Dutch news item: Bitcoin whales swallow everything: Market worried about centralization. - what’s your view on this?

No FUD, just curious to your opinions.

Google Translate:

What would happen if 1% of all bitcoin (BTC) holders owned 99% of the total supply? Can bitcoin still be called a decentralized cryptocurrency?

Increasingly, so-called whales are buying up large amounts of BTC, which are therefore taken out of circulation. The result: less than 2% of all wallets own the majority of all bitcoins in circulation.

Large Bitcoin investors are increasingly owning BTC In 2009, Bitcoin was introduced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi rewarded himself with 1.1 million BTC and is currently the largest owner. In the first four years, miners received 50 BTC per block for processing transactions. This is now only 3.125 BTC per block.

Because Bitcoin mining was very profitable at the time compared to now, it was easy to accumulate a large amount of BTC. Currently, of the 21 million BTC that will ever be available, 19.71 million BTC are in circulation.

Of the 19.71 million BTC that are currently in circulation, this graph from BitInfoCharts shows that 1.86% of all wallets hold 90% of the total amount of BTC. Large whales are therefore buying up bitcoin en masse. These large whales can be institutional investors, large companies or private investors. By purchasing these large quantities, many crypto owners are expressing concerns about the decentralization of BTC.

Bitcoin increasingly decentralized The originally released whitepaper (report with all information about the project) by Satoshi Nakamoto states that BTC is a peer-to-peer network. This means that there is no intervention from banks, governments, large institutions or other parties.

There are currently more than 46 million BTC addresses that hold at least one dollar. The 104 largest addresses alone hold a total of almost 2.5 million BTC, good for 15.98% of all circulating BTCs. And these large wallets are only buying more.

To keep a cryptocurrency decentralized, it is important that whales do not get to call the shots. They can then manipulate the price, which does not benefit reliability and decentralization. At the moment, the network can still be called decentralized, but whether that will remain the case with the record speed at which whales are gobbling up BTC, remains to be seen.

Source: https://www.crypto-insiders.nl/nieuws/bitcoin/bitcoin-whales-slokken-alles-op-markt-bezorgd-over-centralisatie/