Vladimir Club
Community Submission - Author: Oleh
The term “Vladimir Club” was first mentioned on
BitcoinTalk forum in 2012 and was originally applied to Bitcoin. User
Vladimir suggested that owning 1% of 1% of the max supply of Bitcoin was a good idea, and the term Vladimir Club was coined right after. Since the max supply of Bitcoin is 21,000,000 coins, anyone with more than 2,100 BTC can be considered a member of the Vladimir Club.
Back then, it was much cheaper than today to become a member of the club. In 2012, one Bitcoin was valued at about $11, which would require a person to invest $23,100 to be considered part of the Vladimir Club.
When
Bitcoin price was close to $20,000, in late 2017, one would need to invest around $42,000,000 to be considered as part of the Vladimir Club. As of 2019, with Bitcoin hovering around the $4,000 mark, the threshold is around $8,400,000.
Originally, it was estimated that the maximum number of club members would be 10,000 (if all coins were mined and divided equally among the members). However, as some Bitcoin holders accumulate much larger amounts than 2,100 coins, the maximum number of members is significantly smaller than that. Additionally, there is a very large number of coins that are inaccessible, either because the private keys were permanently lost or because they were sent to invalid addresses and cannot be retrieved (e.g., the
genesis block address).
It is quite difficult to estimate how many members the Vladimir Club currently have because many Bitcoin holders split their funds into multiple different addresses and also because some of the richest addresses may be owned by the same person. Still, the number of members of the Vladimir Club is estimated to be somewhere between 500 and 600 people.
Since the Vladimir Club concept became more popular in the
cryptocurrency community, the term is often used to refer to other cryptocurrencies, other than Bitcoin. For instance, any person owning more than 1% of 1% of the max supply of the BNB may be considered a member of the BNB Vladimir Club.
Considering the max supply of
BNB of 200,000,000 coins, one would need around 20,000 BNB to be considered a member of the club. If all BNB coins were equally distributed, the maximum number of members would be 10,000. However, the total supply of BNB is gradually decreasing due to the multiple
coin burn events, which will be performed until the
total supply is eventually reduced to 100,000,000 coins. As a result, the maximum number of BNB Vladimir Club members will decrease significantly.
Note that the max supply refers to the maximum number of coins that can ever exist (e.g., 200 million for BNB or 21 million for Bitcoin). The total supply, however, refers to the coins that were already issued and are either circulating on the open markets or locked up. While the max supply is fixed (defined when the cryptocurrency is created), the total supply may change due to burning events.