1/ #Bitcoin FUD-busting time!

claim: bitcoin ownership is heavily concentrated.

@business published an article claiming "2% of accounts control 95% of all Bitcoin" 🤣

truth: the facts, my friends, simple don't line up. let's dive in!

2/ interrogating on-chain addresses is tricky.

address =/ account.

one person can control multiple addresses.

one address can hold bitcoin belonging to multiple ppl.

exchanges and trading firms will have addresses with large balances that represent client funds.
3/ the fine folks @glassnode published an excellent analysis of on-chain address balances in January

the ownership distribution of bitcoin among wallets is actually much more diverse than one might expect.

full piece here:
https://t.co/n5IdIQdNoA
4/ 31% of BTC is held in addresses not identified as exchange wallets.

these are likely institutions, funds, custodians, and OTC desks.

our analysis at @CoinSharesCo indicates >15% of all bitcoin is held in third party custody, including @coinbase and our own @KomainuCustody
5/ in fact, between asset managers @Grayscale ($36B in BTC) and our @xbtprovider ($4B in BTC), 4% of bitcoin is locked up by fund providers and asset managers!

our @CoinSharesCo research team publishes an EXCELLENT weekly report on fund flows and AUMs - https://t.co/6Kky96m3ob
6/ distribution of bitcoin over time has also changed a lot

as new market microstructure emerges, the way market participants manage and store their coins also changes.

with more institutions and more AUM in structured products and funds, inevitably we see more clustering
7/ if we look at number of participants, the trend looks as we might expect. there is a very fat tail, with the majority of wallets (22M) holding less than one bitcoin.
8/ ultimately, bitcoin ownership is not as heavily concentrated as reported. this is because the large wallets holding much of the bitcoin supply represent thousands if not millions in user funds.

these types of misconceptions lead to all sorts of wild, wrong claims.
9/ bitcoin DOES represents equality of opportunity.

you don't need a bank.

you don't need a brokerage account.

you don't need to be an accredited investor or well connected.

anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can buy $5 of bitcoin easily and quickly.
10/ let me know what other misconceptions you want to talk about! it's important that we arm ourselves with the *facts* and support our claims with empirical evidence and data.

luckily the #bitcoin ecosystem is comprised of incredibly intelligent people who do this research!

More from Bitcoin

Ok, so what is the significance of the @lagarde statement on bitcoin?

We were offered a very open insight (but slightly flawed analysis) into top level policy perspective behind the crack down on selfhosted wallets.

https://t.co/1LTzrxHbgs 1/32


'It is a speculative asset, by any account. If you look at the price movements... '

It starts with an economic price perspective and we can learn that ECB is closely monitoring this price movement as one of the many indicators.

So we are in the classic central bank frame 2/32

'Those who thought it would turn into a currency. Sorry, it is an asset not a currency.'

Here she summarises a classic debate on what is currency and what is needed for that. Based on the holy three: unit of account, means of payment, store of value. 3/32

The summary is classic, but too narrow and does not incorporate the wider financial history viewpoints on money, currencies and the way we pay. 4/32

ECB overlooks the de facto unit of account role of bitcoin, having been used to 200 years of having cash around whic is both the unit of account and a means of payment. 5/32

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)