Bitcoin’s ‘under one percent’ allegedly control a bigger share of the bitcoin market than the richest US households control in dollars. Below 1% of the largest bitcoin holders supposedly control over 25% of all the bitcoin in circulation, based on a new study.
One American private nonprofit research organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research, released a study where it claimed that 10,000 Bitcoin investors, or about 0.01% of all the bitcoin holders, own 5 million bitcoins, or around 27% of all the 18.9 million coins that are currently in circulation.
This amount of bitcoins held by the ‘one percent’ is equivalent to around $232 billion, as reported on Monday by the Wall Street Journal. This study was conducted by finance professors Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics and Antoinette Schoar working at the MIT Sloan School of Management. It aims to prove that Bitcoin is not as decentralized as people think. Schoar stated:
“Despite having been around for 14 years and the hype it has ratcheted up, it’s still the case that it’s a very concentrated ecosystem.”
Looking at that WSJ report, the top holders are seen to control a larger share of bitcoin than the richest American households control in dollars. Citing data acquired from the United States Federal Reserve, the report indicates that the top 1% of the United States households have nearly a third of all wealth.
This new report may seem alarming for the crypto space since most of the bitcoin proponents have promoted decentralization as one of the Bitcoin network’s largest principles. Based on a statement by Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, most of the circulating bitcoin supply is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto. He said:
“Satoshi’s coins alone make up for more than 5%. Over time, the ownership of Bitcoin is designed to get more distributed. For fiat, the opposite tends to happen.”
Notably, most of bitcoin’s circulating supply is also controlled by anybody and it might be lost forever at some point. Coincover crypto-insurance Company said that nearly 4 million bitcoins are out of circulation as a result of lost access.
