This is complete garbage. A bitcoin account in no way represents the wealth of a person. If you look at the graph, you will see that bitcoin accounts typically change in their "wealth" by orders of magnitude over the period of a month.<p>So if this is some way represented the real economy, it would be saying that in a given month, some people get 1000 times richer, some get 1000 times poorer, but in some average sense, the rich tend to get slightly richer.<p>The whole article has the feel of researchers taking the data that exists and is easy to analyze, doing some simple computations that are completely meaningless, and then pretending these computations have some implications for society.<p>EDIT: I was mis-reading that graph, but the point remains that bitcoin accounts are no a meaningful quantity (if we are interested in the wealth of individuals). In particular that figure (and their observations that the rate of growth is higher for higher balances) only applies to the subset of accounts whose balance increases. When you look at the accounts whose balance decreases, almost all of the time the balance goes to zero.