Richest Bitcoin Addresses

by cfontes • 13 years ago

172 200 13 years ago

stereo• 13 years ago

This analysis linking the richest address to Silkroad’s DPR is interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310600.0

retube• 13 years ago

I sure hope those guys are keeping their keys safe.

Also - there's 4 addresses with almost exactly the same number of coins (40000) who all last transacted on april 9. Surely connected.

Also also: why do so many btc balances end with ".0411"?

gizmo• 13 years ago

There are 10 in total in the top 100 with their last transaction on April 9th. I agree that can't be chance.

And 6 blocks of 10.000 bitcoin with a last transaction on the 4th. So it looks like that there are far less than 100 players in the bitcoin top 100.

exit• 13 years ago

doesn't the fbi haul belong on at the top of this list?

https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

Top of the list for single address, most people in Bitcoin have their wealth in one wallet but many addresses inside that wallet.

res0nat0r2• 13 years ago

Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want to do for New Years.

It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?

lukev• 13 years ago

No. The market just isn't that deep. I really doubt there are people looking to spend 10 million (or even 1 million) dollars on bitcoin in any normal time frame.

Most of the bitcoin super-rich are the early adopters, who mined hundreds of bitcoins on their personal PCs while that was still possible.

waterlesscloud5• 13 years ago

One million dollars is less than 1400 BTC on gox at the moment. There are several transactions a day in this range.

And contrary to the popular folklore, you can get USD out of gox, it just costs you a fair amount to do so. If you're dealing in million dollar transactions, it can be arranged.

BinaryBrainz2• 13 years ago

To put it in perspective, Bitcoincharts.com [1] reports that the market trade volume is around 200,000 BTC (I believe this to be a 24hr stat). BTC-China is currently the largest exchange and their 24-hr volume is 67,500 BTC. So yeah, several thousand BTC being traded at once could be a significant disturbance in the force.

I wonder if it would be possible to come up with some kind of market indicator to detect when one of major holding addresses starts to sell off on one of the exchanges. This may be possible if the escrow/intermediary accounts are known. If one of these 'major holders' really felt like being evil, they could test out some of the BTC to USD processors to see how well their setup to handle large transactions and nuke them with 1000BTC conversions. Coinbase.... BOOM!... BTCQuick.... BOOM!

[1] Bitcoin Charts / Markets - http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

Edit: turns out Coinbase has a 50BTC/day buy or sell limit.

waterlesscloud5• 13 years ago

Sure, although it would likely take some time, and would cost some money.

Probably would be more along the lines of a private sale than dumped on an exchange, though of late we've seen dumps/buys in the million dollar range.

buugs• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely sure but I think to cash in you would need to find willing buyers at the price you want.

So it works similar to trading.

So if you want $1million dollars at $700 per bitcoin you would have to find a market with enough people to buy at $700.

wuschel• 13 years ago

IF bitcoin will materialize as common internet currency, these guys/girls will have some jolly good time. Until this happens this list is is nothing but a high-score in a web based game, for there is no way to exchange your BTC into real currency.

Of course, anyone who has invested in BTC is highly interested to push the hype button and spread the word of BTC as universal payment system. This is the only way to bring more hard currency into the BTC cashflow.

aqme28• 13 years ago

What? There are tons of ways to turn BTC into any number of currencies.

clarkmoody• 13 years ago

You would have to make a deal one-on-one with a buyer. The current liquidity on the exchanges would mean that you tank the price and end up with way fewer dollars. And you would start a price panic.

otoburb2• 13 years ago

Once you complete the transaction, there are also tax implications. An attorney wrote up a description with some broad strokes: http://www.bitcointax.info/

Useful if you're a US citizen or resident and have bitcoins you want to sell.

fat0wl17• 13 years ago

The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep buying. It's the result of a bidding war.

There is an article here about that basically explains (this is my interpretation not his words) how the price of BTC is kindof like the sticker price on an item in the store. It doesn't represent the real value, it's simply the value as perceived by consumers and is, in a way, fixed -- http://falkvinge.net/2013/09/13/bitcoins-vast-overvaluation-...

But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system. Basically if everyone started selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change & I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they can unload most of their stack.

EDIT: Since I was immediately downvoted, please note that this happens regularly any time you speak ill of Bitcoin's pyramid scheme aspects and is completely expected/anticipated when I post these responses. It's a public service that I will drop eventually, but think about this -- even people who own a ton of BTC (article I linked to) criticize it as being insanely flawed. They only stay with it because as they point out, they believe the price will continue to rise. Speculators love it because they KNOW it's flawed, but still feel confident in a bet that the price will rise. I think it's why ultimately it will take gov intervention or a market catastrophe that screws over all the speculators to finally destroy such interest in Bitcoin and finally give it a chance to start over again... as a currency.

hahainternet• 13 years ago

But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system

This is also the case with rich families. It doesn't make the system unusable.

knodi• 13 years ago

This!! A rumor is all its going to take to tank the price.

sogen• 13 years ago

+1 Thanks for being a voice of reason and speak of this pyramid scheme.

anopows2• 13 years ago

But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system.

No they risked their money with a speculation that had almost 0% chance of getting any return in the future. They took a huge risk, without this, bitcoin would not exist. And that's why they are rewarded: Taking a risk that almost no one would have taken to create something big.

Basically if everyone started selling the market would destabilize because supply/demand curve would change & I'm pretty sure the value of what they're selling would plummet before they can unload most of their stack.

Bitcoin had already 2 big crashes (one time from $30 to $1-2 and one time from 200+$ to under 100$) and still recovered afterwards because there's people like me who see the potential in bitcoin.

And please tell me what your "real value" exactly is, because in my opinion their is only a perceived value for everything in the world.

bjnortier_hn• 13 years ago

The whole price of Bitcoin is an illusion that they use to get people to keep buying. It's the result of a bidding war.

The price of everything is an illusion according to the Subjective Theory of Value [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

im3w1l• 13 years ago

Falkvinge thinks they will be worth 100k-1000k in the future. If we accept that (which I don't btw) is it so weird that people want to spend 700 today for something that might be worth 100k in a few years?

Kequc• 13 years ago

No you need to make a private sale, we're talking back alley or across a table somewhere. Getting money out of the US based exchange Mt.Gox is impossible in the range you are talking about. Currently they are cashing out everyone at $10,000/day, that isn't per person that's combined.

Or you can move your Bitcoins to another exchange (which have a much lower valuation) and which are all foreign. Then cash out there. Then repatriate your USD. Which has tax implications. So in an amount as big as $10M you're going to lose a large amount of "money."

You also have to pray that somewhere along the way your anonymous untraceable Bitcoins aren't stolen.

downandout• 13 years ago

Actually, it wouldn't be that hard over the course of a few weeks or months. Yes, the price of BTC would drop to some degree, but not necessarily considerably. Over the last 30 days, approximately $720 million worth of bitcoins have been traded on MtGox and btc-e.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btceUSD.html

clamprecht• 13 years ago

$10 million for New Years - I want to party with you. Monaco 2014? ;)

cfontes• 13 years ago

I wonder if Satoshi is amongst those...

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

afaik 90+% (100%?) of all the blocks mined by satoshi have never been touched. Satoshi's wealth would be in thousands of separate 50BTC wallets, not 1 big one.

Can't be bothered to find the source atm but someone did some analysis on the mined blocks in 2009/2010 and found the likely blocks mined by the same person who mined the first block, all unspent.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

Either he didn't want to reveal its identity, because he (they) knew well that the history will remain for a long time, or he simply lost access to those bitcoins.

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

Thousands of separate addresses, most of those coins still sit in their mined blocks. However it is likely Satoshi has all the addresses in one single wallet so that he could move them all at once if he wanted to. Satoshi's estimated wealth is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 coins.

unethical_ban3• 13 years ago

You got hellbanned, saneshark.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

And you defeated the purpose of hellbanning by pointing it out to the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning

grey-area• 13 years ago

I'm sure anyone using the term hellbanned knows what it means. Sometimes automatic hell banning makes mistakes or is heavy handed (not sure what the algorithms are); some selective civil disobedience corrects the issue and lets the user at least ask admins to find out why.

publicfig• 13 years ago

My assumption is that because they have the username 'unethical_ban' they probably understand that they broke the spirit of the Hellban, but did so intentionally.

unethical_ban3• 13 years ago

I know. I disagree with the practice, especially when I look through the history of the account and see no flagrantly offensive remarks. HN mods might think this site is a temple, but it's disrespectful to waste someone's time and mislead their expectations of feedback for months at a time.

dangoldin• 13 years ago

Pretty interesting to look at the last transaction date. For the most part it looks as if they've been pretty inactive lately.

JimmaDaRustla• 13 years ago

Scrolling down, there are addresses with an even 10000 bitcoins. If these all belong to the same person (trying to mitigate risk by spreading across wallets?) then it adds up to about 186 million...

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

They may have all the addresses in the same wallet.

joeblau• 13 years ago

Why are there so many at the EXACT same amount (71-94)?

rtkwe2• 13 years ago

Probably holding accounts/cold storage for a single group or a small number of groups using a similar division plan, say an exchange. I bet the idea is keep them in separate wallets to ensure that one compromise doesn't lose their whole investment.

All just wild conjecture though.

taude• 13 years ago

I know nothing of BitCoin, but could one figure out which Address belongs to the Winklevoss brothers? Does it matter?

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09...

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

It's likely the Winklevoss brothers have all their coins spread over many addresses. Their wallet will show 100,000+ coins but you can't tell because they are spread among many addresses inside the single wallet file. If they use a brain wallet seed they can create unlimited deterministic addresses but only have to remember one key, and you won't see large accumulations of coins.

pa5tabear• 13 years ago

What's the point?

Spreading the risk of loss by hack? And reducing their visibility as a target?

chrisacky• 13 years ago

Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever.

Look at this address:

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5...

The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, thought it was a ridiculous concept and deleted everything from his system.

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&s...

taigeair• 13 years ago

No way to recover the Bitcoins?

etix• 13 years ago

No way if you lost your wallet.dat

otoburb2• 13 years ago

Not without knowing the private key for the bitcoin address in question.

skriticos22• 13 years ago

No. If you delete the wallet, the contained Bitcoins make poof.

You basically delete the private key and won't be able to sign a transaction with it ever.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

Correct.

And this is one of many reasons why it will become increasingly important to beef up the security and robustness of the Bitcoin network and ecosystem. It has some of the same failure modes as traditional bank/government-backed currency. But it also has a set of a different kind of failure modes that should also be minimized or mitigated.

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

You could run vanitygen to guess the private key to any Bitcoin address. It might take a few billion years.

BinaryBrainz2• 13 years ago

Either that or their name starts with an S... (something besides Steve).

I'm curious which of these might be intermediary wallets for Coinbase and the like.

skriticos22• 13 years ago

Does not really matter, they are divisible and the ones that are in circulation define the market cap.

But I imagine the person that deleted the wallet back then is pretty pissed with himself now-a-days.

giarc• 13 years ago

I hope that if you are smart enough to be an early adopter in bitcoins, that you are smart enough to never delete anything, ever.

wdvh5• 13 years ago

Given tptacek and colleagues' paper on the RSA-doomsday scenario that might not be too far out in the future, I think it might be possible to reclaim (steal?) that money in the future.

Obviously when RSA's end nears, assuming bitcoin is still around then, we'll see some sort of managed transition to a newer cryptosystem. I imagine the network will probably support announcing transactions saying something like, "Wallet X will now be known as wallet Y" where Y uses the new cryptosystem. And presumably only the first valid signed announcement will count and make its way into the block chain. It's at this point that I think people with enough compute power might be able to "steal" lost wallets.

kzrdude2• 13 years ago

Bitcoin doesn't use RSA.

MSM2• 13 years ago

Way smaller scale but back in 2011 I heard about bitcoins and crunched some numbers. I realized that at the current price (~$16), I was able to make profit mining them on my desktop since it would only cost about ~$12 in electricty per coin.

I got myself 3 or 4 coins (I wasn't even in a pool at that point) but then the price crashed in late 2011 and I eventually forgot about it. Since then I've reformatted and I remember having that "Oh shit" moment as I was reformatting but after looking up the price I realized I was only out about $10. This was late 2011.

Now every time I see a HN post about a new price milestone I kick myself. Today I could have sold them for ~$1500-2000.

reconbot• 13 years ago

I got 2 coins off a guy in a coffeshop about 1 year ago for $20. I sold them today for about $1600. About 2 years ago I almost dropped $1000 on bitcoins but was talked out of it by family and friends. It feels weird. I can't connect bitcoins to social or economic value. The "china explosion" of btc price won't last imho. And while I like bitcoin, it's just a currency and not an investment, as in it doesn't generate value itself. I have a hard time connecting stocks to social or economic values too. I'd like to think we can invest in actual businesses where it's a better connected to reality. I don't know how to do that however. Not yet anyway.

Anderkent• 13 years ago

Now every time I see a HN post about a new price milestone I kick myself. Today I could have sold them for ~$1500-2000.

You shouldn't. You only lost $10 by reformatting that pc - your only loss is from not buying the bitcoins at that point, of which most of us are guilty.

Moral_• 13 years ago

How do you get 3 or 4 coins if you aren't in a pool, that's impossible.

If you aren't in a pool the only way to get coins is to solve the block and in that case you would have had 50.

csomar2• 13 years ago

I don't think it's an issue

1. Bitcoin third-pary services security will get better.

2. People are now more aware of security concerns.

3. You can divide a BitCoin to smaller units.

jrs99• 13 years ago

It's possible that he died.

possibilistic• 13 years ago

Assuming these people don't know what they have, would it be possible to track down their whereabouts? Are IP addresses recorded in bitcoin exchanges?

cromwellian• 13 years ago

This seems like a fundamental flaw in the currency that makes it's deflationary properties worse.

Let's say bitcoin is to last a century, over time, there will be gradual losses to all kinds of problems, like hardware failures, owner errors, etc that cause lost of wallets, and thus, coins, forever.

There's no way to replace these, so over time, the total number of coins it not only limited, but after the last bitcoin is mined, it must decrease.

This suggests to me that bitcoin is a marvelous experiment that finally proved that such a currency is possible on a wide scale, but as a foundational currency, it has serious flaws, and it sounds like it needs to ultimately be replaced by a Bitcoin 2.0.

However, creating a new Bitcoin that is incompatible with the old would massively destroy value in the old system, so it's an interesting proposition as to how you can 'version' the Bitcoin protocol over time while not causing great upheaval.

samolang• 13 years ago

Are there any studies on the rate at which physical money disappears from the system? I know physical money can be printed to make up for it, but like all things the electronic counter part of physical money will become much more reliable than physical money over time. Do you worry about google corrupting a digital file you emailed to yourself?

Frozenlock• 13 years ago

I fail to see how you jump to this conclusion.

Suppose that all bitcoins are lost except one.

Well, we just use fractions of the one remaining. While the protocol currently supports 8 decimals, there isn't any hard limit; we can continue dividing forever as needed.

Ellipsis753• 13 years ago

In theory there's no limit to how much a bitcoin can be divided. Currently 0.00000001BTC is the smallest amount possible. But if there's only 0.00001 bitcoins left in the world then the program can be easily updated to allow 0.00000000000000000001BTC to be sent and used. Bitcoins are a bit like gold, you can just keep dividing a bar up smaller and smaller into dust. Of course if all bitcoins in the world vanished after the last block (with a reward) had been mined then that would be the end of bitcoins but that seems pretty unlikely right now.

jafaku• 13 years ago

Oh great, another genius who has found a "fundamental flaw" in Bitcoin.

sigh

oleganza2• 13 years ago

Creating a new Bitcoin that is incompatible with the old would NOT massively destroy value in the old system. Look at Litecoin and other forks. Bitcoin holders collectively add value to Bitcoin (by simply willing to hold them and willing to pay slightly below the market price to add to their holdings), there is no single person who can change its fate. Even big rich guy's wealth depends on many poorer people to accept his BTC for the service they provide him with.

To switch to Bitcoin 2.0 all holders need to see no future in Bitcoin 1 and panic-sell into Bitcoin 2. If this happens, it's another huge bet (like going from USD to BTC), but the prerequisite is to Bitcoin 1 really be in trouble. Divisibility problem is not a fatal flaw, it can be patched, worked around, or counted in as an extra cost.

On the other hand, USD has tons of fatal flaws: it's being printed like crazy and it needs to be stored in banks that easily freeze, tax and censor accounts. Essentially, USD is not even an asset. It's always a chain of promises by bankers and presidents, who brake them constantly in various ways. Compared to USD, Bitcoin is infinitely better, so people are willing to make a bet that Bitcoin can replace USD. Imbalance like that is the requirement to start discussing a jump from BTC1 into BTC2.

alandarev• 13 years ago

Some view it as fundamental flaw, others as an extra layer of safety against inflation.

ralfd• 13 years ago

That is a strange pattern:

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1HtUGfbDcMzTeHWx2Dbgnhc6k...

FridayWithJohn• 13 years ago

Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

You can see every single address on the blockchain, just not peoples wallets (Because the wallet contains address but most of the time no obvious link between those addresses can be made).

You can see these addresses and speculate. Also some members of the community keep track of famous Bitcoin users that are known to have accumulated over 100,000 coins.

elux• 13 years ago

See "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph”,

a 2012 paper by Ron and Shamir. (Adi Shamir of “RSA".)

Preprint available here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

(The "Rich List” seems obviously inspired by this paper.)

nullc2• 13 years ago

The original Bitcoin "Rich List" predates that paper by years.

Sadly that paper is pretty poor. It's adequate for informing someone bitcoin isn't anonymous though— but the bitcoin.org website also does that without being littered with basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works.

rtkwe2• 13 years ago

No the entire history of bitcoin transactions is public that's the only way the whole thing works because that allows anyone to validate that a given account has enough coin to settle a given transaction.

tracker1• 13 years ago

The most surprising thing to me is the number of those addresses that haven't had a transaction in several years now... how many of those people lost their "wallet" so to speak?

sbjustin• 13 years ago

Top 100 richest people using bitcoin control 20% of bitcoins.

dustcoin• 13 years ago

Some of these addresses are cold storage addresses controlled by businesses that are holding BTC for a large number of individual customers.

Some of the richest holders own multiple top addresses.

sktrdie2• 13 years ago

What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?

cma• 13 years ago

Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?

mcherm3• 13 years ago

Yes, that would work.

And better yet, everyone could just switch to a client that works exactly like the clients we use to day except that it allows a new wallet I just created containing 100,000 bitcoins. This one is better because I get rich.

And to make it work the only thing I need to do is convince everyone to use it. It's kind of like that guy who convinced everyone to allow little green slips of paper to be traded for goods and services -- ALL money has value only because society consents to value it, and society could change it's mind. We've done so before -- consider when the Euro was created and how after a transition period the currencies it replaced became worthless (except as collector's items).

The hard part is convincing everyone to use YOUR plan. The deftness with which Bitcoin has navigated that social dilemma is one of the most impressive things about it. Somehow we have all come to agree that certain bit patterns and secret keys are worth valuable goods and services.

Jtsummers• 13 years ago

That would seriously diminish confidence in bitcoin, though it might encourage spending of bitcoins. I suspect the latter will not be enough to overcome the former. The end result would likely be bogus transactions between addresses merely to keep the money "alive". Adding 0 value and potentially negative value as now a set of useless transactions will sit in the ever growing blockchain.

Similarly, during the transition of clients accepting to clients not accepting those coins, what happens if there's a transaction from one of them? What if it's only partial, they spent 2k but left 2k, they're active but now out 2k BTC that they can't spend?

This is sort of like discussing blacklisting "stolen" BTC. Suppose I figure out 100 brainwallets and steal 1000 BTC. Before I get added to the blacklist, I transfer 1 BTC to each of 1000 addresses. Do you blacklist the whole chain of addresses going back? Do you only blacklist that one amount (essentially reducing the value of those addresses by 1 BTC each)? What if one of those addresses is yours and I'm just tainting every address I can find. You'll have 1BTC that you can't spend, and you don't know to whom it belongs. Which of the original 100 addresses do you send it back to if that's the intent of the system? Do you send it back to a known hacked address? Does the former owner have a mechanism to announce a valid new address for kindhearted souls to return their bitcoins to?

wdvh5• 13 years ago

Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing this.

sktrdie2• 13 years ago

No IP address is saved in the block-chain. You would need to trust the source of this IP listing service, and still you wouldn't be able to actually prove people's real IP address if they were using systems like TOR to send money.

wdvh5• 13 years ago

I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and listen in on transactions.

And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.

chrislomax• 13 years ago

Why when you click on the wallet does the last transaction on some of them go to 2013 when the list says 2010?

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/1Du2jAQsBQnkkVZkN4oqC46tS...

antonios• 13 years ago

Note, this isn't a list of rich people, it's a list of rich _addresses_, and one can have many addresses.

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

And many people can be apart of one address, although that is more risky. One of the top addresses is the Just-Dice investors address, which has between 50,000 and 60,000 bitcoin.

asdfaoeu• 13 years ago

For some proof of that there are ~350,000BTC unspent from ~feb 2011 presumably owned by the same person.

http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jvsalo/unspent_oct30.png

darkmethod• 13 years ago

Back in early 2011 I ran a BTC miner for awhile on a spare system and generated around 18 BTC. I bartered them later in 2011 for a pair of movie tickets to take my wife out to see Moneyball (ironically).

Siecje• 13 years ago

Litecoin doesn't have this problem.

josephagoss11• 13 years ago

Whoa, you sure about that? I recall several million ltc are controlled by a handful of people.

loceng• 13 years ago

Who are these people? And if any of them are out there reading this thread -- reach out to me and let me know if want to invest in something that will help adoption of Bitcoin, which will result in its value continuing to go up...

csomar2• 13 years ago

Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned by even less people.

gwern2• 13 years ago

Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their holdings.

PeterisP3• 13 years ago

It should be expected that any changes/disturbances in the financial system (including large scale adoption of Bitcoin) will involve some losses for the common person, while a few people will find a way to make a huge profit from exploiting everyone else in this change process.

Just as it has always happened in history.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

Interesting that many of them were last used within a few seconds or minutes of each other. Indicates to me that one person or party is controlling quite a few big wallets.

TheSisb2• 13 years ago

I don't think this richlist is a list of different people. Look how many have 10k BTC flat. A lot of these are spare wallets.

NickSharp• 13 years ago

How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC? That's significantly more than the #1 address on this list. Am I missing something?

C1D• 13 years ago

Needs an update, currently the largest wallet know is this one 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. It's holding about 200k btc.

drchiu• 13 years ago

I don't see btc as being able to retain its hundreds of dollars in exchange currency value. Imagine you have 1 mil usd worth of btc, and then imagine trying to dump it all on the open market. You would probably find a widening gap in the bid-ask as your position is liquidated. In other words, there isn't likely enough buyers.

Someone is probably manipulating the supply and demand to serve their own purposes. You might as well day trade something more liquid.

eonil• 13 years ago

I really don't understand how BTC make better world. I mean, it monopolized by a few people from FIRST. And the monopoly will sustain forever.

If someone else make another BTC?

oleganza2• 13 years ago

Suggest a better way to distribute new asset "fairly". Facebook shares are also distributed unfairly. And gold. And dollars. Also, something that looks fair for you, wouldn't look fair for another person.

What's important to me is that money is hard. If you have it, it can't be printed out of value. It should not be very costly or risky to store or transfer (like gold or USD). I want to be sure that even the richest guys can't simply extract money from me. That they have to earn it by doing work. Or earn service from others by paying them, not forcing them. Bitcoin allows us to get to that kind of protection closer than ever.

Consider this: gold was always as hard to protect as to confiscate it. It's symmetrical. Therefore, most powerful and brutal were accumulating gold over time. Gold is now owned massively by largest governments and banks. Regular people can only own as much gold as they can hide in their pockets. Extra gold is too easy to take (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102). Bitcoin is much cheaper and easier to store and transfer than to extract it. It's asymmetrical. Now big guys with guns would have to work more and steal less to get some money, then before. Stuff that was stolen or destroyed will never come back to you, but at least, over time, distribution of wealth would match more closely actual merits of market participants, than amount of gunpowder that they have.

Richest Bitcoin Addresses

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