Most Bitcoin is owned by a tiny group of people, and mined by them too

Much like any other MLM scheme, the promise of cryptocurrency is that anyone can get rich through it. However, just like MLMs, the majority of Bitcoin income is owned by an extremely small group of people.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), via TechSpot, explained that the most popular cryptocurrencies are plagued by wealth hoarders. In fact, over a third of the cryptocurrency is owned by the top 10,000 or less investors.

Bitcoin is another example of wealth hording

The NBER revealed that the top 10,000 Bitcoin addresses account for approximately 8.5 million coins currently in circulation. At the current price of Bitcoin, that's the equivalent of $519.62 billion. Even out of the large sample, there's more extreme examples of wealth hording.

Out of that 10,000 person, the top 1,000 own 3 million out of 8.5 million coins. Essentially, the top 1,000 accounts for 35% of the cryptocurrency. That's the equivalent of $183.440 billion at the time of writing.

Additionally, the NBER believes that there is overlap between the top 1,000 accounts. It's not uncommon for investors to have multiple accounts or, in this case, crypto wallets. This means that one person could be the owner of multiple top 1,000 addresses.

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Mining follows the same trend

That belief that anyone can get rich quick through bitcoin continues with mining. The pitch is that anyone can mine bitcoin at home and get free money — like how bogus survey websites pitch themselves. Of course, the truth is the opposite as Bitcoin mining requires a lot of power, good hardware and a lot of time.

As such, just 10% of Bitcoin miners control 90% of the market. Even worse, half of all crypto mining is the result of the top 0.1% of miners. NBER reports that just 50 people are in control of half of the world's mining output.

Essentially, the world of cryptocurrency has a hording problem. Just like real money, the rich get richer, and Bitcoin is creating a new 1%, and bolstering the current one, while destroying the planet in the process.

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