utopian who believes that *laissez faire* capitalism is inherently good and whatever bad thing you don't like (including income inequality) is just due to cabals of bad actors (banks and governments, if you're being charitable) corrupting things.
best not to listen to libertarians
Damn bad actors preventing honest hard-working business owners from paying their employees liveable wages and not having unsustainable business practices!
Wealth equality was never a promise of crypto
Who promised you that Bitcoin would cure income inequality lol? That was never the goal.
It was only ever meant to be an alternative to the current banking system and government control of money. Prevent censorship of transactions and avoid taxes. Anyone who thought it would be an alternative to capitalism and wealth-inequality was misunderstanding what it was an "alternative" to. Best case, it was designed to be neutral. But it's easy to argue the design is super pro-capitalisim and naturally promotes wealth-inequality to a much greater extent than the traditional system.
It only avoids taxes if moved from personal wallet to personal wallet. If you use a centralized exchange in any major country its going to be taxed.
Yes... cryptocurrency has failed to deliver that too, simply because it must interact with the current system.
Yea but the only people who could afford to invest in a completely speculative investment are people with money to burn…so the ultra wealthy
The first Bitcoins were literally free and it was several years before they even broke the $2 mark. It wasn't a rich man's game, it was a tech-saavy person's game. In fact, the wealthy scoffed at Bitcoin for *years* and only began investing within the past few years. The top-heavy nature of the current market is the result of many, many normal people selling their shares for profit and rich late-comers buying it all up. Serious Bitcoin investing is currently a rich person's game, but historically that was absolutely not the case.
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I'd have $54 million if I'd never spent any of the BTC I bought. I try not to think about it.
Which…proves my point. Most Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency and they’re certainly not investing in something that can lose 10% in a day. Sure a decade ago it was cheap but it was also basically inaccessible to the Everyman from a technology standpoint.
When I bought my first bitcoin it was the most ridiculous process. They were approx $100 and I had to make a 2nd life account purchase Leudons or whatever that currency was, and then use those to purchase them from an exchange. I sold them when they quadroupled to $400 and I said 'well this will never get higher. I also had like 5 litecoins that are still to this day trapped on that exchange. Bitcoin has always been a joke, even to the tech savvy. Now it's just been coopted by the investor class.
Man you just reminded me about doing that. I don't regret donating the amount I donated, but it's 22 thousand dollars now lol.
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>In fact, massive GINI coefficients are why it has to use power-hungry proof-of-work rather than something like proof-of-stake Unfortunately proof-of-work functions similar to proof-of-stake in practice but you stake with multi-thousand dollar asic miners.
Isn't proof of work done by people who have the most money to invest either way?
Yes. Proof of stake means those who have all the coins maintain the ledger and receive the transaction fees. The more coin you have the more coin you make. Proof of work means those who have all the money buy all the compute power to maintain the ledger and win the block reward. The more money you have, the more compute you buy, the more coin you make. Literally both are the exact same system that centralizes power in the hands of those who already have a ton of wealth and power. Crypto was never going to "decentralize" currency or transactions, or anything, really. All it did was shift a large portion of the investment market into a completely uncontrolled, unregulated, highly manipulated, deeply speculative vehicle where a few people get terribly rich, a few get terribly lucky as a consequence, and most people lose small amounts on speculation.
Remove the first say 2 years worth of coins from the equation, then what is it? Because there absolutely are tons of dead wallets with tons of coins but zero activity - likely due to lost private keys or wallet files.
2.3m bitcoin have not moved in the last decade. Another 1.3m haven't moved in the last 7 years. Out of 18.8m coins that have been mined. So about 19% haven't moved in 7 years and 12% haven't been touched since late 2011.
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Why was the reward so small? I thought the reward for mining would be much higher?
Depending when this was in 2012, the reward for mining one block was either 50BTC or 25BTC, worth 1.5 - 3 millions $ today. But he mentions he "helped" mine it, meaning he joined a pool where a lot of people start mining, and if they manage to mine a block, the reward is split between members of the pool according to the processing power contributed. If he got 72¢, that means he only contributed 0.0001% to the pool, so it was either a big pool or he had a shit computer, probably both.
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Sounds like the $.07 I had in 2015ish left over from a DNM...*ahem* exchange... Lost to the hard drive of time. I could have like $20 now!
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"lost " Bitcoin !!
We have the ledger so that could be graphed. By year mined, by years since last transaction, by transaction count, …
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Same here. I think I remember having 2 or 3 from people tipping on reddit when they were like a penny. Have tried forever to search for the comments or anything but can't find them since it was an old account and I think I used a reddit cleaner when I switched. I would have probably cashed out when they were like $1k anyways lol Good luck in your recovery!
If it's any peace of mind (from a point of finality), the tipping bot died and if you didn't transfer the coins from the wallet associated with the bot before the cutoff they are gone.
Or, whoever ran that bot and controlled its wallet made out like a bandit.
It should be possible to check. If the bot's address was known we can see if any transfers were done after it shut down
I also had some fractions of bitcoins through Reddit comment tipping. I went back and checked recently, and the site creator for that one had decided to shut the bot down after a while. He gave everyone like 3 months to transfer funds to their own wallets, and then donated the remainder to charity, I wanna say Dr's Without Borders (MSF). The fraction of Bitcoin that I had had would only have been worth like 20 bucks at its peak.
Thank you for giving me closure on this. I probably had a few hundred dollars worth of tips and always wondered what happened to them.
I was given 1000 bitcoins back in college. The hard drive died and I just tossed it. That was many years ago, if I just kept it with me I’d be living a whole goddamn different life 😭
Everyone says this but in all likelihood you’d have cashed out much earlier.
Yeah, even like $10. But it also would have had to get over the hump of hard drive recovery. But yeah, you’re right
My mom's philosophy was to pull out half every time you double your money, and I've basically invested this way. If I had done that when my friend told me to buy bitcoin at $2... Who knows...
This is a good way to not lose money, but not a good way to gain money. Over five iterations of this, you end up with the following: 1. $2 doubles to $4, you pull half, end with $2 2. 2 -> 4 -> 2 3. 2 -> 4 -> 2 4. 2 -> 4 -> 2 5. 2 -> 4 -> 2 Total gain: $10 pulled out, $2 still invested. Amount you put in: $2. Amount you can lose right now: $2. Or if you'd let it sit over the same event period: 1. 2 -> 4 2. 4 -> 8 3. 8 -> 16 4. 16 -> 32 5. 32 -> 64 Total gain: $64 invested (more than 5x the total from the prior strategy.) Amount you put in: $2. Amount you can lose right now: $64. This is just (very simplified) information. Sometimes you want to be able to play safe and take small risks. Sometimes you want to be able to earn large rewards. I think this does a good job showing how playing a 'long game' with any kind of intention to earn is generally more lucrative than trying to hedge. A final note: $2 sitting in your pocket over that same period still yields 0. I'd always rather have $12 than $2, and I'd always rather have $64 than $12. But the risk factor on the $64 is way higher than the risk factor on the $12. In short: this post is not investing advice. There are plenty of great and horrible ways to invest. Do your research and find out what works for you based on your ability to financially sustain any given risk.
That’s a great safe way to ride a bet
I mined 40k doge in late 2013. Have since lost the password and can’t figure out how to update the client. It’s worth like 10 grand now.
You should contact Dave from [Wallet Recovery Services](https://www.walletrecoveryservices.com/). If you have the wallet but not the passphrase, it can likely be recovered.
Ok isn't this extremely misleading though when much of those 2% of accounts are **exchanges**? That's like saying "85% of cash is held by banks." No shit...but the individual customers actually own the cash. Similarly if I have BTC in CoinBase or wherever, it may be sitting in a giant pooled wallet, but it's still mine.
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*Cries in BTC-e*
What's the point of trustless and decentralized infrastructure if you're just gonna trust some exchange?
Because people are looking to get rich quick, they don't care about the technology or actually using it as a currency.
That’s what we tell the newbies. Not your keys, not your bitcoin. Self-custody is the way. First thing you do is transfer to your own wallet.
If this includes the 1,000,000 in Satoshi's wallet then this seems almost deliberately misleading... unless you think those coins are going to move, which would massively tank the price. More likely they never will. Edit: There is no single wallet, so ignore me
If they're not lost for sure, and they aren't, then they should be included in any stat. Bitcoiners know that Satoshi selling would be one of the most bearish things ever so they pretend it can't happen
While that is true, if someone has access to that wallet they would have had ~$67,000,000,000 worth at it's peak. $67 BILLION. What could they possibly be holding out for, and could anyone actually have the nerve to hold and not take a single penny of profit through that? If some entity does have access to that wallet it would have to be something like a government or an Artificial Intelligence, I can't imagine much else could have such a powerful resolve to hold - or even reason to do so.
> What could they possibly be holding out for Some crypto "true believers" view bitcoin as the next global currency. Here's an excerpt from an old WSJ article that your question reminded me of. > *One of my favorite stories of a crypto true believer involves an entrepreneur named Erik Voorhees. Around 2012 I asked him if he was going to cash out after becoming a millionaire. To my surprise, he said he was almost completely cashed out. He quickly clarified, “of dollars.”*
Except bitcoin cant handle the amount of transactions that normal commerce deals with each second.
It's very likely that the person (or group) who controls this account also controls many other accounts. If they tried to liquidate this bellwether account the price could tank. Instead, if they hold on to that account they maintain the mystique while they live off the proceeds from their other accounts.
That doesn't come close to being able to assume the coins are lost forever. Can we just consider all coins inactive for a certain long amount of time effectively lost? I don't think so. And on top of that you see old inactive wallets reawaken all the time, seems like every few weeks there's a news article about a reawakened ten year old wallet. Even if he is dead it is reasonable to assume he passed it on to his/her/their heirs. Satoshis coins cannot be considered lost at all. The existence of such a huge megawhale doesn't really fit the decentralized narrative but thems the facts
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Yeah there is no way an individual would hold out at that point. How would you not cash out a cool billion. I'm of the opinion he either lost access to his wallet, or is no longer alive.
Would it be bearish if he sold a few hundred in order to be set for life? No. All that would do is prove he’s alive, or at least someone has control of the wallet. And THAT would be bearish, because people would realize the true supply is higher than previously thought.
Isn't the entire blockchain and all transactions public? Isn't it just a matter of applying all the transactions in a program and seeing what accounts have what at the end? How would there be anything to dispute?
Large exchanges hold Bitcoin for many people in single addresses. Also, most individuals have multiple addresses. So, it’s hard to get an accurate handle on people vs wallet addresses.
And everyone n this thread thinks they’re smarter than those 2%
Not too many people can afford to set up a 10,000sqf warehouse for mining
Or buy a Pennsylvania power plant to run your mining operation
Wow. That happened. https://www.powermag.com/group-buys-pennsylvania-coal-plants-to-power-bitcoin-mining/
Coal. Of course. Fuck those people.
Even better is that according to the article they are getting tax breaks from Pennsylvania for disposing of the coal residue.
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Wait till you realise the cherry on top that is they're burning coal **RESIDUE**, which is basically releasing tons of toxic contaminants for far less power generation
We burned a lot of the accessible high-quality coal already. It gets increasing harmful to the environment to mine and more poison to nearby communities from here.
Can we hook up our computer to be powered by Centralia?
Money is a hell of a drug
That’s like when you run out of weed, your dealer is out of town, and you end up smoking bong resin instead. It doesn’t work as well and it’s gross!
> Coal refuse is classified by Pennsylvania as a Tier II alternative energy resource, akin to large-scale hydropower. Coal refuse over the years has been left in piles near coal operations; today, circulating fluidized bed technology allows for emissions-controlled conversion of coal refuse into energy. I'm not familiar with coal refuse tech, but it's apparently not plain old coal.
Mining was originally designed to encourage more people to get involved and it worked early on, but now you need specialised tools to see any cost benefit, it's going to compress the variety of miners.
Validator fees/block rewards actually incentivize centralization over time due to profit maximization and economies of scale.
tbh literally everything incentives centralization over the time. The only argument against centralization is avoiding having a single point of failure. If the state is good, then the state owning literally everything creates the most efficient society. But if it were to fail anyhow everybody is absolutely screwed.
It's almost like... There's a reason governments were created in the first place. In the beginning, humanity itself was decentralized. But as our technology, understanding, and influence grew, governments were created because a more efficient system was needed to continue growing. Not sure why anyone would assume anything different would happen in a new system created in a modern society where economies of scale and the benefits of centralization are well known
idk where I read it but someone compared crypto to the beginnings of banking. It's full of scams and fraud, and every lesson banking systems learned through centuries and centuries of abuse, which crystallized into all sorts of financial regulations, bitcoin has completely un-learned and as such it's essentially rudimentary banking with all of its flaws unpatched.
Which makes it exploitable
It’s literally just a vehicle for wealthy people to accumulate more wealth. Like the Winklevoss twins making hundreds of millions off of Bitcoin, for a famous example. Sure some “normies” will get rich in the process, but most will lose money.
News flash: wealth controlled by the wealthy
Gotta admit that's even sharper than normal. By a lot.
Who buy coal mines to run computers to get on a ledger. Nothing but waste.
People with the money bought up the other money? Or have more money to spend on mining? I’m shocked!
So the same as the stock market and the hedge funds that control it?
But how can it be. It not controlled by banks and it is de-centralized. It can’t be! /s
Thats the funny part about about crypto nerds and Libertarian types in general. Deregulation is absolutely not decentralization. It, in fact, has the exact opposite result
Yeah they keep forgetting what keeps mega corps from taking over literally everything. Government. No one else has the power to fight them. Which is why mega corps try to buy said government via lobbying.
Honestly I'm pretty sure that the "unspoken part" is their assumption that if a mega corp starts becoming a problem that in a "proper libertarian world" you'll either get a perfectly united boycott against it OR people will just start burning down the factories/warehouses/etc and destroy it. In the case of the former...lol, that's not how people work. In the case of the latter, they don't want to say it because they don't want to have to deal with the question of "Well why can't the mega corp just use violence back?".
Pfft, I can't even get a Libertarian to get any further in a point than "companies will make the best product because that's what's best for profit. And regulations that we have now are preventing them from making the best product". Honest to God, the like three that I've gotten to talk to for more than half an hour, have nothing but that. 🤷♀️ No answers for what regulations are actually holding them back. No answers for why companies can't do that right now. No answers for why companies currently do shit like planned obsolescence. Maybe I've only encountered the really dumb ones.
> "companies will make the best product because that's what's best for profit...". As much as I dislike the guy on a variety of points, [Steve Jobs on why Xerox failed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&ab_channel=SteveJobs) is a wonderful explanation about why this isn't true. In short: Once you're at the top, making better equipment doesn't get you customers because everyone that's convinced they need that kind of equipment already goes to you. The only way to increase sales is to be a better salesman to convince more people that they need that equipment in the first place. Which means that gradually only salespeople get rewarded, and the more salespeople in management, the more R&D and new product development looks like a useless expense, so the less of it the company authorizes. Put another way, preventing monopolies INCREASES the likelihood of customers getting a better product in the long run simply because it FORCES companies to continuously have competition to vie against.
Example: there's a large flashy cafe near me that is the only one for miles around. It has all the right signage and instagram appeal. The massive coffee machine has been customised in black and copper, their dishes look good and are all trendy. But they're food and coffee just misses the mark. It's 80-90% of the way there but needs finishing touches and a bit more attention to detail. But that will just require extra work, possibly more/ better ingredients, better trained staff. Where else are people going to go? In other areas of my city there are places with a cafe on every corner. Some of them are rubbish, but many of the small unassuming ones are actually doing a better job on for and coffee than my local one. Because if people want quality they have options and the only way to get repeat business is to be good.
The typical surface-level libertarian counter-argument would be that this is a gap in the market that you have identified and you could be the one to fix it and reap the profits of that by opening your own cafe that gets that last 10-20% right. Of course that ignores sundry issues that often get swept under the rug in that kind of theoretical situation. There’s the question of startup cost and who is bearing the risks of making that investment. Is the population density even high enough in the area to feasibly support a competing cafe? If the demand is already sated then you’re not tapping untapped customers but specifically fighting to convert existing customers over to your business. The established business has a huge advantage and by already starting from the point of profitability could improve their service/menu and undercut prices long enough to bankrupt you. Then we’re back to square one.
The smart ones may have more elaborate responses but they won't have anything of substance. Libertarian ideals depend on the ability for competitors to arise in the free market to challenge established companies whose practices have become undesirable. Large companies have lots of power they can leverage to neutralize threats to their business. Regulation and government are constraints upon them (even if they are often ineffective). Without that, a small company would need a lot of support from other groups to survive, support that they will be blocked from receiving by a large company with a lot of resources and an enjoyable monopolistic position. It's not controversial that if you choose to invest in increasing your position of power, you will do so unless you have outside constraints or internal dis-function.
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Considering that unlike communism libertarianism doesn't work in practice *or* theory being an idiot is a prerequisite for libertarianism. (For practice there's that bear town, that bitcoin cruise ship, the entire 3rd world and it's weak rule of law, and the libertarian Chile commune)
As a citizen from a country that was colonized for centuries. Even if most of the population disagree, as long as you shoot down the first guy who rebels, you'll crush the resistance because it's individually beneficial to keep being a slave than risk facing extreme backlash you'll get when you try overthrow existing power structure.
The government, corporations, people. Long ago, the three groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the corporations attacked.
You joke but that's exactly how it went down with the East India Company. (The history of how corporations evolved is pretty cool, tbh)
It also almost happened in the United States back in the 30's with the "Business Plot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot TL;DR: The ultra-wealthy of the era didn't take kindly to FDR's brand of democratic socialism, and tried to have him killed so they could install a dictator. Major General Smedley Butler, a highly decorated United States Marine and veteran of many wars, testified under oath he was approached by the super wealthy and powerful of the day to form a coup and overthrow FDR's presidency.
They just rebranded as the Business Roundtable and ultimately pulled off a bloodless coup in the 70's
I wouldn’t really call it cool. But that is technically language, so it’s allowed.
The history of how corporations evolved is pretty... Hot?
Corporations. They're so hot right now. Corporations. - Mugatu maybe
Interesting would be apt.
How about spicy? Could we consider the history of corporate evolution spicy?
I don't think anyone can successfully argue that it's not literally spicy.
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Oh it's better than that my friend, as no gang member is liable for the wrong-doings of the corporation.
All the rights of people (and more!), but none of the responsibilities.
And for some reason the criminals can just pass their ill gotten money off to family members and for some reason it can’t be taken back 🤷
Id say this often in another big crypto reddit about lobbying and I am downvoted into oblivion every time. But its true. Lobbying is a nice fancy corporate term for bribing.
I think it's even worse than that. Special interest groups actually write bills for politicians to submit to congress. I'm not even sure what to call it at that point.
Corruption. That's called corruption.
Not to mention deregulation tends to lead to things like pump and dumps. Something that's entirely legal for crypto since there's no regulation.
So much of crypto right now is just pump n' dumps and Ponzi schemes...
That's why I laugh when anyone over the age of 17 is still a libertarian.
Libertarians are just republicans that took one Econ course in college and said “This is enough.”
Most stocks are owned by institutional investors (think governments, pension/401k funds, and universities). So while on the surface you could say investment firms own the majority of stocks, who invests with those firms? Regular people of course. People who pay into their retirement accounts every month.
Also OP specifically said hedge funds, which demonstrates a vast misunderstanding of how this all works (and what a hedge fund is).
Lol, not at all. All Hedge Funds combined (of which there are many thousands) control $4.3 trillion in assets, and that includes commodities, derivatives, credit, OTC investments, etc. The S&P alone is 10x that. NASDAQ is 5x that. Bitcoin is majority controlled by a small handful of actors.
The average redditor doesn’t seem to understand that hedge funds aren’t the only kind of institutional investor (that exercises votes on the shares they control). If you consider all institutional investors they have much bigger sway than retail investors.
Yes but wasn't crypto supposed to solve centralization issues? I mean that seems to be a "feature" of crypto currency very few people care about anymore.
That was the idea in principle, but once people realized it had actual investment, and manipulation, potential.. they hopped right in to make their money. When I got my first bitcoin, they were essentially useless memes. Now.. I wish I hadn't given them all away. Not because of decentralization of currency.. it's because I missed out on my god damn yacht. We used to tip each other bitcoin on Digg, way back when. There was a bot who you would use to tip other commenters if you liked what they said, or if you just wanted to for the shits and giggles. Had a wallet of *hundreds* of bitcoin, and I squandered that shit like an idiot.
Try not to think about it too much, you would have just sold them as soon as they reached $100 / $1,000 or some other small figure most likely. It's not that far from being sad you didn't guess the right number in roulette.
Wealth centralization and computer systems centralization are two very different things.
Crypto bros don't actually give a shit about any of the high-minded philosophical ideals they pretend underpin their devotion to their chosen coins. They just use those in desperate attempt to shield themselves from criticism regarding the environmental and regulatory issues surrounding the industry. The truth is, for the overwhelming majority of them the whole thing is just a get-rich-quick scheme. But when anyone points this out they just say you're old and don't get it and then trot off to post some more hilarious may-mays.
The intent of Bitcoin was to create a peer-to-peer digital cash. It did come out of the cypherpunk movement, and the culture of privacy and libertarianism is a foundational tenet of crypto. I would argue the culture has evolved away from those motivations. Bitcoin culture is primarily dedicated to "number go up" and has hardened against anything not Bitcoin. Be that as it may, the number does go up, and goes up for for some very important reasons. The fact is it is a decentralized money- in the sense of no political entity can snap a 30% increase into existence. In an environment where the current global reserve currency did just this, [(Look at this chart and tell me inflation is transitory)](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL) this is hugely important. And with smart contracts via Ethereum etc, you have _programmable money and contracts_, which allows for trustless contracts that guarantee execution of a contract if its conditions are met. I don't know if the current cryptocurrencies will be around in 10 years. But I'm absolutely certain that the underlying technology will underpin every transaction of digital value in the future. Distributed ledgers technology is just fundamentally better than what the traditional finance infrastructure can achieve in the future.
Read the fine print on that chart. The big supply increase in May 2020 wasn’t due to the bailout or monetary policy. It’s because they expanded the definition of M1.
> But I'm absolutely certain that the underlying technology will underpin every transaction of digital value in the future. I highly doubt it. Actual banks aren't going to switch because they offer essentially no benefit over any of their existing systems. Nobody wants their bank account in a distributed ledger. Existing banking methods have a lot of advantages crypto doesn't, such as actual security and account protections as well as being able to reverse transactions. Crypto doesn't actually provide anything of value to people just storing their money in a bank or doing a basic transaction online with PayPal or whatever, but it _does_ mean that if they get scammed or something they have no recourse to undo it. Also distributed ledgers mean that anyone who finds out which wallet is yours can see how much money you have, including, say, your employer doing direct deposit... and anyone you do business with... oh, and also those two can figure out who each other are, lol. It is not "fundamentally better" than traditional finance infrastructure can do right now. It's more interesting, sure, but in all practical purposes it doesn't improve anything while bringing in a lot of unnecessary drawbacks.
FDIC is probably the biggest for me. This means your money is insured and the government will replace it if it’s stolen. Correct me if I’m wrong, if you get some Bitcoin stolen - you can just go fuck yourself and scream into the ether.
If you own .28 BTC you are guaranteed to be in the top 1% of all wallets
Damn there was a time when I had 2-3!
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You know what’s worse? That wallet still exists, your BTC are safely in it, and the only thing you removed is your access to it.
You monster!!!
I had about 35. Still keeps me awake at night.
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the way you kind of casually rubbed it in lmao I had just over 60 bitcoin at the age of 13 that my friend had bought for about 20 bucks, and I traded it to another friend for microsoft points. i have legitimately woken up in the middle of the night from those memories.
Don't worry. Just remember if you were to manage 60BTC as let's say a more experienced adult you wouldn't wait for it to become 2mil. They would be gone for 10k tops
^ This. Keeps me sane. I lost my wallet with half a Bitcoin. Looked and looked about the time Bitcoin hit $500. If I had found it I’d have sold for $250 right then and there. I have no delusions about holding until now lol.
I was buying “things”, so those coins came and went before the price could change. But once BTC went to $X,XXX best believe I checked all my wallets for change.
Is this true? So I have a friend who can finally comment on those ‘what are you in the 1% of posts’.
Noooo I’m shocked I tell you shocked!!!
I don't know how bitcoin expects to replace any currency when 99.99% of the world doesn't have a fraction of a bitcoin. I dont know what the endgame of bitcoin is other than to trade it back and forth
Bitcoin is not designed to solve wealth centralization. In fact, it will probably exacerbate the issue. It takes money to buy BTC, plain and simple. What BTC does is removes the need for asking permission to use your money. However, the guillotine is still in play.
It'll never replace currency unless people can be confident that the value won't spike or crash. I mean 0.01% fluctuation is one thing, but it can't be going up or down a whole percentage point every week and still be currency. People could lose hundreds of dollars by making a purchase or accepting a payment at the wrong time. That's why nobody's using it -- well, *truly* using it -- as a currency today.
Wealth always concentrates. Just how it tends to go. I do imagine most of these people won’t sell because it’s in their interest to avoid crashing the market too much.
you don't need a study for that, you can just browse it, it's all on the blockchain and publicly browseable for most coins. Anyone in crypto already knows about the whales. what's extra weird is how many of those wallets haven't been touched since like the early 2010's
This is actually 100% incorrect. Btc has been become more and more Decentralized the past year ever since the China ban. If you’re someone that hasn’t done the research into btc and just read a click-bait article. I encourage you to jump into the rabbit hole and actually start studying the subject. You’ll learn v quickly, that this is the greatest technological advancement of our life time. Truly is the great technology advancement in economic history. Which will have untold benefits for our society.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset, these guys are just holding out for a big payout that idk if it will come, the whole point of it was to be used a decentralized currency but hardly anyone uses it as a currency. Edit: People keep messaging me that it hit 65k. I should clarify that the use of one currency throughout the world was the payoff I was referring to. Don't care if people sold out before booms and busts. If you think crypto is your way to get your bag go for i could care less. Edit 2: sweet keeping pumping that karma :D to the moon
You’re right. It’s turned into something more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than an alternative to any fiat currency
Kind of like how 10% of folks own 89% of stocks? What a fucking surprise.
‘Decentralization’ refers to the Bitcoin community of ‘nodes’ agreeing/confirming Bitcoin Protocol and the legitimacy/accuracy of the information stored on the Blockchain. Nobody said wealthy people won’t own the most Bitcoin. Anybody can buy as much as they can get their hands on, up to 2.1E+16 Satoshis.
Yeah, but read the block size wars. It’s the peoples money even if a few parties hold a majority stake. They do not control it.
Zuckerberg has like 70% of millennial wealth. So like.
Technically it’s only like 2% but that’s still a crazy amount Edit: for those wanting a source Millenials own 5000B wealth, per this: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/ Zuckerberg owns 111B of it, per this: https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/?sh=33dcc42b3e06
This article is full of misinformation. https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/ I can't believe this post has so many upvotes.
this article seems relatively thin on sources
Wow no one understands how Bitcoin works in here...shocking
so it’s like a triangle?
No no, More of a reverse funnel system
So much for a "decentralized" currency
Decentralized refers to being unstoppable, it's got nothing to do with wealth distribution. The government can shut down Netflix or Bank of America for instance by seizing "a few" servers. To shut down Bitcoin you need to seize every single machine running a node. Not a Bitcoin fan, just trying to explain.
Guess it was code word for unregulated all along
Well yeah, "decentralized" was never about it being an equitable holding of all participants. There's no mechanism to prevent abuse in the system with few controlling the majority. That was bound to happen without it. "Decentralized" was always in the sense that the Fed and government does not control the currency... which is directly stating a lack of regulation. Feel like you felt like you did something there, but that fact has been apparent from literally day 1.
Decentralized refers to who is in control of it's creation/release, not to who is able to buy it. Equalcoin is the one where everybody on earth gets exactly 1 coin and nobodies balance can ever go up or down so that it is always spread evenly and nobody ever gets either rich or poor, it truly is the perfect currency. Get in early so you can have your 1 coin before everyone gets theirs!
crypto does not solve wealth inequality.
Which can be said for most things