TLDR Considering that Bitcoin is still a relatively small asset class, getting your hands on 1 BTC can indeed make you wealthy in the not-too-distant future. To assess the likelihood of this hypothesis, we have to keep an eye on price graphs and network adoption models. Currently, they all point in the right direction.
Is holding 1 BTC like owning a golden ticket in our digital world? In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, five golden tickets were hidden inside chocolate bar wrappers. The lucky children who found these tickets were granted chocolate for life and a Wonka factory tour.
Is owning 1 BTC for adults what Willy Wonka’s golden ticket was to children: both a status symbol and a way to set you up for life in terms of wealth?
There are interesting similarities. The protagonist of Roald Dahl’s story, poor kid Charlie Bucket, is friendly and humble. While the rich kids with their greed and pride end up in a bad place, Charlie is rewarded.
Compare this to the Bitcoiners’ phrase ‘Stay humble and stack sats’. It conveys that belief, patience, and humility will be rewarded. It’s precisely because of Bitcoin’s sharp downswings that ordinary people (our Charlies) have until recently been able to achieve the status of wholecoiner. The smug people from Wall Street miss out, while Charlie just stacks his sats every month.
People carry the moniker wholecoiner with pride. Here’s a reaction on a Reddit thread on the topic.
The Number of Wallets Owning > 1 BTC
Let’s look at some sats stats. 1 BTC is held by a little over 1 million wallets at the time of writing. The one million milestone was first reached in May 2023.
A first caveat is that a wallet doesn’t equal an owner, as persons can control multiple wallets. Addresses can also be associated with groups of people or companies (which is why it is tricky to think of Bitcoin whale addresses as wealthy individuals: these might be exchange wallets).
Bitcoins owners with 1 BTC are called wholecoiners in cryptocurrency circles. This number of wholecoiner wallet addresses reached an all-time high on Jan. 1 2024, with just over 1,024,000 wallets holding one or more Bitcoin, according to Glassnode.
How has the trend evolved? Zooming in on the situation in 2010, when BTC was barely 1 year old, the number of addresses with more than 1 BTC was tiny, estimating from the chart it must have been around 57 thousand.
The number of whales – owners of more than 1 thousand BTC at the time was 365. This means that the proportion of whole coiners versus whales was roughly 150:1.
How has that proportion evolved? Currently (July 2024) there are 1.01 million wholecoiners and roughly 2 thousand whales. So there are roughly 500 times more wholecoiners than whales. This tells us there has been a distribution of coins from whales to smaller holders. This is a good thing: who wants a payment network where a few players own all the coins? Where a few players can manipulate the price?
Here’s a graph of the distribution. Shrimps are addresses with fewer than 1 BTC. Crabs own 1 to 10 BTC. Fish own 50 to 100 BTC, Sharks 500 to 1000 BTC. And Whales 1000+ BTC. (other categories, not included in the above graph, are Octopuses (10 to 50 BTC), Dolphins (100 to…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
