@Murk @jaygreenb
You might want to check this out,
Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses and Bitcoin distribution (bitinfocharts.com)
Over 95% of all BTC is held by wallets that own .1 BTC or greater. I personally consider any wallet between .1-10 BTC as a retail account, which holds approximately 16% of the supply.
There are still roughly 2 million more BTC that have yet to be mined.
Exchanges hold approximately 2-3 million BTC from the numbers I've seen.
As for the big money players, there are tons of them.
Satoshi Nakamoto's BTC account has something like 1 million BTC or so that has not moved in years.
I've also seen some estimates that there is somewhere between 3-5 million BTC that have already been lost. There was a story from I think the UK where some guy had hundreds of millions of $ of BTC on some hard drive on his computer that was thrown away and buried at some local land fill. He even offered to split the cost to be allowed to search for it lol. This is obviously a more extreme example, but it's happened quite a lot and will continue to happen. With that said, I do believe that most of the lost BTC was from it's early days when people just had it sitting on a computer instead of on a cold wallet or something like that. However, over time there will be BTC that continues to be lost forever. It could be someone sends it to an address an incorrectly puts it in, thus it disappears forever. It also could just be put on a ledger that gets lost and the person didn't write down the code or something where a person dies and no one knows about it lol.
There are also many governments that hold a lot of BTC. The U.S has over 100k BTC, many of which were from confiscations. There are many other countries that hold sizeable hordes of BTC; Bulgaria for instance holds something around 25k BTC. El Salvador actually owns quite a bit, as not that long ago they made BTC legal tender.
Then we get into big institutions. Michael Saylor/Greyscale holds sizeable portions of BTC.
This ETF stuff we are seeing in companies like Blackrock, Fidelity and others is a huge deal, as I've stated before on here. I personally see a scenario playing out where these companies are looking to buy up these assets so that they can offer it is an investment avenue for their customers. It's as simple as a customer has a 401k or some sort of portfolio and they have the option to start allocating a percentage of it into BTC. Like with any portfolio run by these companies, it tends to be diversified based upon your age, goals, etc. A person that is younger should be more heavily invested in things that can make larger returns in a longer time frame. Meanwhile, someone who is in their 70s should be leaning more towards things that are less volatile. You literally are going to have trillions of dollars that can potentially allocated 1-3% of their liquidity into BTC.
The reality is that very few people are going to go out of their way to invest into BTC AND have to self custody this asset by buying a wallet. The crypto space is not for noobs and most people have no clue what they are doing, so naturally they are scared of this asset class. However, you take some of these big companies that now offer this as a part of your portfolio that is NOT going to disappear or become lost and people will be much more comfortable with investing into it.
@jaygreenb Brings up a solid point, which is the majority of BTC is owned by longer term holders. I'm sure some of these people will sell if we get into a crazy bull market, but I also am of the belief that many of them will just continue to hold, especially now that this asset is becoming more mainstream. Hell, BTC is starting to even become discussed on the political stage of this election cycle here in the U.S, which is a huge deal in my opinion. Vivek Ramaswamy has attended crypto/BTC conferences and openly expressed that he believes that the U.S $ should be backed by BTC, as well as other commodities. It doesn't matter if you are a supporter of him or not, this is being openly discussed on the presidential candidate stage of the most influential country in the world.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, any individual that owns 1 BTC or more is going to be doing incredibly well down the road. The number of people who will have this status I personally believe is going to cap out very soon, as it's going to become out of reach for the overwhelming majority of individuals that are not already invested in this space.