Posted by Xoken.org – The price of Bitcoin is very close to its all-time high. That’s thanks in large part to the United States (US) financial giant.
Investment firms such as Grayscale, BlackRock and Fidelity are pouring billions of dollars into buying volatile digital assets. In recent weeks, some of these powerful institutions have been called Bitcoin Whales.
That’s because, in the Bitcoin system there will only be 21 million bitcoins. A total of 19 million have been made, but many have already been accounted for and may be off the market.
So the question arises, are other organizations or individuals Bitcoin whales? So what does wealth mean for a digital currency that was originally created as peer-to-peer internet money?
Some of the numbers below are estimates gathered from direct research and published information. It just should give a good idea of how Bitcoin is distributed.
Data collection ended on the morning of February 29. Estimates of how many bitcoins are lost forever vary between three million and six million.
Bitcoins can be lost because people forget their digital wallet details and there is no customer support on Bitcoin. James Howells for example, who lost 8,000 bitcoins on a hard drive that was thrown away in Wales.
Some of the lost bitcoins may also have been criminal proceeds left untouched. According to crypto investigators at Elliptic, as many as 3.15 million bitcoins have been active for 10 years or more.
Some analysts, such as those from Chainalysis investigators, say that Bitcoin that has not been transferred in five years could also be lost. So millions more bitcoins could potentially be added to the lost pile.
A loose estimate that is often agreed upon is 3.5 million. It’s just that 1.1 million of those active tend to belong to anonymous Bitcoin creators, so we can take that out of the equation.
Therefore, a conservative estimate for lost coins is around 2.4 million, or 11 percent of all bitcoins. A Cryptocurrency exchange acts like a bank for crypto users.
Reported by the BBC on Sunday (3/3/2024), it is said that it can exchange traditional money such as dollars or pounds for Bitcoin and other digital tokens. K33 researchers estimate that about 2.3 million bitcoins are held with exchanges, either in customers’ names or as float.