Category: Market Cap

Distrust in  fiat currency, controlled by a state, was one of the principal motivations in designing of  the Bitcoin protocol. It was designed  to be a decentralized system of creation of new money by a transparent computational algorithm.  Any person participating in the currency’s ecosystem can run this algorithm on a computer and generate new money. It is supposed to be a currency created by the people for the people and therefore a currency of the people. It is a currency of future when true democracy will prevail. here  here  here  here  here

But what is the reality? Who owns the bulk of these virtual currencies? To get an answer to this question, I looked into data about the distribution of these currencies amongst the participants in this technology game. The result of this exercise is truly revealing.

Data: We have collected data from the website https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html which gives “Rich List” of some selected 9 currencies. We collected data as on 11^th April, 2018. The market cap of these 9 currencies was 58.8 per cent of total market capitalization in terms of US dollar on that date.  On the data date, the total market capitalization of virtual currencies (excluding tokens) was 261 billion US dollar. So one can say collected data is adequately representative of the virtual currency ecosystem. The website has grouped data by value of coins  held against each address. An address having , say 0.001 bitcoin (BTC), would be grouped in the bucket “0 to 1 BTC” bucket.  For some cryptocurrencies , the number of coins held in an address may be very large as their market value is much smaller as compared to that of Bitcoin.  So the number of class intervals for coins held would be higher than a highly valued cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. To keep the results compact we have collapsed crypto wise class intervals into a common 3 classes. The following table gives a summary of distribution of value in US dollar and number of addresses across these class intervals.

Table 1: The distribution of addresses in terms of value of coin held and number of addresses for various class intervals of value of coins for each address.

It is obvious from the above table that only few addresses, each having more than 100 coins per address account for the bulk of total market capitalization of each currency. Bitcoin which the highest market capitalization of all circulating coins is also concentrated in a small number of addresses. The table 2 below clearly indicates how a few big market players have completely taken over each currency market.

The US tax authorities as well as Commodity Future Trading Commission have designated as “commodity” and not currency. From that perspective, this commodity market is highly monopolistic and susceptible to market manipulation by few large traders.  It is high time that anti-trust authorities in the developed economies wake up to this reality and take appropriate actions in the interest of average participant in these markets.

Table 2: The number of addresses and value held by top bracket by number of coins held per address

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