The Billionaire Flippening

When do half of the world's billionaires come from crypto?

This is a useful thing for a government to know, to understand if proposed crypto restrictions are actually causing capital flight by driving out a large portion of the world's investors.

Some time back, a friend of mine did an estimate of the price per BTC at which the so-called "billionaire flippening" happens. Note that this calculation is a moving target because the number of billionaires keeps changing. But here's my attempt at a reconstruction of math, which I think gets us to the right order of magnitude.

Briefly, under the extremely rough assumption that one address corresponds to one person (it could be an exchange address holding assets for many people, or alternatively many addresses could be held by one person), there are ~2393 addresses with >1000 BTC. At $1M/BTC, there would be 2393 billionaire addresses.

Bitcoin is currently about 60% of the total crypto market cap, so assuming a similar distribution of wealth for other coins, and assuming the entire crypto market cap also appreciates with Bitcoin, multiply 2393 by 1/0.6 to get about 4000 crypto billionaire addresses.

Today there are about 2000 billionaires, so 4000/(4000+2000)=0.66 would mean ~66% of billionaires were from crypto, which is an overshoot. As I recall, back when my colleague estimated this the actual threshold was ballparked as $200k/BTC, as a point between $100k-$1M/BTC to guess when 2000 rather than 4000 new billionaires came from crypto. A proper curve fit may give a higher number, given the exponential dropoff in BTC-per-address.

Anyway, one can quibble with many of the assumptions in this rough calculation, but $100k-$1M/BTC is the right range for when the billionaire flippening happens, though you might argue for the upper end of that range.

The main point is that if and when the billionaire flippening does happen, keeping out the world's crypto millionaires and billionaires will mean keeping out a large portion of the world's wealthiest people from investing in your country.