Dear Bitcoiners (and all others),
how is the Bitcoin distribution changing over time?
This table is from Oct. 2020...
@stayoutoftherz/how-many-bitcoin-do-you-own
This one is from April 2022
@stayoutoftherz/how-many-bitcoin-do-you-own-the-2022-edition
And this is from yesterday:
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html
Still some progress towards more adoption and decentralization but not too much. Way more addresses with <0,00001 BTC are in existence (4,9 mio. vs. 3,4 mio. 2 years ago, +44%) and also more addresses in the next larger cateory. But still most of the coins are held in whale addresses of the category 1000 to 10000 and all addresses with up to 0,1 Bitcoin together (>90% of all addresses) hold not even 1,5% of the Bitcoins. It is like the Pareto rule (20% hold 80%) but on steroids! Here in fact 0,3% hold 82% of the wealth!
MidJourney
But how is this apparent lack of decentralization compared to other cryptos?
With Bitcoin, the top 100 addresses hold 14,8% of all coins (2 years ago it was 15,45%).
https://bitinfocharts.com/
With Litecoin (LTC), the top 100 addresses hold 42% (even more than 2y ago where it was 40%)! Dash is a little better with 29% for the top 100, Bitcoin Cash is 38%, Monero´s value is 29%.
And the top 100 addresses in the popular Dogecoin hold even 65,5%!
And what about Hive?
Here the top 100 addresses (in terms of HP holding) currently own 102,4 mio HP (source), that is 58,8% of all staked Hive (which is 174 mio.)! Not a good value for a blockchain having "decentralization" in it´s claim! And this is not even skewed by the big exchanges accounts like for other cryptos because exchanges mostly have liquid Hive, not HP!
OK, the 174 mio. HP make only up 41% of all the Hive, so these top 100 hold only 24% of all Hive as HP and 27,5% if you add the 13 mio. liquid Hive they hold. Still plenty of room for improvement in terms of decentralization of Hive. But I think in fact the opposite is happening. But that is another topic...
So the conclusion is that Bitcoin is still way better decentralized than many of it´s peers, even despite the "blackrocking" that is happening since January this year (i.e. the accumulation by large organizations via the spot ETFs).
In the past (2019 , 2020 and 2022) I have asked the Hive community repeatedly how much Bitcoin they own and obviously not too many want to disclose this information.
About 30 to 50% of the (responding) Hivians said that they own zero Bitcoins and I am wondering if this is still the case.
So please, if you like, let me know in the comments if you (or "your friend") own any Bitcoin, even if not at all, and if yes, if less than 0,01, less than 0,1, less than 1, less than 5, 5 to 10 or more than 10! Many thanks! Every comment gets an upvote!
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