As flagged by Bloomberg, newly released data by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that just 10,000 individual investors control roughly one-third of the Bitcoin in circulation.
To get to that number does require, of course, ignoring that moving that much Bitcoin would shift the market and affect the cryptocurrency’s value .
Most likely, the people behind those accounts are individuals who managed to accrue huge stockpiles of Bitcoin early and just kept getting richer and richer—possibly by using the sheer weight of their holdings to manipulate prices.
“To the best of our knowledge, we have the most complete information about crypto entities that have been used in academic research up to this point,” authors Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics and Antoinette Schoar of the MIT Sloan School of Management wrote in the report.
The authors cautioned that “measurement of concentration most likely is an understatement since we cannot rule out that some of the largest addresses are controlled by the same entity.” As Bloomberg noted, one example is the 20,000 separate addresses controlled Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the person or persons who developed the cryptocurrency and disappeared without withdrawing their profits.
Miners, the computer farms that generate new Bitcoins, are even more concentrated by the NBER estimate—with the top 10% controlling 90% of mining capacity, and just 0.1% controlling 50%.
Bloomberg noted this could make the Bitcoin network susceptible to a “51% attack”—the only way a malicious party could take it over is by seizing control of over half of the miners working on it.