The ongoing Bitcoin bull run braced believers with new hope and embarrassed non-believers. However, some crypto market observers come up with substantiated skepticism targeting not so much Bitcoin&'s value as the wealth distribution among investors. Prompted by the surge, a finance expert with over 15k followers, nicknamed Darth Powell, posted a screen from Bitinfocharts.com revealing some disturbing data.

According to the numbers, as few as 0.04% of all BTC addresses own over 62% of all available Bitcoin. When you go a notch up, you can see that nearly 85% of BTC is owned by just 0.35% of address holders, and at a bit north of 2%, the ownership grows to over 94%. If you check global wealth distribution data, it doesn&'t come close to Bitcoin in terms of "unfairness." In 2020, Credit Suisse estimated that the richest 1.1% owned nearly half of the total wealth - and it&'s probably worse now.

Bitcoin landscape is constantly changing, but hardly in a way that mitigates the wealth concentration – which is quite understandable, given the fact that investing in Bitcoin is easier when you have a few spare millions of dollars. At press time, Bitcoin distribution numbers are slightly different. Currently, a tiny bit over 59% of Bitcoin is linked to 0.03% of addresses.

For 92.78% of the total BTC supply, the number of identifiers stands at 1.99% (don&'t confuse it with the number of owners, as one owner can have multiple addresses). Note that there are four addresses owning an insane amount of BTC: between 100k and 1 million units, with a total market share of 3.44%.

The large disparity in Bitcoin ownership has been a long-known fact. Still, it&'s worth reminding since many (most?) retail investors have little knowledge as to the extent of this phenomenon. Should Bitcoin suddenly become a global currency, a giant chunk of wealth would fall to an extremely small set of market participants.

Considering the above, Darth Powell questions the decentralization as the core feature of Bitcoin. He&'s both correct and wrong. Bitcoin is, indeed, decentralized with regard to the underlying mechanism – the logic and rules governing its network.

Still, if you identify decentralization with noble things such as democracy, equity, or people&'s empowerment, you could probably use a reality check. Wealth distribution in Bitcoin is totally out of line with its technical decentralization.