Before I get into today video, I wanted to let you all know that this Friday I will have Ben from BTCsessions (on Youtube) on as a guest so if you have any questions you’d like me to ask him, or if there’s any topics you’d like to hear us discuss, feel free to leave those suggestions down below in the comments!

• A small number of BTC wallets hold the majority of BTC supply

Although this myth isn’t necessarily false, the story behind it will probably change how you feel about this fact.
At first glance, this statement probably prompts you to visualize one or a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who own all of the bitcoin and therefore have the ability to sell them and cause all kinds of fear and panic selling.

Before we let that anxiety creep in, let’s exercise what’s always being encouraged in this space and “Do Your Own Research” (DYOR).

If you were to do a simple web search of the top richest Bitcoin wallets, you’ll easily find out that the top 5 richest Bitcoin wallets belong to centralized exchanges. Exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, Huobi, and Bitstamp. Although it is true that these wallets are controlled by exchanges, the rights to all of those bitcoins belong to hundreds of thousands of other individuals.

If this still is unsettling news for you, it should be, because this means that these centralized exchanges hold incredible amounts of Bitcoin. And even despite what had happened with the Mt. Got exchange a few years back, people still trust these centralized exchanges to store any amount of their crypto investments.

Do yourself a favor and DYOR on things called decentralized exchanges, focusing particularly on those which DO NOT require you to deposit your coins onto their platform.

These are the real decentralized exchanges, the ones that will be your saving grace in the future.
Check out Blocknet, Bisq and Komodo’s Barter DEX, those should serve as good examples of what a quality DEX looks like.

• You have to buy one whole Bitcoin

This one is actually quite common and from a layperson’s point of view, it’s pretty understandable.
If you think about it in terms of dollars, there’s dollars and there’s cents, with cents being the smallest amount of money represented in this scenario.
It’s not to often that the mainstream media speaks of Bitcoin in terms of satoshis which is indeed a denomination of Bitcoin.
Actually, a bitcoin can be divisable by up to 8 decimal places. This means the smallest amount of Bitcoin you can own is 0.00000001 bitcoin.
So for those of you who may have been intimidated by the prices of Bitcoin today, or for those of you who can’t quite figure out why your friends or family may have been hesitant to invest in Bitcoin, this might be why.

• It’s private/anonymous

This particular rumor about Bitcoin has most likely been perpetuated by the assumption that Bitcoin is only used by criminals. In fact, there exists a thing called chainanalysis or more recently, Crystal which is brought not to us, but to law enforcement and financial institutions by Bitfury.

These tools are used to track and analyze the history of a bitcoin.
So if you somehow find yourself in possession of a bitcoin which at some point was in the wallet of let’s say a sanctioned country, or it was at one point in the possession of a hacker, and a government entity has been tracking it and it has found in your possession, I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to assume that you’d be dealing with some bigger problems than a drop in price.
Think about it like this, imagine if the FBI was tracking some dollar bills and it turns out that one of these bills was found in your wallet and you are now found guilty of possession of laundered money even though you had nothing to do with it. It seems like a far-fetched scenario because we know our paper money to have fungibility. This is a term that is definitely worth getting familiar with along with how important this is to Bitcoin.

This is the argument for the need of privacy functionality within Bitcoin, not specifically for criminals, but for the good of the entire network and those who use the coins.

Other cryptocurrencies like Monero, Zcash, DASH, PIXV and others have tools already available. But if you’re looking for privacy protocols that are being developed for Bitcoin, check out Liquid by Blockstream.

• Bitcoin has been hacked

Nope, Bitcoin has never been hacked.
Ok, well there was that one time many years ago when a 51% attack accidentally happened, it didn’t result in any theft or damage and those who were involved promised to never let it happen again.
But in regards to a malicious attack on the actual network, no, there has never been a successful attack and manipulation of the Bitcoin network.

There are two things to consider here.

• First, there is Bitcoin, the actual coin, the thing with that price that many people obsess about day in and day out.
• Then there is the Bitcoin network. This is the blockchain that is comprised of and monitored by thousands of nodes and miners who work to manage the blocks of the bitcoin blockchain and ensure that things like double spending can’t happen.

The more nodes and miners that exist, and the more spread apart they are, the stronger the network is and the more difficult it is for ANYONE (government included) to infiltrate it and control it.

Sure, lots of centralized exchanges have been hacked and plenty of people have had their bitcoins stolen, most of these thefts occur due to lax security practices.

Storing your Bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase, Binance, Bittrex, Kraken, Poloniex just because it’s easy is also a great indicator that you also use easy passwords. This is something hackers are well aware of and why so many exchanges are their targets.

Centralized exchanges can be thought of as a second layer to the Bitcoin network.

Just because they use Bitcoin does not mean that they automatically gain all of the benefits of its decentralization if they themselves are a centralized entity that uses centralized methods for storing your precious bitcoin.

Additional Reading/Links:

Top Richest BTC Wallets
BTC is Divisible
Chainanalysis
Bitfury's Crystal
7 ways your BTC address can be linked to your identity