Only 0.01% Of People Own $232 Bln Worth Of Bitcoin
A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that the big Bitcoin holders control the cryptocurrency more than most wealthy Americans control the dollar.
As per the research, the top 10,000 Bitcoin holders own a total of 5 million Bitcoins, which equates to about $232 billion. This means that around 0.01% of Bitcoin holders control 27% of the 19 million bitcoins in circulation.
The study was carried out at the MIT Sloan School of Management at the London School of Economics. It was headed by finance professors Antoinette Schoar and Igor Makarov. It took into account every transaction in Bitcoin history for the first time in more than 13 years of history. Every transaction was carefully mapped and analyzed before a deal was reached.
The researchers found that 90% of all Bitcoin transactions came from just two activities that had no economic function. The former is simply a result of how the network processes Bitcoin transactions. The second comes from users trying to remain anonymous when sending transactions between wallets.
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Only the remaining 10% comes from what the researchers termed “real volume” operations. These were essentially transactions between trading desks and stock exchanges.
Illegal transactions such as fraud, gambling sites, and other illegal uses made up just under 3% of the total volume.
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