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About 10,000 of the largest individual investors control more than a third of the bitcoin market. This is according to a study published<\/a> on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) website ),\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0Forbes.<\/p>\n The authors of the work, Igor Makarov (London School of Economics) and Antoinette Shoar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have developed a set of algorithms that allows addresses to determine ownership of the bitcoin market.<\/p>\n On their basis, they found that at the end of 2020, intermediaries, such as crypto exchanges, controlled about 5.5 million bitcoins (about a third of the cryptocurrency in circulation), individual investors together – about 8.5 million bitcoins.<\/p>\n At the same time, the 1,000 largest individual investors control almost 3 million bitcoins. About 5 million bitcoins are held by the top 10,000 investors – about a third of their total.<\/p>\n “This concentration figure is most likely an understatement, as we cannot rule out that some of the largest addresses are controlled by the same person,” Makarov and Shoar said.<\/p>\n The data collected by researchers shows that the concentration of miners is even higher: 10% of miners control 90% of Bitcoin mining capacity, while 0.1% of them (about 50 miners in total) control 50% of mining capacity.<\/p>\n