0.01% of owners control A quarter of all bitcoin

The Bitcoin BTC, BTC price, BTC/USD, bitcoin price live, system is "very concentrated", showed two researchers who have analyzed all transactions in this cryptocurrency since its inception.

 

Behind the declared ambitions of decentralization, we find known mechanisms of concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of actors.

  • how much bitcoin should I own in 2021?
  • What is an honest quantity of Bitcoin to own?
  • Is Bitcoin worth investing in 2021?
  • what proportion can they value a Bitcoin in 2021?

 


We knew the "1%", there is now the "0.01%". A large part of the bitcoin price live in circulation today is concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of owners, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research published in October 2021, and taken up at the end of December by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Is Bitcoin worth investing in 2021?

Only 10,000 bitcoin account owners have 5 of the world's 19 million bitcoins in circulation. Considering that there are said to be around 114 million people and entities owning bitcoin, this, therefore, represents 0.009% of bitcoin owners who own 26.3% of all bitcoin.

 

This concentration is reminiscent of that of fiat currencies: 1% of Americans owned a quarter of the country's income in 2011.

 

Researchers Igor Makarov and Antoinette Schar have analyzed all bitcoin transactions since its creation in 2008, to better understand who the players in these exchanges are. "It's a very concentrated system," .

 

Antoinette Scholar commented to the WSJ, going against the imagination carried by this crypto-asset, supposed to represent a model of alternative horizontal and decentralized finance.

 

Originally, this is how bitcoin price live was thought: a virtual currency that relies on an open-source protocol, and which anyone is supposed to take part in "mining" to generate it thanks to resolving very complex calculations.

 

These operations are used to verify and maintain the blockchain, a kind of public virtual ledger where all crypto transactions are recorded and logged.

 

50 miners control 50% of the total mining capacity


However, things have changed a lot for several years. On the one hand, on the side of the miners, who must have increasingly powerful computers to carry out the required calculations.

 

"The top 10% of miners control 90% of the mining capacities", we can read in the study, which continues with this surprising information: only 50 miners (or 0.1%) control 50% of the total capacities of mining.

 

There have been big developments on the side of those who own, use, and trade BTC prices. Already, the two researchers have shown that 90% of bitcoin transactions recorded on the blockchain were "not related to activities that make sense, economically " but simply comprised a single person (or entity) carrying out transactions.

 

Transfers to itself. Since all transactions are public, as I recorded them on the blockchain, no one can be anonymous. Many are, therefore, increasing the number of transfers to other accounts to erase their virtual trace.

 

Of the remaining 10% of 'meaningful' transactions, '75% of bitcoin volume can be traced to online transaction entities, such as virtual wallets, direct transaction bureaus (OTC), or international trading entities. », We can read. In comparison, the use of virtual currency for illegal purposes or gambling is only 3% of the total.

 

This important study thus makes it possible to deconstruct the received ideas on the most famous of the crypto-assets and to better understand its global functioning. It remains, however, still complicated to know exactly who are the actors of the transactions, and who are the famous 10 000 richest owners.

 

We know the most publicized:

Elon Musk, for example, revealed that his company Tesla had bought 1.5 billion bitcoins at the beginning of the year 2021, before "discovering" that the mining of this cryptocurrency was very polluting.

  1. These kinds of announcements have helped to explode the value of bitcoin.
  2. There is a finite number of bitcoin around the world (21 million): this is how this crypto-asset was thought of when it was created.
  3. By the end of December 2021, nearly 90% of bitcoin had been mined, but that doesn't mean the end is near.
  4. Thanks to the phenomenon of halving (which we explain here), generating a bitcoin are taking longer and longer. We should not see the end before the year 2140.

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