Bitcoin Wealth Distribution
blog.lawnmower.io
blog.lawnmower.io
Due to the nature of easy & anonymous address creation, and corporate account management inherent to Bitcoin & the companies in the ecosystem, estimating the actual number of unique bitcoin holders as opposed to addresses is unfortunately much more difficult — & not something we can glean from observing its blockchain alone.
Addresses can not only overstate user numbers when single people unknowingly control numerous addresses, but also understate user numbers when single addresses hold the funds of numerous unknown people, like an exchange who may control balances in a traditional database.
It is much easier to check if the points fall in a straight line than a perfectly draw exponential.
Are you sure that graph is a power law? Are you sure it isn't a thick-tailed hyperbole or some hyperexponential?
being roughly straight on a log-log plot is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for power-law behavior
pp. 24-29 have nice log-log plots of various data sets, along with whether they can plausibly described as power law distributions. 'Wealth', interestingly enough, looks like a pretty straight line, but fails the statistical test badly.
Btw, if you just take logs and run a regression to estimate the exponent, you get a highly biased estimate.
In general, it's much better to do a direct statistical test, although the method described in the paper is somewhat involved.
What I'll say is that what something is is a fuzzy term, although I generally agree what you mean especially about a power law says about the behavior in the tails especially. That comes from thinking a small deviation on the tail is "small" due to optics and not realizing it is deviation on orders of magnitude. That might be what the replier to my comment was referring to. That's why "two graphs" is usually a good answer.
PS Also, I would never fit a straight line on a loglog or semilog graph, nor should anyone ever. People who do that don't understand what least squares is at all.
A polynomial is a power law...with more terms.
Lol yep. Had a few thousand when they were worthless and don't remember what happened to them.
I've been kicking myself ever since.
I could run some benevolent organization but I have to admit that if it was truly benevolent and important, I could start it tomorrow and accrue a donation base to fund it. Lack of a windfall isn't a great excuse for inaction.
Pretend you buy a luxury car. You'll probably look carefully after it, take it for routine washes, get dents removed etc. If instead you buy the $4,000 craigslist special then who cares - let the rain wash it.
If you live in a mansion, you hire a maid and a gardener and have to look after rooms of furniture, be worried about your treasures ... for what? How many places can you sit at once?
You live once, this is all you get. Forget that silly stuff.
I was happier there than in a 2 bedroom apartment. Cleaning the whole place took 15 minutes, and the outdoors were always just a few steps away.
In a big place I'd feel somewhat trapped. It was too nice to just lounge around that it gave me an excuse not to go outside.
Give $100 bills to homeless people. Buy nice things for all your friends and family. Hell, with that kind of money, you could look into houses that are about to foreclose and anonymously pay off the mortgages. The only reason I've ever wanted to be rich is to see how creative I can get about spreading that wealth around to do some good.
It's harder because people would want some demonstrable efficacy and results before hopping on board... That's not a bad thing
Does some goal or ambition miraculously appear? It might... Perhaps this puts new things in reach.
The crux of the argument however is that unless those things are something intimately personal like starting a serious art collection or buying a private jet, you could arguably get the money.
And if they are personal itches then you likely won't get them fixed through materialism. There's decent $100 paintings and $20,000 airplanes you can split between 3 or so people (ie, $5,000 a person). This is actual money, yes. But it's not 1%er status.
Guess yours have the same fate too except you can't really access them.
When they were kids, my father and his friends did the same with baseball cards. They would chew the gum, and then put the 'worthless' baseball cards into their bicycle wheel spokes.
Who knows how many Mickey Mantle rookie cards they might have come across.
Point is, nobody can predict when a currently-worthless item might explode in value.
As a result, when I was pricing these recently, they were apparently collected by every other 1960s hobbyist and put in a shoebox. You combine that with the fad of stamp collecting waning and now the first-issue, day-1, limited-edition 55 year old stamp is put up for a few dollars (and usually doesn't sell even then), because every one of them were snatched up.
Second, here's two other of my near-million misses:
I was in an early talk in the bay with what eventually became YouTube.
It went like this "yeah that's fine but what about real player? They tried all this already. On demand video isn't a new idea. Just another flying car. I wish you luck."
Then there was the time I worked in Venice and there was this small company called snapchat and i was like "isn't this a busy and well established market already? Don't consumers have things like MMS, imo, and a myriad of other options?"
Who knows, maybe if I did join then my dismissive pessimism would have been instrumental in their failure on some alternative timeline.
I think the right analysis here is that both companies succeeded because the demographic of who could access the technology and for what purpose changed ... so the same idea in different hands did different things. It really opens up the analysis when considering these as essentially commodity startups.
My brother had 10 BTC but sold it right before the famous spike to $1200. That felt even worse haha!
I was just sharing a similar experience to the one mentioned in the parent comment.
https://medium.com/@jony_levin/the-lorenz-curve-of-bitcoin-i...
If I had a thousand addresses full of these amounts (0.0001) I could spend them all in one transaction into a single address.
The fee would end up being higher than the standard due to the recommendation that fees are per byte.
So I might end up with 0.099 in the final address.
So it's possible to move them if you can combine enough of them together to make the transaction worthwhile.
Of course the part where you're right is that it's unlikely a single person owns a large number of these spam transactions and thus the economics doesn't make sense for them to move at this time.
However, if Bitcoin were worth 100x and the fee remained in dollar terms roughly the same , it would now become much easier to move these spam amounts.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1195/how-to-calcu...