A recent study showed in the period from December 2017 to April 2018 the speculative turnover of Bitcoins increased by $ 30 billion. This can partly explain the trend of declining the value of the cryptocurrency since the beginning of this year.
According to analysts, this was an unprecedented sale, which is unlikely to happen again soon.
In November 2017, two-thirds of the Bitcoins belonged to long-term investors, whereas to date the number of Bitcoins that are in the hands of traders is equal to the number of Bitcoins used as long-term investments.
Analysts report that most of the Bitcoins are concentrated in the hands of a small number of players. However, with the influx of new speculators, the situation began to change. 1,000 largest long-term investors and 600 largest speculators control Five million BTC. The wallet of each such speculator contains at least 200 BTC, while at the purse of the investor there is at least 700 Bitcoins.
There is an opinion that the new speculators, whose number increased by 57% since December of last year, adversely affected the price of Bitcoin, because of which the value of the cryptocurrency continues to decline. In order for the price to stabilize, speculators need to transfer some of their coins to long-term investments, or the demand for Bitcoin should increase due to the influx of new speculators or new ways of using Bitcoin. In addition, 2.3 to 3.7 million Bitcoins are considered lost, which reduces the real capitalization of Bitcoin by 13-22%.
As of April 2018, out of 21 million coins that will ever exist, not yet produced about 4 million, at least 2.3 million Bitcoins are lost, 7.4 million coins belong to long-term investors, of which 1.5 million can be lost, 5.1 million belong to speculators, 2.2 million used for transactions, including crypto-exchange exchanges.
From September 2015 to April 2017, long-term investors held most of the Bitcoins. Beginning in April 2017 and until April 2018, the number of Bitcoins used for speculation increased from 14% to 35%. This suggests that investors have cashed in part of their assets and now these Bitcoins are in the hands of new users who use them for speculation or make transactions instead of keeping them as a long-term investment.
The number of Bitcoins used to make transactions with time remains stable at the level of 15%.
As for Bitcoins as long-term investments, about 1.6 million are stored on wallets that contain 10,000 to 100,000 or more coins; about 2 million (of which about 500,000 can be lost) is kept on wallets containing from 1,000 to 10,000 BTC; approximately the same amount is stored in wallets, the balance of which is 100-1000 BTC; and, finally, about 750 000 BTC is stored not more than 10 coins per wallet.
However, not all these wallets are active: most likely, about 1.5 million Bitcoins on those wallets that had no activity after 2016 are irretrievably lost. These are wallets, the balance of which contains from 100 to 10 000 BTC.
What are the lost Bitcoins? These include coins that will never be available. As a rule, this happens because the keys to the wallets were lost, and it is impossible to restore them. According to the methodology of Chainalysis analysts, the Bitcoins are lost if no transactions have been made since 2014 from that wallet.
Among other things, the production of new Bitcoins continues, the distribution of which is extremely difficult to calculate, but they also have an impact on the current price.