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by iskander 1619 days ago
Wallets != people. Without proof of personhood, you never know the distribution.
2 comments

This right here. Everybody running and screaming about the OP statistic have 0 knowledge how bitcoin works or purposefully spreading false information.

It's like the elections being stolen, or anti-vax propaganda or whatever other idiocy being spread on FB on any given moment.

No, OP is correct actually

>95% of Bitcoin is owned by 2%

This is just the lower limit on the concentration of wealth in Bitcoin, found from onchain data. Since people can have multiple addresses it is possible that the 2% actually control 97% or even more of btc supply

This isn't necessarily true, because some of those largest wallets are probably exchanges/trusts. It can go both ways: one wallet may have many owners, and one owner may have many wallets.
Can you tell me right now how many wallets does Satoshi have?
Isn't this a problem?

More specifically: assuming we can't derive it by some clever means, or approximate it from some tax reporting data, isn't it a problem that we can't get such a distribution?

I mean this not as a moral judgement, but more as a system dynamics concern. It's easy enough to see how wealth concentration can destabilize a money/value system absent other factors. So my concern isn't about what's right or wrong socially, but whether there might be a reason to question the implicit trust that the maths will work out.

Just wait until you find out that there's not even a block explorer for monero.