The Study Bitcoin Doesn’t Want You to See
Two economists quietly downloaded the entire blockchain and counted who really owns Bitcoin. What they found breaks the one promise the whole thing was built on.
“Bitcoin has no kings.”
You’ve heard some version of that line a hundred times. No banks. No middlemen. No small room of powerful men deciding what happens to your money while you sleep. Power handed back to regular people. Money for everyone, owned by everyone.
It’s a beautiful story. Honestly, it’s one of the most beautiful stories money has ever told about itself.
Then, a few years ago, two economists did something almost nobody in this space bothers to do. They didn’t argue about Bitcoin. They didn’t tweet hot takes or go on podcasts. They just… downloaded the whole thing, every transaction since 2009 and counted.
What they found doesn’t make it onto any conference slide.
The pitch was a world with no kings. Hold that thought.
Part I — The Promise
First, what we were sold
Let me set the scene, because the promise is the whole point.
Back in 2008, the global banking system was on fire. Banks that were “too big to fail” failed anyway, got bailed out with public money, and the people who caused the mess mostly kept their bonuses. If you were alive and paying attention whether in New York, Lagos, Manila or a small town nobody’s heard of, you felt the same thing: a tiny group controls this, and it isn’t me.
That’s the exact moment Bitcoin was born. An anonymous person calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page paper describing money with no central authority. No bank in the middle. No government printing button. Just a shared record — a “blockchain” that everyone could see and nobody could secretly control.
The dream was simple, and it was gorgeous: take power away from the few, spread it across the many. For a lot of people, Bitcoin was never really about getting rich. It was about escaping — escaping the system that keeps quietly taking a cut. A financial jailbreak.
So here’s the fair question. Fifteen years in…did the jailbreak work?
The promise: money spread thin across everyone, owned by all of us.
Part II — The Count
What the two economists actually found
In 2021, Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics and Antoinette Schoar of MIT published a study through the National Bureau of Economic Research with a boring name: Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market. Boring name. Not a boring finding.
Here’s what makes their work different. Bitcoin’s blockchain is public, every transaction ever made is sitting right there for anyone to read. That’s supposed to be a feature. But most people never look, because raw blockchain data is a wall of gibberish addresses. Makarov and Schoar built tools to untangle it, to group thousands of anonymous addresses back into the real entities that control them. Basically, they put a single owner behind the numbers.
Then they counted who owns what. The result:
27%
of all the Bitcoin in circulation was controlled by roughly 0.01% of holders which is about 10,000 entities. That was ~5 million coins, worth around $232 billion at the time.
Read that again slowly. One coin in every four, held by a group small enough to fit inside a single stadium. And that’s counting the big private holders, the whales not even the exchanges.
The exact percentage shifts depending on how you count exchanges and lost coins. But every version of the math tells the same story: a tiny group sits on an enormous share. Schoar put it plainly.
“Despite all the years and all the hype it’s still the case that it’s a very concentrated ecosystem.”
-Antoinette Schoar • MIT Sloan
Now here’s the part that should stop you cold. The study found Bitcoin’s wealth is more concentrated than the US dollar, the exact system it was built to escape. The thing sold as “money for the many” is, by the numbers, owned by fewer hands than the old money it was supposed to replace.
What gets screenshotted, versus what’s actually on the ledger.
That’s the study. That’s the one that doesn’t get a slide at the conference. But if you think that’s the whole hidden layer, it isn’t. It’s the first floor.
Part III — The Hidden Layer
“Okay, but that’s one study”
Fair. I’d push back too. So let’s stack it with the others, because this is where it stops being an opinion and starts being a pattern.
Study two: the invisible buyer. In 2017, Bitcoin went from around $1,000 to nearly $20,000. Pure magic, everyone said. The future arriving. Two researchers, John Griffin and Amin Shams, went looking at what was actually pushing the price up. They zoomed in on Tether, a “stablecoin,” a digital token that’s supposed to be worth exactly one dollar, backed one-to-one by real dollars in a bank.
What they found: fresh Tether was being printed and used to buy Bitcoin, again and again, right at the moments the price was sagging. And it was concentrated to one big player, one exchange, doing most of it.
~½
of Bitcoin’s entire 2017 boom lined up with just 1% of the hours in that year, the specific hours when the most new Tether appeared.
Half of the greatest boom in Bitcoin’s history, traced to a small, invisible, well-timed buyer. Not millions of believers. A buyer. (If you want the full story of how a “casino chip” became one of the most important instruments in crypto, I broke Tether down here.)
Fresh Tether, printed and pointed straight at the dip.
Study three: the price on your screen is partly theater. In 2019 a firm called Bitwise handed the US securities regulator a report. They’d examined the trading volume that crypto exchanges were reporting to the world, the big numbers that make a market look deep and alive. Their finding, filed with the SEC:
95%
of reported Bitcoin trading volume was fake. Of ~$6 billion in daily volume, only about $270 million was real. The rest was “wash trading” means the same coins passed back and forth to fake demand.
Most of the “trading” was the same coins going in circles.
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Sit with that for a second. The ownership is concentrated. A chunk of one historic rally traces back to an invisible printer. And most of the “trading” was never trading at all.
None of these are conspiracy theories whispered on Reddit. One is a peer-reviewed economics paper. One is published in a top finance journal. One was formally filed with a government regulator. This is the mainstream evidence, it just doesn’t get repeated, because it doesn’t sell hope.
Part IV — The Why
Follow the incentives
Here’s the thing though I don’t think Bitcoin “failed.” I think it did exactly what open systems do when you leave them alone. It concentrated.
Money flows toward whoever is early, whoever has capital, and whoever runs the doors everyone has to walk through. Bitcoin killed the old middlemen — the banks and then, quietly, grew new ones. The early miners got coins when they were basically free. The whales bought when nobody was watching. And the exchanges? They became the new banks. Makarov and Schoar found that around 80% of Bitcoin transaction volume flows through exchanges or exchange-like entities. To use this “trustless” money, most people trust… a company. To hold it, they let that company hold the keys.
The king was supposed to be dead. Instead the crown just changed heads. This is crypto’s biggest misconception, and almost nobody wants to say it out loud.
Part V — 2026
It didn’t get better. It got worse.
You’d think that as Bitcoin grew up and went mainstream, ownership would spread out. More people, smaller slices, right? The opposite happened.
As I’m writing this, in the last week of August 2026, Bitcoin is trading around $80,000, clawing its way back after the crash earlier this year. And look at who’s actually holding the coins now.
Satoshi — the anonymous creator who vanished still sits on roughly a million coins, frozen and untouched. One ghost, one-twentieth of the entire thing. Add up just the top five living entities and you’re looking at close to 20% of all Bitcoin sitting in a handful of vaults.
2026: the anti-bank asset, now sitting inside the banks.
And here’s the punchline that would’ve broken a 2010 Bitcoiner’s heart. The current rally is increasingly being called “a BlackRock market”, at times, roughly 70% of all ETF money flowing into Bitcoin has come through a single BlackRock product. The asset built to escape Wall Street is now being held, for a growing share of buyers, by Wall Street. The rebellion got a custody desk.
Part VI — The Ledger of Consequence
So who wins, and who loses?
Winners: the early whales, the exchanges that became banks, and now the ETF issuers collecting a fee to hold coins for people who could technically hold them for free but don’t know how.
Losers: mostly the person who bought Bitcoin believing they were buying rebellion and got exposure to an asset a few dozen wallets can push around. When someone who can move $100 million of it decides to sell, Schoar warned, they “can have a massive price impact.” That’s not decentralization. That’s a small number of hands on a very big lever.
What should you actually watch going forward? Not the price. Watch custody. Watch how much of the supply keeps flowing into ETFs and exchanges. Watch whether a handful of institutions end up holding the thing that was designed to make institutions unnecessary. The price is the story they tell you. Custody is the story that’s true.
Part VII — The Tool
The Naked Market Test
If you take one thing from this whole piece, take this. Whenever something is sold to you as “decentralized,” “democratized,” “power to the people,” or “for everyone” money, a platform, an AI, a movement, anything don’t argue with the slogan. Do what the two economists did. Count.
The Naked Market Test
Three questions. Ask them about anything that calls itself “decentralized.”
- Who actually holds it? Not who’s allowed to. Who does, right now.
- Who can move the price or the outcome alone? If the answer is “a few,” it’s centralized, no matter what the marketing says.
- What happens if the top ten coordinated? If ten phone calls could move the whole thing, you already have your answer.
That’s it. That’s the lens this entire newsletter is built on. Strip the story off and look at who holds the power underneath. Most of finance and honestly, most of the world gets a lot clearer once you do.
Before You Go
One last thing
I’m not telling you Bitcoin is a scam. It isn’t. I’m not telling you to sell, or to buy that’s genuinely not my job, and I’m not your financial advisor.
What I’m telling you is: see it naked. Bitcoin is a real, fascinating, genuinely important technology. It also broke its biggest promise, and almost nobody in the room will say so because the story is too profitable. Both things are true at once. You’re allowed to hold both.
The people who understand what they actually own not the story they were sold are the ones who don’t panic when the ghost wallets move. That’s the whole game. Clarity over hype. Every single time.
The market is always wearing clothes. Our job is to see it without them.
If you want to understand where money is really heading before it becomes obvious, this is the newsletter for it.
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Keep reading
1. Crypto Was Supposed to Escape the SystemThe Promise
2. Stablecoins: How a Casino Chip Became the Center of CryptoThe Tether Story
3. Crypto’s Biggest MisconceptionThe New Middlemen
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