The Ugly Truth Of Governments Owning Bitcoin
Crypto is still a hot topic at the moment. As the democrats try to save face and buddy up with crypto after four long years of being the most oppressive towards it. We have now shaped into a time where countries are thinking about or already stock piling bitcoin and still the price hasn't really moved.
So what happens when countries end up owning the vast amount of the supply of bitcoin in the future? Does it put the entire system at risk or does the proof of stake.
We are actully not too far away from such a scenario. Just take a look at current bitcoin wallets and distribution.
I think one of the biggest things to take note of here are the 1-10 accounts which is only at 859,000 (rounded up) with 21 million bitcoin in existence that means a huge amount of people don't own anywhere near 1 bitcoin. So when people say make sure you own at least one bitcoin you can start to see why that's the case. Even worse only 3.6 million wallets own less then 1 bitcoin or 0.1 bitcoin.
Now of course some wallets could have multiple people or a person could have multiple wallets. So we can clearly see that a vast majority of bitcoin is already in the hands of just a few accounts.
Does This Harm Decetralization?
In a way it does as large accounts could in fact manipulate the prices of bitcoin into their favor buying or selling by moving just a small amount of their assets around.
Before it was miners that were often the raise for concern with a 51% attack on the network as more and more large cap businesses started to show up mining bitcoin in droves compared to any single person could which is what was originally thought would be the case.
With nearly all of the bitcoin now mined and honestly trading on bitcoin doesn't happen that much because of the crazy high fees it's most likely that it will stagnate more and more over the next few years. So if your every day person doesn't start to pile in on bitcoin then the elite few will mainly hold control over the network.
Does It Matter?
As we can see today a vast majority of bitcoin is in fact in a few accounts. Of which some of those accounts could very well be lost to time and some bitcoin has also been "burned".
With a vast majority of it being tied up into these few accounts already we can see there really "so far" hasn't been much reason for concern. Bitcoins price has always kind of just done it's thing. But on hard sell offs or hard pumps either the low liquidity fuels this or the actions of these larger accounts which can swing the markets much faster compared to if it was more spread out.
On the other side of that there's also nothing that is currently stopping the whales from holding all of it. With that much current supply in a few accounts a few well placed trades will see them gobble up droves more of bitcoin.
This is a centralization issue that will most likely take a few years before we see the negative impact of. If governments get involved this will most likely only expand this even further as a few select governments would start owning vast amounts. This would leave core businesses and governments once again in control exactly what bitcoin aimed to try and stop. A full 180 in just 15 years.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
That's pretty scary to think that those BTC have been lost forever without the keys. I can't even imagine. It's crazy to think some people were probably sitting on so much in the early days. I don't own a full BTC yet, and I am not sure I will ever get to that point sadly.
that one dude that threw his away and went to go look in the landfill. I wonder if he ever found it and what came of it all.
I remember that guy. I think he had the landfill all mapped out into quadrants, but he was running into issues with the local politicians over spending so much time there. Maybe that was a different guy!
Wish I knew where my old hard drive was and the keys to my wallet, wasn’t a lot but will be in the future
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I for one feel that the less in governments hands the better (and not just crypto either). Unfortunatley it is human nature to cede our power and wealth to a "manager" because we don't want the responsibility.
And yes, it does hurt decentralization. One of the key powers of something like bitcoin :-(
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Questions about centralization of Bitcoin are like questions about Hive. All chains start with a few miners or buyers, even without pre-mines, and it is a natural thing to buy early and sell. People continually take profits and sell to new people coming into the investment. I think it’s natural for these things to get more decentralized over time. Bitcoin has become more decentralized over time as many hold small amounts of bitcoin, with the price placing a whole bitcoin beyond the reach of most people. But they can buy some, and I think many do. So it’s slowly becoming more decentralized.