Vin Diesel’s recent explanation for his long-running feud with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson caused fans to start taking sides.

The feud between the two action stars started several years ago when The Rock dubbed a then-anonymous male co-star a “candy ass”. After years of speculation, Diesel finally decided to share his side of the story in an effort to explain why the two Fast & Furious co-stars fell out.

The Rock Needed to Improve His Acting Skills

Vin Diesel, who also produces the Fast & Furious franchise, claimed that he felt the need to improve Johnson’s acting because he was worried audiences might associate the latter with wrestling instead of filmmaking.

The actor shared that his tough-love approach allowed The Rock to deliver the required performance and blend more easily with the already established Fast & Furious cinematic world. Diesel said that the process took a lot of work but it managed to reach the expected aesthetics, which is something that he is especially proud of.

He revealed that at times he had to give a lot of tough love to his counterpart. He continued by adding that while his coaching methods weren’t Felliniesque, he was ready to do whatever was necessary to get the desired performance out of Johnson and other actors taking part in his productions.

“Vin Diesel Shouldn’t Be Giving Acting Lessons”

Diesel’s claims sparked a heated debate between Fast & Furious fans, as well as other cinematic aficionados. While some agreed with his comments, others took the position that Vin Diesel is a limited actor himself and should be the last person in Hollywood to give acting lessons to The Rock or anyone else for that matter.

Dwayne Johnson doesn’t appear in the franchise’s latest installment F9: The Fast Saga, which was released in the United States on June 25. According to Diesel, the film’s cast and crew did their best to create “the best movie ever made”.

Despite all the talk of democratizing finance, a handful of rich investors apparently hold huge amounts of the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin. The data that the National Bureau of Economic Research has recently released shows that some 10,000 individual investors control around a third of all the Bitcoin in circulation.

The Top 1,000 Cryptocurrency Investors Are Popularly Known as Whales and Control Around 3 Million Bitcoin Tokens

This new research on the Bitcoin market expands on prior studies and distinguishes between intermediaries like cryptocurrency traders, exchanges, and brokers who process vast amounts of the cryptocurrency and individually-held accounts. While intermediaries control some 5.5 million Bitcoin and individuals have around 8.5 million Bitcoin, the top 1,000 investors own around 3 million of all Bitcoin tokens. Still, it is difficult to determine the degree of control those investors have, as there is no reliable record of who is actually behind those accounts.

Individuals Who Accumulated Huge Bitcoin Stockpiles Early On Are Considered to Be Among the Top Owners of the Cryptocurrency

It is believed that the people who own the accounts with the most Bitcoin tokens are individuals who managed to mine huge stockpiles of Bitcoin early on and kept getting richer in the years that followed. Still, most crypto enthusiasts seem to not care too much about the top players and their manipulations, so long as they keep their own financial trajectories going up in a similar fashion.

The report identified that scams and criminal activity involving the Bitcoin network are indeed substantial, but perhaps not quite on the same scale that authorities have claimed. The authors cautioned that the measurement of concentration is very likely an understatement because the possibility that the largest addresses are controlled by the same person could not be ruled out.

Apparently, the miners who use computers to farm and generate new Bitcoin tokens are even more concentrated. It seems the top 10% of miners are controlling some 90% of the mining capacity, and of them, just 0.1% control 50%. This tracks with the ever-increasing difficulty of mining new Bitcoins over time. It scales in terms of computational demand and has resulted in the appearance of large-scale Bitcoin farms that use huge stockpiles of special hardware to generate new units.