As of Jan. 14 we already have 784,000address that owns 1 bitcoin or more. The number is already had an 11% increase from 707,000 that is recorded a year ago. In 2015 has more than doubled. Most of the address came from exchanges and big player "whales" that usually hold a big amount of bitcoin.
For me, this is great news since bitcoin is influencing a lot of users, as the number increases meaning the community is already getting bigger surely when a lot of people invested in bitcoin it could easily increases the market price of the bitcoin because of the supply and demand thing.
In my experience, it is not easy to earn 1 bitcoin so I think most of them are investors.
What is your opinion about this? How does it affect bitcoin?
Consider that people can own more than one address. Consider that is actually a very good practice, and has been recommended since the beginning to never reuse addresses, and also consider a whale might actually want to not look as such by splitting their funds (and maybe to better protect themselves).
The point is, number of addresses does not equate number of people. Whales can hide among fish by owning several addresses. Also I'm not sure about exchanges or mixers but they probably do something similar.
It is possible that the amount of people owning bitcoin has increased, but probably not in the same amount, ie. not 11%. If i had 100 bitcoin in an address, and decide to split it into 100 addresses, are there 99 more people owning 1 bitcoin? No.
Oh and those taxing rumors, that probably also stimulates people to spread their coins around, just saying...