Bitcoin Followup - Bloomberg Article on Bitcoin "Whales"

In our earlier article on Bitcoin, we noted that trying to cover it is somewhat complicated and that there are a number of factors to consider in trying to analyze it objectively. 

In this Bloomberg article, they point out yet another one. According to the article it seems that 40% of the Bitcoins in existence may be owned by around 1,000 users. Is that good or bad? We'll leave it up to readers to decide for themselves. Below are a couple of excepts from the Bloomberg article.

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"About 40 percent of bitcoin is held by perhaps 1,000 users; at current prices, each may want to sell about half of his or her holdings, says Aaron Brown, former managing director and head of financial markets research at AQR Capital Management. (Brown is a contributor to the Bloomberg Prophets online column.) What’s more, the whales can coordinate their moves or preview them to a select few. Many of the large owners have known one another for years and stuck by bitcoin through the early days when it was derided, and they can potentially band together to tank or prop up the market."

. . . . .

“I believe that it’s common sense that these whales that own so much bitcoin and bitcoin cash, they don’t want to destroy either one,” says Sebastian Kinsman, who lives in Prague and trades coins. But as prices go through the roof, that calculation might change. 

                       Please click here to read the full article on Bloomberg

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Added notes: If you want an easy place to track the price of Bitcoin alongside other things like gold, oil, and the Dow, I have a page setup on the blog to do that here. I added a quote for Stellar Lumens to the page because Stellar was part of the partnership between IBM and KlickEx that we covered here earlier this year. Stellar Lumens have also had a significant increase in price since that news was announced.

In our previous article on Bitcoin we noted that one obstacle to Bitcoin becoming more commonly used in regular commerce are the extra steps involved in acquiring it and trying to spend it easily. Most everyone who wishes to become involved with Bitcoin will do so by joining a coin exchange first (one of extra steps involved). Coinbase is one of the largest of these types of exchanges. Recently, they alerted their customers that due to increased volume, transactions to buy and sell may be delayed. Here is the information recently put out by Coinbase on this. Here is an article on Yahoo Finance that talks about this issue.

One last note. Readers may find this 25 minute audio interview with Keith Neumeyer of interest. He is the CEO of a major silver mining company and talks a bit about Bitcoin in relation to gold and silver.