Who owns the most bitcoins is a tricky question to answer for a number of reasons, but mostly it’s due to the Account Model that Bitcoin was built around. The Account Model means that one entity can hold an unlimited number of individual Bitcoin Addresses and although anyone can see what those addresses hold via the Blockchain, no one knows which ones belong to whom.
As such, it takes good old fashion elbow grease to figure it out and the results might surprise you a bit. From incredibly wealthy individuals, to pioneering companies, to the largest of countries everyone is holding bitcoin, sometimes billions of dollars worth!
Who Owns The Most Bitcoins?
Getting straight to the point, the largest bitcoin owners are made up of both individuals as well as other entities such as private companies, publicly traded companies, governments, ETFs and more. We’ll get into the various specific individuals later on, but as a rough overview the amounts they are as follows:
- Individuals: 14.69M BTC
- ETF’s/Funds: 1.25M BTC
- Satoshi Nakamoto: 968,452 BTC
- Companies: 811,000 BTC
- Governments: 529,618 BTC
There’s also around 1.191M BTC that are still yet to be mined.
>> Deeper Dive: How Many Bitcoins Are There?
Is Bitcoin Too Centralized?
Not by any metrics we can find. One of the biggest Bitcoin Myths is that the supply is “too centralized”. That is, that there’s these mythical whales out there that are hogging all the supply of bitcoin and that there’s no point in switching the world over to a Bitcoin Standard because there will just be the same “elite” people with all the wealth.
When you look at the raw data, which can be accessed by everyone at any time via the Bitcoin Blockchain, we see a very different reality. While there are a number of Bitcoin Addresses that hold a significant investment amount, such as the four addresses with over 100,000 BTC or the 93 addresses that hold between 10,000-100,000 bitcoin, there’s a huge number of addresses holding between 0.00001 and 0.1 BTC.
While it’s possible that one person or entity owns many addresses, through other analysis it’s become quite clear that “individuals” as a whole own at least 14.69M BTC or about 70% of the total bitcoin supply ever to be mined.
Looking at the distribution above, the bulk of all bitcoins are held between addresses with just 1 BTC all the way up to 100,000 BTC. This adds up to around 994,437 individual addresses. While this is obviously a small fraction of the overall addresses (around 1.8%), we’re still talking about hundreds of thousands of people, clearly demonstrating that there aren’t just a “handful of elites” here.
Going even further, the funds held by public companies and various funds such as the Bitcoin ETFs are mostly held in some form or another by individuals, just held indirectly. If we include these then it could be argued that individuals hold almost 80%. If we then remove the coins owned by Satoshi as well as the bitcoin that hasn’t yet been mined that number increases to 87%!
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