Quantitative Analysis of Moon distribution (round 17) - a Tale of two Truths

Greetings you glorious crypto enthusiasts! Regardless of if you are a bitcoin maxi or a ICP spaz, can't we all agree that having our own social token is super cool? I talk of course of our beloved Moon.

Another Moonth has come and gone, and the community has split a pool of nearly 1.7M moons, and once again you may be wondering things like:

"How many Moons do most people have?"

"Should I mention that I have 38 Moons my Tinder profile?"

"Is it time to stop ordering off the Value menu and get a Crunchwrap Supreme?"

To answer these and other questions, I analyzed data from nearly 100,000 pseudoanonymous Moon token holder addresses through testnet.redditspace.com. These addresses contain approximately 74 Million Moons, although nearly 29 Million of those are in a single wallet which purportedly is used for Moon distribution and also contains the majority of the Mods' holdings.

Another ~3 Million moons are split between two addresses for the Admins and the mod community fund. Finally, another 1.3 Million moons are in the account corresponding to /u/TheMoonDistributor, which is an account funded from the Mod's share of Moons and used for various community things (I don't know what, specifically). So those top four holders were removed from the data shown below, so that we can focus on Moons held by the community members.

So that leaves us with about 40.9 Million Moons distributed among users (with a supply in circulation of 74 Million since those other holders' Moons are still active and not burned or otherwise removed), and I bring you a story of two seemingly contradictory observations:

1. The Moon distribution is incredibly concentrated to a minority of holders.
2. You probably have more Moons than you think, compared to most of the community.

How can both of these things be true? One thing at a time! Here's a graph showing Moon balance by user address, sorted from largest to smallest (down to 1 Moon).

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https://preview.redd.it/c7vtgipaxpn71.png?848&format=png&auto=webp&s=949c20397f5f54b57d14e62f10f30785d5dac21e

You may have seen a graph like this before. In fact, last month's chart that I made the same way looked pretty much identical (there are about 10K more Moon holders now than there were then). On the left side, you can see how the Moon balance rockets up for the first hundred or so users. In fact, of those 40.9 Million Moons, just 18 people hold 1/5th of them. Read that again - that's just .02% of the users, holding 20% of the Moons. If you take the next 20% of Moons, you find they are held by just 120 more users. And the next 20% is held by only 627 more users! Next in line are 2901 users with another fifth of the Moon. If you're keeping track, that makes 80% of the Moons, held by 3666 people.

If you've ever studied statistics or probability theory (who hasn't, right? right?), you may be familiar with something called the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. It states that for many groups of data, it is common to find that 80% of the outcomes originate from 20% of the population. For example, 80% of the land being owned by 20% of the people in a country (it turns out this is generally true in lots of countries, and there are a lot of other interesting examples of this principle). Why am I telling you this? Because in a way, it would be normal or maybe even expected if 80% of the Moons were held by 20% of the community. But what we have is 80% of the Moons held by 4% of the population. That's what I meant about extreme concentration.

If you're curious about those numbers and how many Moons are held by the residents of each group, here are the detailed breakdown of each group:

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https://preview.redd.it/234ws9zswpn71.png?392&format=png&auto=webp&s=81a7b524a66ec9b27f9002505f1a5a9de2b10aa5

As you can see, if you have fewer than 1393 Moons, which is 96% of you, you are in that lower 20% category.

Before you leave a comment like "Overthrow the oligarchy!" or "We should pass a rule that I should get more Moons!" hear me out - because it turns out you have more Moons than you probably feel like you have. How can that be? Because in the same way that 1393 Moons or less is held by 80% of the community, even a modest Moon stash can easily put you into the upper minority of Moon holders (Moonies? Moonites? whatever).

For example, if you earn just one Moon, you instantly have more Moons than 5616 other Vaults (about 6%) (and this doesn't even count the other 2.9 Million subscribers to /r/cryptocurrency that don't even have Vaults). Earning one Moon is nearly effortless - just leave a couple comments below and you'll practically be there in a few weeks. And if you earn 1 MORE Moon, you jump another 5813 places! In fact, the median Moon holder has just 17.2 Moons. Here is a graph you can use to find your own percentile ranking based on how many Moons you have:

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https://preview.redd.it/fn035q12xpn71.png?928&format=png&auto=webp&s=c923568693805bd4207ac0be08fad5b6254becb8

For example if you have 100 Moons, then you have more Moons than about 75% of the community. You can see how movement up the curve is relatively easy on the left and very difficult on the right (going from the 10th percentile to the 50th only requires 15 Moons but going from the 95th to the 96th percentile requires 330 Moons).

So yes, Moons are skewed to a small number of large holders, but there are still lots of Moons to be distributed (including over 12 Million still this year!) so don't despair my fellow civilians, put together some good content and go out there and get your share of the Moon!

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EDIT: I removed an additional 2 addresses that /u/nanooverbtc pointed out contain the Admin and community fund Moons to make the data more accurately refer to the community as intended. This slightly changed the top 20% group from 11 people to 18 people and shifted the 80% holding up slightly to 4% of users. It also lowered the threshold for the lower 20% of holders to 1393 Moons from 1609.