> If you operate in this industry and haven’t heard of Bitfury, you may have less of a grasp of the landscape than you think. It was created by some of the main insiders and has employed many former government officials. I would have a rethink of my authoritative stance if I were you.
Employing government officials is not an index of seriousness. I should have been more clear, i've heard of Bitfury in the context of mining and ASICs, but I was unaware they had started a chainalysis product, and I don't take their efforts there seriously. I think the advertised customer list for this product speaks for itself.
> From everything I know about crypto, the linked paper checks out. A lot of people discuss these issues — I think Vitalik recently lamented that cryptocurrencies seem to devolve into feudal dollars.
I'm not denying that the basic idea is correct: that ownership inequality is high. It's just not as high as this headline is indicating.
Remember, the paper does not anywhere assert this 0.01% vs 27% stat. That is created by combining the paper's data on wallet clusters with crypto.com estimate of bitcoin owners. If you read the crypto.com whitepaper on how they computed this, they note that a limitation of their analysis is that they cannot count people who bought Bitcoin at one time, and have since sold it. That means that if you accept everything else about their analysis (which I don't), the denominator they're using counts literally everyone who has ever owned any non-zero fraction of a Bitcoin, ever.
Employing government officials is not an index of seriousness. I should have been more clear, i've heard of Bitfury in the context of mining and ASICs, but I was unaware they had started a chainalysis product, and I don't take their efforts there seriously. I think the advertised customer list for this product speaks for itself.
> From everything I know about crypto, the linked paper checks out. A lot of people discuss these issues — I think Vitalik recently lamented that cryptocurrencies seem to devolve into feudal dollars.
I'm not denying that the basic idea is correct: that ownership inequality is high. It's just not as high as this headline is indicating.
Remember, the paper does not anywhere assert this 0.01% vs 27% stat. That is created by combining the paper's data on wallet clusters with crypto.com estimate of bitcoin owners. If you read the crypto.com whitepaper on how they computed this, they note that a limitation of their analysis is that they cannot count people who bought Bitcoin at one time, and have since sold it. That means that if you accept everything else about their analysis (which I don't), the denominator they're using counts literally everyone who has ever owned any non-zero fraction of a Bitcoin, ever.