Quote from: zooitje on March 15, 2013, 01:01:20 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on March 15, 2013, 12:43:10 PM

You're wrong, but I don't have the time to explain why.

I understand you're busy. Thanks for reading along.

What i don't understand is that this major (possible) risk is not thoroughly explained anywhere else (as i can find). It should be on the Bitcoin.org website. And i'm surprised that it seems that i'm the first to mention this here (as i'm very new to Bitcoin).

I sure hope someone else who understands this better than i do has the time to explain this sword of Damocles possibly hovering above the Bitcoin ecosystem. Or maybe throw me a link somwhere.

As i said before, i want to be able to explain this to people around me in order to inform them on using Bitcoin. And that is my main purpose of starting this thread: having a credible explanation on this matter.

You're not remotely the first to mention it. The reason that there doesn't seem to be much data upon it is because it's not an issue. Pretty much everyone figures this out on their own, but the initial ability to see the distribution of wealth so readily is often a shock. Again, the distribution of wealth for the US $ is far worse than bitcoin, but even the claims about how uneven the distribution is for bitcoin wealth presented in these articles are just wrong. If it's not outright FUD, it's akin to panic. A pool of addresses that can be shown to have a close association does not mean that all of those addresses are controlled by the same entity, and even if it's a pool of some kind, it doesn't mean that all of the wealth contained belongs to a single controlling entity. The 'bitcoin laundry' example is just one such example. Of the list of largest groupable addresses that the article presents; I've already noted that A is a Silk Road internal mixer pool (and wallet service), but even the authors acknowledged that B was the user pool at MtGox, G is the user pool at Instawallet and L is the miners' pool at Deepbit. They know those because those groups are open about it. They didn't know about A being Silk Road because they are not open about it. The point here is that, while even if they are correct the distribution isn't really that bad wehn compared to fiat currencies, it's not that bad anyway because their methodology of assuming that large pools of addresses are single entities is flawed.

EDIT: P, however, is definately a single person in control of 400K+ bitcoins who made no effort whatsoever to obscure that fact; considering that it's all one single address that does not spend them. And H, J, M, O & Q are almost certainly single users with standard pools of addresses using a single wallet.dat. While C,D,E,I, R & S are almost certainly groups of people using shared pool addresses. With a little more research, I'd wager that half of them would turn out to be the user pools for the traders on the other major exchanges, such as Bitfloor or BTCE. There are at least a dozen other exchanges shown on bitcoinwatch.com that could have user pools in the ranges of I, R & S. Many of these lesser exchanges serve non-English speaking markets, and thuse their visablility to the English reading Internet is limited.