No btc hodlers were born into their coin wealth either. I guess we might see that in the future, though. Imagine the sour social media posts about how Kevin was born a "wholecoiner" due to daddy's basement mining in 2015.
It can be difficult to differentiate individual owners from larger groups and exchanges that hold currency for many users, but the NBER was able to skirt this challenge by using a specific data collection method capable of making the distinction.
Would it have killed TechSpot to add a link anywhere on that page to the paper that they are summarizing? I'd love to see how they claimed to do this.
Bitcoin ownership and creation is still highly concentrated
No shit. Anyone touching Bitcoin 10 years ago was severely mocked. The media basically spent the last 10 years saying how stupid it is and people are dumb for having anything to do with it, it's a giant ponzi scheme, has no value, etc. Constant lectures from the "enlightened" CEOs of banks, billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet calling it worthless or destructive, TV talking heads, etc. Still a few people saw value and thought for themselves instead of following the crowd. You have a market that, therefore, selected for contrarians and independent thinkers, those ideologically driven, and those willing to take big risks. That filters out tons of people. Those aren't the kind of people likely to abandon and give something up.
Early adopters and those who got involved building infrastructure had to listen to this constant stream of this negativity telling them that they were wrong. Not many people are interested in or strong enough to work in that kind of environment, so naturally there won't be many, but they were able to make fantastic investments due to the suppressed price from all that FUD.
This is all pretty obvious, but articles never seem to talk about it from this angle. At most, they'll play the "lottery winner" angle to make it sound like these people just stumbled into this money, to try to make it seem like they don't deserve it, it was a fluke, or to make the readers jealous. It's all really strange if you step back and look at it. The obvious conclusion from an impartial reader is that the media/academics/economists were fantastically wrong on all of this (and still won't admit it), that those incorrect predictions cost tons of people money who might have invested but were trying to be responsible and thought those "experts" knew what they were talking about and could be trusted.
Those early adopters mostly realized that these "experts" didn't really seem to know much about Bitcoin but loved to spout off their opinion on it. When you have authority figures coasting on their reputation, evaluating something outside of their area of knowledge, something that cross multiple disciplines, a new technology or situation, incentives for the experts to dismiss or downplay the item, etc, those are the kind of indicators that consensus from the authority figures means very little. If you think all this through and have a better understanding, there is a good chance that you are right than they are wrong.
It's really a fascinating scenario and lesson that should be remembered and considered as we try to evaluate and predict how things might develop in the future.
So what you're saying is the.media is paid propaganda versus reporting and researching for actual facts? Man that's crazy if that's only happening in this space
I'm guessing you already know about Gell-Mann Amnesia
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
It's weird because the intelligent response for people would be to say "hey, you lied to me! I'm not trusting you!" Instead, it seems most people get mad instead at the people who were correct the whole time by giving reasons why the media is full of shit--maybe as a mechanism displacing their own displeasure at being duped.
Geez, it's almost like how stocks, bonds, precious metals and Fiat currency are completely controlled by small groups of people. At least there is an upper limit on crypto coins, so even if a crash is forced, 1btc out of 19million/btc potentially has more worth than $1/$many trillions of dollars