user136: Given the difficult of detecting lost coins, or telling between hoarded and lost coins, it seems impossible to actually report on the real wealth distribution of the bitcoin currency. 

user153: Well, we know at least how much Mt. Gox holds -- as they have a cold storage system that they've proven they control.
Also, flow analysis combined with other data might help make it possible to have a better idea.  It alone doesn't give exact identity, but it can help to point in a general direction as far as how much certain people or certain organizations have received and of that amount, how much they've spent.
Here's an article describing this:

http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html


user409: The protocol gives no information about who controls an address. In an extreme case, every address could be controlled by just one person, or every address could have a unique owner. However, a degree of traffic analysis is possible, and if you have access to other data from outside the Bitcoin network, you could correlate transactions with these non-Bitcoin events and infer who the real-world owners of the addresses are.
For example, if you had access to ISP records of who uses an IP address that has just mined a block, you could start to build profiles of the owners of new coins.
But there are many barriers to achieving the total information awareness that you would need to build a comprehensive profile of all coin owners, so the short answer is no, there is no reliable way to measure Bitcoin wealth distribution.

136: <p>Given the difficult of detecting lost coins, or telling between hoarded and lost coins, it seems impossible to actually report on the real wealth distribution of the bitcoin currency. </p>
 153: <p>Well, we know at least how much Mt. Gox holds -- as they have a cold storage system that they've proven they control.</p>

<p>Also, flow analysis combined with other data might help make it possible to have a better idea.  It alone doesn't give exact identity, but it can help to point in a general direction as far as how much certain people or certain organizations have received and of that amount, how much they've spent.</p>

<p>Here's an article describing this:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html" rel="nofollow">http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html</a></li>
</ul>
 409: <p>The protocol gives no information about who controls an address. In an extreme case, every address could be controlled by just one person, or every address could have a unique owner. However, a degree of traffic analysis is possible, and if you have access to other data from outside the Bitcoin network, you could correlate transactions with these non-Bitcoin events and infer who the real-world owners of the addresses are.</p>

<p>For example, if you had access to ISP records of who uses an IP address that has just mined a block, you could start to build profiles of the owners of new coins.</p>

<p>But there are many barriers to achieving the total information awareness that you would need to build a comprehensive profile of all coin owners, so the short answer is no, there is no reliable way to measure Bitcoin wealth distribution.</p>
