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Richest Bitcoin Addresses

bitcoinrichlist.com

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Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#141

Post by gwern »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #18
lukev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The market just isn't that deep. I really doubt there are people looking to spend 10 million (or even 1 million) dollars on bitcoin in any normal time frame. Most of the bitcoin super-rich are the early adopters, who mined hundreds of bitcoins on their personal PCs while that was still possible.

One million dollars is less than 1400 BTC on gox at the moment. There are several transactions a day in this range. And contrary to the popular folklore, you can get USD out of gox, it just costs you a fair amount to do so. If you're dealing in million dollar transactions, it can be arranged.

And as a matter of fact, the guy who broke the back of the most recent surge to $900 on MtGox was selling something like $5m and is doing just that.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#142

Post by cylinder »

patd wrote: post #83
fat0wl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah rich families are usually rich because they spear-headed a manufacturing industry or rose to political power. Yes, their CHILDREN may not deserve the wealth, but they earned it. Bitcoiners are getting rich for designing a pump-and-dump scam & passing it along. It's called a pyramid scheme. You make a pitch that sounds convincing and then shop it out through "Multi-Level Marketing" strategies. Why do Bitcoiners be…

Maybe one way to look at it is to compare it to owning some land. Some people are rich because their ancestors claimed a large piece a long long time ago. One could argue that they pulled out a lot of money out of thin air.

They actually did. Much of the western US was "homesteaded" through the federal government. Basically, head out west and settle, plant your flag and you can have that land for free.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#143

Post by gwern »

csomar wrote: post #115

Interesting as BitCoin proponents complain about Bankers greed and how 1% own a huge percentage of the wealth. It seems that a really small percentage of addresses owns most of the BitCoin wealth. And these addresses might be owned by even less people.

Compare the distribution of global wealth, or American wealth. And note that we can expect the distribution to gradually get more equal (as indeed it has been all the time) as early adopters slowly sell out and diversify their holdings.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#144

Post by possibilistic »

chrisacky wrote: post #23

Can you imagine how many of these BTCs are actually lost forever. Look at this address: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/address/198aMn6ZYAczwrE5NvNTUMyJ5... The last time this address was touched was 2009, and has an even 8,000 coins (back in the day, this only amounted to 320 mined blocks. You could do that in what?... a few hours/half days?[1]) The owner probably ran his system for a few hours, collected 8000 coins, tho…

Assuming these people don't know what they have, would it be possible to track down their whereabouts? Are IP addresses recorded in bitcoin exchanges?

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#145

Post by fat0wl »

cylinder wrote: post #142
patd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one way to look at it is to compare it to owning some land. Some people are rich because their ancestors claimed a large piece a long long time ago. One could argue that they pulled out a lot of money out of thin air.

They actually did. Much of the western US was "homesteaded" through the federal government. Basically, head out west and settle, plant your flag and you can have that land for free.

yea but that involves work in a sense. You have to tend to this land and develop communities or the land is worthless. I'm sure the value grew over time as the residents were able to make it into a nicer place.

They didn't just buy a few bytes of data & see the value appreciate by 9billion% just for sitting on their fat asses.

And that's the other issue. Land is an ACTUALLY limited resource. We don't know how to pull it out of thin air. The Bitcoin currency is artificially limited just to force a supply/demand situation. People can make other competing currencies just by forking the code.

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#146

Post by Jtsummers »

cma wrote: post #89
sktrdie wrote: post #59

What kind of repercussion will this have in the future, say, when Bitcoin will be more widely utilized? It seems to me that it might only cause an issue to Bitcoin's market during these initial stages, where a rich bitcoin owner could fluster the market by selling large amounts. But in the long run, there will always be the rich and the poor. Or is there something I'm missing?

Couldn't everyone could just switch to a client that blacklisted all of the coins owned by people that were in the top 100 on nov 22 2013?

That would seriously diminish confidence in bitcoin, though it might encourage spending of bitcoins. I suspect the latter will not be enough to overcome the former. The end result would likely be bogus transactions between addresses merely to keep the money "alive". Adding 0 value and potentially negative value as now a set of useless transactions will sit in the ever growing blockchain.

Similarly, during the transition of clients accepting to clients not accepting those coins, what happens if there's a transaction from one of them? What if it's only partial, they spent 2k but left 2k, they're active but now out 2k BTC that they can't spend?

This is sort of like discussing blacklisting "stolen" BTC. Suppose I figure out 100 brainwallets and steal 1000 BTC. Before I get added to the blacklist, I transfer 1 BTC to each of 1000 addresses. Do you blacklist the whole chain of addresses going back? Do you only blacklist that one amount (essentially reducing the value of those addresses by 1 BTC each)? What if one of those addresses is yours and I'm just tainting every address I can find. You'll have 1BTC that you can't spend, and you don't know to whom it belongs. Which of the original 100 addresses do you send it back to if that's the intent of the system? Do you send it back to a known hacked address? Does the former owner have a mechanism to announce a valid new address for kindhearted souls to return their bitcoins to?

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#148

Post by clamprecht »

res0nat0r wrote: post #6

Question: How hard/impossible would it be for me as a US citizen to cash in on a large lot like that? Say I want 10 million dollars for some partying I want to do for New Years. It seems some people have mega riches, but is it actually feasible for me to realize that money (in US Dollars, deposited to my Chase bank account)?

$10 million for New Years - I want to party with you. Monaco 2014? ;)

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#149

Post by lhgaghl »

fat0wl wrote: post #105
lhgaghl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you speak of a con of Bitcoin, but I don't see how any other system solves what you complain about. Please explain to me (or refer me to material explaining) how USD can possibly be stable when used by billions of people. Just because it's been stable from my point of view, doesn't mean it's stable for everyone. If your explanation relies on trusting a single person or organization, you see why I favor Bitcoin…

USD is more stable because gov/banks/etc. are all staring at it all day, as well as their country's population. Not saying I trust them but I'd rather have a bill backed by the US gov than by Satoshi Nakamoto. He's the single person YOU rely on -- the one who designed the mining system, currency caps, etc. Ridiculous. USD is more distributed than Bitcoin just because people are always watching theorizing monitoring U…

You provided no proof that USD is stable, just a bunch of handwaving.

> He's the single person YOU rely on.

For security, no. The protocol is public. So I assume you mean only by market manipulation. But how so? Is this the same way I rely on Bill Gates not to trade all his money to a foreign currency?

Re: Richest Bitcoin Addresses

#150

Post by lhgaghl »

mike_esspe wrote: post #88
wdvh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I did not know that. But there's little reason to believe that whatever encryption that bitcoin uses (presumably EC?) won't be vulnerable at some point in the future.

Bitcoin address is a hash of public key. So, without address reuse you should break both EC, RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256

I'm confused, how can you break EC but not be able steal people's money?

Similarly, if you found had preimage attack for ripemd160(sha256(x)) (you can find a public key with the same hash as any other hash), how could you not steal people's money?

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