Bitcoin (BTC) is among the coins that have successfully gained attention and hype among investors and the crypto community. Bitcoin is known as the crypto king, a pillar for other digital assets in the market. It has the full potential to attain new limits in the market as Blockchain technology becomes a hot sensation.
Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized digital cryptocurrency, which means that it is a form of electronic money that only exists in the virtual world rather than in physical presence. Unlike any fiat currency, Bitcoin can’t be regulated by any authority body or government as it is decentralized in nature.
Bitcoin is peer-to-peer virtual money that is backed by open-source computing nodes on the Blockchain network and implements cryptography mechanisms to ensure the authenticity from both ends. The maximum supply of Bitcoin has been pre-programmed to be 21 million BTC, and there are presently about 19,209,718 BTC in circulation.
The amount of BTC held by one percent of investors is equivalent to nearly $232 billion. The study was conducted with the help of finance professors Antoinette Scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management and Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics to map out and analyze every transaction made within the Bitcoin network to conclude the dominance of Bitcoin holders in its 13-year-old history.
Is 0.28 BTC enough to be in the top 1%? Yes. According to Blockworks Group analyst Jake Levison, you need to have 0.28 BTC to be among the one percent of investors holding BTC of that size. “If you own 0.28 BTC, you’re statistically guaranteed to be in the richest 1% of the world in BTC terms,” Jake Levison, Blockworks Group Analyst.
According to the WSJ report, there is a considerable gap between bitcoin holders and the traditional American riches. Nearly 144 million wallets acquire the top position. Top holders of bitcoin control a significant share in BTC than the richest American personalities that hold in Dollars. The United States Federal Reserve says that the top 1% of US households control one-third of all wealth.
According to Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, a majority of the total bitcoin supply is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Greenspan told Cointelegraph that Satoshi’s coins alone make up more than 5% of the bitcoin supply. He added, “Over time, the ownership of Bitcoin is designed to get more distributed. For fiats, the opposite tends to happen.” It’s worth highlighting that most of BTC’s circulating supply is also not directly controlled by anyone and is likely to be lost forever.
The number of BTC required to make it into the top 1% is nearly between 0.28 BTC to 15 BTC depending on various research. Steve Lee’s 2018 forecast assumes that there will only be 21 million bitcoins which is divided by 0.28 and then again divided by the number of people living on earth, which is 7.9 billion people as of October 2022.
Bitcoin has seen a tremendous spike since its inception, and it shook investors with its return on investment (ROI). For example, if you bought $100 worth of bitcoins in 2010, you could have been a millionaire today with a $20 million profit in your pocket. Bitcoin may skyrocket soon in this crypto winter due to its vast community, and it may soon touch the $100k mark in 2025.