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Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by nosuchthing on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @03:27PM (#15656634)
Reposting this as pertinent:

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard
Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by Anm on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @04:15PM (#15657118)
For context, those numbers came from 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1

I can't find any more recent study specific to the Gini coefficient, however these[1] charts show an improvement over this snapshot[2] from May 2015.

[1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... [2]: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls...

Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by nosuchthing on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @04:55PM (#15657495)
The original studies suggests early mining rewards were distributed mostly to a small group of users. It also shows attempts by large stakeholders to hide their large holdings by distributing funds across several wallet accounts.

If someone were to have monitored IP addresses in the swarm it may be possible to correlate attempts from single users hiding their funds across many wallets. Simply looking at the blockchain balances of single addresses will not necessarily indicate a single person controlling many addresses.

Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by mason55 on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @06:03PM (#15657992)
Please don’t quote large blocks of text like that, it’s impossible to read on mobile because of HN’s crappy web layout
Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by tomc1985 on Thursday November 09, 2017 @12:58AM (#15660226)
But on desktop it looks rather nice
Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by mrhappyunhappy on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @04:34PM (#15657297)
How can they possibly identify 47 individuals and what does that even mean in bitcoin context? Would an exchange fund holding millions of people’s coins be considered a single individual?
Re:Segwit2x Bitcoin Fork Suspended by nosuchthing on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @04:57PM (#15657512)
IP addresses in the swarm, among other unique indicators of identity.