RE: Let’s Take a Closer Look at Bitcoin’s 'Wealth' Distribution
Interesting! I saw that graphic too once and it is indeed something to make one frown.
But I do wonder: Does this include Satoshi's 1 million btc? Because that will indeed pull the average up.
Secondly, what about exchanges? I imagine they have a LOT of Bitcoin too, but they are not the sole owners of those Bitcoin.
After those two are deducted I think it will paint a more realistic picture. Whether that means there is a better distribution... I don't know, and I in fact doubt it. There will probably still be the uberrich 0.1%. But this is kind of the case in the 'real' world too. I am not sure how it is possible to distribute in such a way that there are no whales.
Secondly, even if it were distributed without whales, over time there would still develop a richlist. After all, some people suck at making money and others do not. Even if we all started with 1 token, given enough time there would develop a situation where 0.1% of the token holders own the majority of tokens.
I am not sure it matters either. Does the fact that someone else owns 100K BTC mean anything to me? As long as it's not all dumped at the same time, I'm not sure it would ever really affect me.
Some fair points about the Satoshi addresses and the exchanges, also pointed out by other commenters. I don't have a source that filters them out, also not sure whether that is really relevant. I am more interested in how this develops over time as a whole and will therefore look at the numbers from time to time and document them here on Steemit. I am planning another post on other coin distributions in the near future and might combine them in the end :-)
When more and more people are starting to use cold storage, the relative size of the bug exchanges will probably go down. I expect the distribution will appear to be changing in more fair, while in reality nothing might have changed though. We'll see what happens!