The Bitcoin Economy Isn’t So Different from the Traditional One

As Bitcoin moves towards becoming a part of the mainstream economy, why should it be any different from the traditional economy? Well, that’s what the scenario looks like in the Bitcoin community. It is a well-known fact that 50% of the whole world’s economy is controlled by the top 1% of the population, similarly 99% of the Bitcoin is under the control of 1% of Bitcoin community.

The only difference between traditional economy and Bitcoin economy is that in the traditional economy, when it comes to fiat currency it is easy to identify how much a person is worth and who are the rich and famous. Whereas in the Bitcoin economy, thanks to the “anonymity” it is hard to find out who owns how many Bitcoins, but we can know how many Bitcoins a wallet holds.

To get a rough idea, it is assumed that the mysterious creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto has collected close to 1 million Bitcoins for himself. We all know that Nakamoto had mentioned the total number of Bitcoin will be no more than 21 million and it is estimated that about 14 million Bitcoins are already mined. This leaves the rest of the community with about 92 percent of total Bitcoins. Also, the Winklevoss twins are supposed to be controlling about 1% of the total Bitcoins available out there, making it another 140,000 and then comes the 130,000 bitcoins with the FBI, seized from Silk Road which was later auctioned off. These Bitcoins were bought by who’s who in the Bitcoin industry.

READ MORE: A Bitcoin Economy Will Be A Stable Economy

These are just a few people known to have a lot of Bitcoins at their disposal. There are many more whom we don’t know about. Also, people do not save all their Bitcoins in a single wallet, so the exact number of Bitcoins held by a single person can’t be found. One look at the BitcoinRichList shows that the top 100 richest wallets contains over 20% of total bitcoins and over 99% of total Bitcoin wallets are empty.

The growing popularity of Bitcoin has created a new bunch of millionaires, they are the ones who adopted earlier and horded them leading to the concentration of wealth amongst them that we see today.