The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

Here is Joseph Dejacques using "libertarian" for the first time in a letter to Proudhon (incidentally also an early feminist work; the letter was a rebuke to Proudhons male chauvinism):

> Flogger of woman and absolute serf of man, Proudhon Magnan, you use your words for a lash. Like a slave-driver you seem delighted to disrobe your beautiful victims (on paper) and flagellate them with invectives. Moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian, you want free exchange of cotton and candles and you seek to protect man against woman in the exchange of affectional human passion. You cry against the great barons of capital, and you would rebuild a proud barony of man on vassal-woman. Logician with misfit eyeglasses, you are unable to read the lessons of the present or the past; you can discern nothing that is elevated or at a distance or in the perspective of the future.

(EDIT: Worth noting above is that he sets "moderate anarchist" up as less radical than "libertarian")

And this is another paragraph from the same letter, denouncing not just property rights (one of things he admired in Proudhon's was his "property is theft" slogan) but denouncing restrictions on consumption:

> Do I need, for example, one sun for myself, one river for myself, one forest for my own, or all the houses in all the streets for my own? Have I the right to become the proprietor of them to the exclusion of others, especially when I do not need them? If I have not that right, is it any more just for me to wish, as under the system of contracts, to measure to each one—according to his accidental ability to produce—just what proportion he should receive of all things; how much of the sun’s rays he is entitled to, how many cubic feet of air and of water shall he allotted to him, or the extent of his promenades in the forests; what number or the parts of the houses he may occupy, what streets he may walk in and what streets he must keep out of?

While you probably won't agree with much he says - as a libertarian socialist even I disagree with much of what he says (he's very much what Marx would have written off as one of the utopian socialists, or a hippie a century early), the letter is well worth a read both because it has historical importance in being the start of libertarianism (right wing libertarianism was first born about a century later), but also because it is incredibly beautifully written even if one disagrees with it:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...

It's not unlikely the same reasoning (i.e. 40% of coins on top 1000 addresses) is used for the larger claim.

But that says very little. A bitcoin address after all can be shared by many users, in the same way a bank vault can contain money from many individuals. It's quite likely that the top addresses are held in a (semi) custodial function by parties like Coinbase or Kraken, which have hundreds of thousands to millions of customers, but may store their users' coins on a number of addresses that's a tiny fraction of their user count.

Regardless, unequal wealth distribution isn't entirely unique to bitcoin, either. The top 1% worldwide own about 50% of the world's wealth, the richest 10% own about 85%.

Fair enough, how about "trivial to launder" instead? The fact that every transaction is visible on the blockchain means that people who don't bother obfuscating their tracks (i.e. honest people who don't feel they have anything to hide) are the one who risk their privacy invaded: "hey, look, this is the address where we pay X his salary and some of it got transfered to the known address of this sex shop website".

If you want to hide your tracks however it's easy. Say I'm a politician and I want to accept a bribe. I can get a briefcase full of cash, but that's bulky, not very convenient and I could get caught if I try to move it (especially across borders).

Or I could try to open a bank account in some place where people look the other way but it's more complicated, involves third parties who could expose me (panama papers, lux leaks...), leaves a paper trail etc...

With BTC I click "generate a new receive address" in my wallet, give it to my anonymous benefactor and that's that.

Then after that if I really want to make it difficult to follow the money I can split my coin in multiple addresses, do a bunch of dummy transactions to obfuscate where the BTC change hands, go through a bunch of coin mixers, maybe convert to an other crypto (monero for instance?), do a bunch more mixing, and then back to BTC. Good luck unravelling all that.

>It could be stablished as a law that public money when being spent in the blockchain needs to be auditable by the people (identities of sender and recipient known), and this way you would end up with even less corruption than the current system.

Public spending is already supposed to be auditable in the democratic countries I know of (except in very specific cases, like "black boxes" for paying informants etc..). Generally corruption and waste is when people overpay for a service, like say paying 10x the cost for the construction of a new stadium, favouring a contractor over an other etc... I don't think BTC would help greatly with that. There are many, many ways of making "technically legal" purchases that conceal corruption, I don't think it would improve things very much. "Here, have this very valuable painting by Manet as a thank you for your help", "Here, let me make a charitable donation to your foundation", "Here, let me change this piece of regulation that will benefit your company", etc...

Unless you want to force all citizens (in the public and private) to publish their addresses I'm not sure you can really reign that in. And even then, how would you enforce that?