Toggle the era and the lens. Every figure is a published estimate — from on-chain research, company filings, and government records — because the honest answer to “who owns bitcoin” always starts with “approximately.”
Reading the pie
1. It's still mostly regular people. Despite every headline about Wall Street and nation-states, on-chain research consistently attributes roughly two-thirds of all bitcoin to individuals. The institutions are loud; the crowd is big.
2. Satoshi is the biggest whale, and the stillest. An estimated ~1 million coins mined in the earliest days have never moved — about 5% of everything. Every theory about Bitcoin's future has to decide what it believes about those coins.
3. Millions of coins are gone forever. Conservative estimates put permanently lost coins above 1.5 million — hard drives in landfills, forgotten passwords, dead men's keys. The real cap isn't 21 million; it's meaningfully less. “Think of it as a donation to everyone.”
4. The 2011 pie is the wild one. Toggle back: most of the pie hadn't been mined yet, and nearly everything that existed sat with a few thousand hobbyists. Every era since is the story of that concentration dissolving outward.
5. Governments mostly didn't buy it — they confiscated it. The major state holdings trace to seizures (Silk Road, the PlusToken scam, ransomware busts). The interesting shift is recent: states starting to keep what they seize, and a few beginning to mine or buy outright.
The fine print
The notebook is public, so researchers cluster addresses by behavior, tag known wallets (exchanges file, companies disclose, governments announce seizures), and model the rest. It's genuinely good forensics with honest error bars: “whales” overlap with exchanges holding customer coins, “lost” can only be inferred from dormancy, and privacy-conscious individuals are invisible by design. Treat every slice as ±, not =.