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by vanzard 4029 days ago
Your logic is flawed. It doesn't matter if even 99% of the addresses all belonged to the wallets of a few hundreds early adopters.

As of today (as of block 350,000) there are 102 addresses with 10,000 BTC up to a few 100,000 BTC in each of them. They represent 2.8 million BTC! Most of these addresses belong to exchanges or online wallets and contain their customer's funds, because no one owns that many bitcoins. So these 102 addresses most certainly represent the 2 or 3 million bitcoin users worldwide that exchanges and online wallets claim they have: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-future-consequences-of-the...
1 comments
sanswork 4029 days ago
Heres the actual source of that chart btw its an interesting site http://bitcoinrichlist.com/charts/bitcoin-distribution-by-ad...

Your logic is basically some addresses have lots of coins therefore wallets have lots of users. There really is no arguing against that.

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vanzard 4029 days ago
> There really is no arguing against that.

You are sarcastic, but it really is the case. Some of these addresses were proven to belong to exchanges, for example these 240,000 BTC belonged to Bitstamp: https://blockchain.info/address/12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47Jist...

So of course this single address at the time represented hundreds of thousands of Bitstamp users. Ditto for the other 10,000+ BTC addresses that belong to other exchanges.

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sanswork 4029 days ago
It's not sarcasm. It's pointing out I can't prove your wrong so why argue it? It's a waste of time for both of us.

For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.

As for Bitstamp remember that they covered a 19000 coin loss with no problem. There are a lot of coins in big wallets but there are a lot more individual entities holding large numbers of coins as well that you are completely discounting. Between the major exchanges own holdings, lucky early adopters(I've heard estimates of Ver having a few hundred thousand coins, Winkeltwins have >100,000), gambling sites which seem to be extremely profitable in the Bitcoin world, etc,etc. There are a lot of entities with lots of coins. So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.

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vanzard 4029 days ago
> For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.

Doesn't matter. This one addresses alone represents hundreds of thousands of customers of Bitstamp that you are completely ignoring in your math in your previous posts. I am just pointing out to you that AT LEAST some of these big addresses are bound to represent other exchanges/online wallets.

> So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.

It is simplistic for you too to assume that these 2.8 million BTC are all owned by a few individuals.

If you want my estimate, since we don't have much data to rely on, I think that roughly 30-70% of this 2.8 million BTC is owned by individuals and the other 70-30% represents exchange/online wallet customer funds. It's realistic to think that even the smaller portion (30%) of 2.8 million BTC could still represent at least 1 million users. And the ~2 million addresses with smaller funds could represent another ~1 million users (as you yourself estimated, well you said 0.75 million which is close enough). So that's ~2 million users total.

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