Takeaways from this piece by Marketwatch and bitinfocharts, detailing the coverage of bitcoin's global distribution.
Top 5 takeaways:
1) Total of 36.1M addresses hold BTC globally
This is still considerably low as compared to credit card or gold ownership. The World Bank states that the percentage of credit card ownership in developed countries such as France, Singapore, Finland, and USA is 40%, 48%, 62%, 65% respectively. That's 213M Americans alone. Looking at gold ownership, survey shows that 12% of Americans own gold, which equates to 30M Americans.
2) There are approx 100,000 BTC millionaires
There are 93K addresses holding >$1M worth of BTC, and 8K addresses with >$10M worth of BTC.
3) Pareto's law in the crypto world
The bottom 50% of addresses holds 0.02% of existing BTC, while the top 0.46% holds 85% of existing BTC.
4) 50% of holders are merely dipping their toes
Majority of addresses do not have considerable exposure. The bottom 50% of addresses each only hold an average of USD $10.2 of BTC. On the contrary, the top 3 addresses hold an average of USD $5,939,588,365 of BTC (found out that they belong to Huobi, Binance & Bitfinex)
5) Only 82K of addresses have considerable exposure (>USD $125K)
Only 2.2% of the total addresses have an average of >USD $125K worth of BTC. The other 98% of addresses are what I would interpret as "retail investors" who have less than USD $15K worth of BTC. The distribution of the amount of BTC across addresses are calculated below.
Flaws & rebuttals:
A BTC address might not directly equate to a living person
The top 3 addresses of exchanges might mean that hundreds of thousands of individuals could be owning BTC too
Point 5 is based on averages, so it might differ from the true distribution
Why does Satoshi's supposed ownership of 1M BTC not show up
With these questions, unsure why news media are reporting about these figures that addresses = accounts = individuals. With headlines like "the digital currency’s ascent is helping mint a round of crypto millionaires" or "There are now as many as 100,000 people who have $1 million or more stashed in bitcoin".
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