A lot has been made int he past ten years about the 1%. The ultra-rich who control more wealth than the other 99% of us. I’m not going to get into all of that. Suffice to say that I’m not a member of that club but I wouldn’t turn down an invitation.
The 4% are something altogether different. It is estimated that with a maximum of 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist – ownership of a whole bitcon will become a bit of a status symbol. Currently trading at right around $8200, buying a bitcoin is not something that most people on the planet are capable of. Shelling out $8200 is a big commitment – in some markets that’s a down payment on a house, it will buy the very cheapest of brand new cars, or many other things. Now consider – some of the 1% have hundreds or even thousands of bitcoin in their wallets. It’s estimated that Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of bitcoin has more than a million btc. The top cold wallet has nearly 200k and the other top 100 range from that down to 70k. What that means is that most of the existing bitcoin are already spoken for by those top wallets and Satoshi. The rest of them are split up into little pieces called Satoshis or Sats. The majority of bitcoin enthusiasts only own a piece of a bitcoin and then own a lot of alternative coins (aka ‘alts’) which add up to crypto holdings that can be in excess of 1 bitcoin – but usually don’t hold the bitcoin as such.
A recent estimate says that only half of one percent of the population on the planet owns any form of cryptocurrency. So, we are talking about the 1/2 percenters here, not the 1 percenters. Out of those 1/2 percenters – only 4% of them own 1 or more bitcoin. It’s tricky to do the math here because there are some (many actually) people with more than one bitcoin wallet. When we do some very rough calculations we come out with the fact that out of roughly 8,000,000,000 people on the planet – there are only 160,000 of them who own a whole bitcoin. So, my friends, if you stepped up or got lucky or were smart enough to invest early on when bitcoin were cheap and plentiful in relation to demand…congratulations…you are part of the .002% of humans that will probably be among the wealthiest human beings int he history of our species. Congratulations!
If you haven’t bought any bitcoin yet, what are you waiting for! Use the coinbase link to the right to get started…you can buy little bits at a time or many bitcoin, but don’t forget, if you leave them on the exchange…you don’t really own them. If you don’t know how to begin, check out my quick guide about How to Invest in Bitcoin to get started