The Richest Bitcoin Whale in Existence Now Has Over $2,763,000,000 in BTC After Massive Series of Transactions
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There is no way to know this for certain. [...]
I know that if I had a large amount of BTC, my holding would be split between numerous wallets, in ways that “crypto analytics” (i.e.,
spying) would be unable to link. I would want to fly under the radar—
not to show up on “rich lists”. Are all Bitcoin whales are too dumb to do that?
How many whales are
ghostwhales? (To coin a new term here.) The question cannot be answered. Ghostwhales are invisible; that is the point.
The Richest Bitcoin Whale in Existence Now Has Over $2,763,000,000 in BTC After Massive Series of Transactions [...]
I have a hard time believing that anyone who holds/controls large sums of bitcoin are going to keep it in places that can be identified as being owned by one person or entity (unless they are a public company or a government that has to make those kinds of disclosures). Private individuals or even private institutions should be disincentivized in being known for controlling large amounts of bitcoin. So even with something like 130k BTC, there might be some preferences to not keep more than a certain amount in any one place.. maybe less than 10k in anyone location?
By the way, I could understand/appreciate that if there is a private trust or some kind of a joint ownership, then there might be some need to create some traceability regarding sources, so the other joint owners know about fairness and accountability.. so maybe i am arguing against myself to consider that there could be some cases in which accountability or tracking of ownership is preferred. Oh, as I am typing I just considered another case of inheritance, so a private individual or private entity might want to show ownership so that if anything ever happened, then the heirs (or the beneficiaries) will know how much BTC is out there and the various locations to find the BTC.
That is no reason to make all of the information public! BIP 32 explicitly contemplates use cases where a party may have a legitimate need to watch all of the transactions in what, to the public, would appear to be separate wallets. For example:
Use cases
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Audits: N(m/*)
In case an auditor needs full access to the list of incoming and outgoing payments, one can share all account public extended keys. This will allow the auditor to see all transactions from and to the wallet, in all accounts, but not a single secret key.
This can be done with an account (“wallet”), or with a whole hierarchy of accounts (“wallets”)—to support the complex uses cases that are often needed by sophisticated large HODLers.
Beyond that: Privacy coins that reveal absolutely zero ownership information on-chain have developed a concept called
“selective disclosure”. They have what are called “view keys”, in contradistinction to “spend keys”; the view keys serve a purpose similar to disclosing the extended public key for a BIP 32 account hierarchy. View keys facilitate full auditing and accountability. In “selective disclosure”, information is disclosed on a need-to-know-basis—to those who really do need to know,
not by publishing it to the whole world where any anonymous snoop can examine it.
If/when Bitcoin gets real privacy, I expect that it will also embrace “selective disclosure”. That would preserve irrevocable, undeniable, irrefutable blockchain information for legitimate use cases—while locking out the prying eyes of hackers, cyberstalkers,
kidnappers seeking ransom, armed robbers, and commercial espionage that seeks to infer competitive business plans from financial transaction data.
That last is
a huge impediment to big-business Bitcoin adoption. Most retail-tier HODLers are blissfully ignorant about this, but some leading Bitcoiners are well-informed about the problem. I recall that Greg Maxwell mentioned this, in some discussion of why he invented Confidential Transactions. Bitcoin ultra-maximalist company Blockstream uses CT in its Liquid sidechain, for the purpose of giving
big businesses and institutional investors at least a modicum of privacy. I wouldn’t be surprised if some billionaires use Liquid and similar tools to break up the public view of their whale-HODLings. Meanwhile, moronic “crypto journalists” run headlines about “the biggest whale!!” to impress the n00bs.
SAD.