Miners play a major roll in the bitcoin network, but they don't actually control as much as you might think...
Based on the headline above, you likely know that miners hold roughly 10% of the bitcoin supply.
This is known miner wallets by the way.
However, there is something very interesting to take note of regarding those holdings...
The known miner wallets currently hold about 1.8 million BTC (roughly 10% of the current supply), however, roughly 1.73 million BTC are held in miner wallets that are 7+ years old and have not moved.
Very likely indicating those funds are "lost".
That would indicate that miner wallets are only holding about 70k BTC total, and that includes all of the mining pools out there.
A graph of the data can be seen below:
(Source:
)https://twitter.com/glassnode/status/1279130620212502528/photo/1
- glassnode
What can we glean from this?
Based on the above information we know that the amount of BTC currently being held by known mining wallets is actually fairly smaller.
Much smaller than the initial figure showing close to a 10% ownership.
Looking at the above chart of the data, we can see that miner holdings have basically been trending down for much of the last several years.
In fact it only recently started trending back up starting end of 2019 and throughout 2020.
This may indicate that there are miners that have been holding in anticipation of another big move up.
The data on the chart above mostly only shows a bear market and a sideways market and possibly the start of a bull market.
Extrapolating out, one could possibly suspect by their actions that they are anticipating a bull market rally in bitcoin in the near future and have been increasing their holdings accordingly.
This is yet another feather we can put in the bull market cap.
As it stands right now, that cap is starting to get rather full of feathers...
Stay informed my friends.
-Doc