I’m not speaking about the real millions of Bitcoin or for that matter millions of fiat lying in your wallets as cryptocurrency. No, this time it’s all about statistics.
If we make a comparison of the real world millionaire part of population and the according percentage of Bitcoin addresses holding a specific amount of money, then it would seem that one has to be in possession of cryptowallet, holding about 70 BTC. Well, it is a very rough approximation that is based on the data from bitcoinrichlist.com web page.
Now, I understand your skepticism. There is a good phrase that is usually associated with Mark Twain (although he attributed it to the Benjamin Disraeli):
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistic.”
However, if throw aside my lousy math skills and see for ourselves this graph, then many things become much clearer.
As you may know, the distribution of wealth among Bitcoin owners is extremely uneven, as in the world of non-virtual money (as long as we accept that money are non-virtual). Hence, 95.46% of ALL public keys contain somewhere between 66 and zero U.S. cents, accordingly 0.001-0 BT, which amounts to the total of less than a 0.01% of all the Bitcoin volume.
The biggest share of all digital coins (27%) are spread over 0.35% of addresses, containing from ten to hundred BTC. Yes, that is where I took the liberty with math and just gave you a 70 BTC line, which has to be crossed for someone to be a “BTC millionaire”.
As disturbing as it may seem, these numbers are ultimately flawed. There is no limit to the number of wallets one person can possess and certainly no limit to the number that a bot can create. Unless, of course, if you consider 2 to the power of 160 a limit.
I am taking a wild guess here, but most of the public keys are utterly unused/used in clusters. If the former is pretty crystal – people tend to lose flash drives, brick their smartphones or to forget their private keys, the latter is a much more peculiar idea that takes its roots in the recent hacker attack on exchanges.
There were so many simultaneous transactions that the servers’ inner bookkeeping systems went out of sync with the Network. It means that number of wallets used in the attack was enormous. Especially if we consider the number of contemporary transactions on the Bitcoin markets every waking moment.
Maybe in this article I sound a bit dramatic but the whole thing is very logical. Until the Bitcoin dies no transaction or wallet will be lost, and the chain will only continue to expand. There is a possibility of “cleanup” or some sort of compression of the chain to be designed in the future, but currently the Bitcoin network looks like our own genes, containing only a minor percent of importance the rest being forsaken trash.