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Given the difficult of detecting lost coins, or telling between hoarded and lost coins, it seems impossible to actually report on the real wealth distribution of the bitcoin currency.

barrymac
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  • You say improve, but what makes you think this is not an optimal state? – jl6 Apr 21 '12 at 15:01
  • I know of no currency that is as easy as bitcoin to generate statistics about... – Pieter Wuille Apr 21 '12 at 15:20
  • both fair points. edited – barrymac Apr 21 '12 at 15:41
  • Is this a problem? – Stephen Gornick Apr 22 '12 at 00:52
  • Possible duplicate of http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/86/is-it-possible-to-estimate-the-gini-coefficient-for-bitcoins-and-if-the-trend-is – David Perry Apr 22 '12 at 01:48
  • The reason I asked is because I've seen a bit of discussion around the topic, some people are a bit concerned about early adopters having some unfair advantage. I was wondering if there are many differences with our current monetary system in this regard. – barrymac Apr 22 '12 at 13:32
  • @ Stephen I don't think there's a problem, and possibly an advantage @David, thanks for the link to that related question – barrymac Apr 22 '12 at 13:34
  • @barrymac Fees are very relevant in difference between current monetary system and bitcoin. Fees are like a tax. Lower fees with bitcoin mean less friction to put that wealth into place. When bitcoin fees are paid, they aren't going to those already wealthy, necessarily. – Stephen Gornick Apr 28 '12 at 05:52
  • See: http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bitcoins-2013-12 – makerofthings7 Dec 11 '13 at 23:06

2 Answers2

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The protocol gives no information about who controls an address. In an extreme case, every address could be controlled by just one person, or every address could have a unique owner. However, a degree of traffic analysis is possible, and if you have access to other data from outside the Bitcoin network, you could correlate transactions with these non-Bitcoin events and infer who the real-world owners of the addresses are.

For example, if you had access to ISP records of who uses an IP address that has just mined a block, you could start to build profiles of the owners of new coins.

But there are many barriers to achieving the total information awareness that you would need to build a comprehensive profile of all coin owners, so the short answer is no, there is no reliable way to measure Bitcoin wealth distribution.

jl6
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Well, we know at least how much Mt. Gox holds -- as they have a cold storage system that they've proven they control.

Also, flow analysis combined with other data might help make it possible to have a better idea. It alone doesn't give exact identity, but it can help to point in a general direction as far as how much certain people or certain organizations have received and of that amount, how much they've spent.

Here's an article describing this:

Stephen Gornick
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