Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
An article that I do not have my hands on that the moment says 70% of Bitcoin is owned by under 1000 people.
How can that become a wide spread currency use for the world's population once all 21 million are mined?
When so few will own it and regular country currencies are in the hands of everyone in the world?
The smallest unit for bitcoin is 0.0000001, so there will actually be 2,100 trillion units available to be used. This number of units, by design, was considered large enough to represent the world’s M1 supply. (see https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/qu...decimal-places for a short discussion).
Concerning the top 1000 accounts, it is only speculation to assume that 1 account = 1 person. A single person can control many accounts, or a single account can be holding bitcoin for many people. The largest accounts that you find will very likely be storage/custodial accounts for exchanges that hold large amounts of bitcoin for customers.
Here is a dynamically updated page for the “bitcoin rich list”...
The top account in this list is marked as an account for the Bitfinex exchange. According to table at the top of the page, to account for 70% of the available supply, you need somewhere between 15,000 and 130,000 of the top accounts.
This is still a small percentage, but the reasoning is that the early adopters should be rewarded for the assumed risk with an economic/selfish incentive. Many of the incentives designed into bitcoin, are designed to encourage selfish behavior, assuming everyone is always acting in their own best interest, which results in the perpetuation and expansion of bitcoin use, to the benefit of all participants.
An article that I do not have my hands on that the moment says 70% of Bitcoin is owned by under 1000 people.
How can that become a wide spread currency use for the world's population once all 21 million are mined?
When so few will own it and regular country currencies are in the hands of everyone in the world?
Yup this is often an overlooked point either purposefully by supporters or also by ignorance. The supply is limited but not nearly to the degree most people think of under stand it. 2.1 quadrillion is a lot
Most of the large wallets are exchanges that hold the money of thousands upon thousands of people, so for example some of the largest wallets are probably Coinbase and Gemini which potentially are holding Bitcoins for millions of people. Not saying there aren't Bitcoin whales holding a lot butmany of these large accounts are exchanges and businesses.
Bitcoin is dying the death of a thousand cuts.... and the altcoins are the knives.
Yes and no. 99% of altcoins are garbage and won't be around 2 years from now, that said are they taking some marketcap away from Bitcoin sure. The entire crypto market right now is just kind of boring, I don't think anything is going to match the excitement and hype of December of 2017. The days of seeing your portfolio go up hundreds of percent each day, day after day are over. I think were going to see slower growth like we do in normal markets. Short of some huge widespread adoption happening very quickly that's how I see things going
I don't think it's about preference so much as just another option. Why did we need credit cards when we had cash. Why do we have echecks and ACH if credit cards are more convenient. Why do we have Paypal when we have credit cards and ACH, its about choices and different applications for different purposes.
Bitcoin has some things going for it, mainly that it's outside the control of banks, regulators, credit card companies. I can transact directly with you as opposed to us needing Visa/MC, a payment processor, a payment gateway, a parent bank.
One illegal instance of this was Silk Road and darkweb marketplaces, however there are certainly 100% legal industries which have trouble getting credit card processing. Let's say for example you sell software. I pay you, I then do a credit card chargeback, I have your $1,000 dollar software and I get my money back. When you go to dispute the charge your asked for a tracking number which you dont have one since it's a digital product and I win.
Something like Bitcoin which doesn't have chargebacks can be useful for certain industries like that.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
