Bitcoin Forum

Evidence suggests his ~1 million BTC were mined into throwaway addresses:
https://bitscan.com/articles/satoshis-millions-gone-for-good

Well if this is true, he truly anticipated everything. It keeps on blowing my mind that he thought of all these consequences and incredibly intelligent and yet simple ways to tackle certain problems!

Article looks like bullshit based off nothing but speculation to me. There's nothing that offers proof or backs up their claims at all. Nobody knows what happened to satoshi, his coins, or even if he is one or more people.

Personally I think he probably has control of them but is just hodlling  ;D. Obviously he's likely bitcoin's biggest believer. Think of all the good he could do with all those coins.

I think he should have made something obvious like an address that consists of a string or something. That way people could be pretty sure he doesn't have control about the coins anymore. If those coins move, I bet they move into a black-hole address.

I thought this wasn't satoshi but several of his accounts had been compromised and thus it was an imposter. Can anyone confirm or deny this?


I think the most likely scenario is he's either dead or purposely lost access to them, but something tells me he wouldn't just waste the coins like this.

Well, he could very well still have many coins we can't really trace back to him. Maybe he still pool-mined some coins back in the days! If those coins move, the price will suffer. Badly.
Don't think he's dead, though. He just faded out his influence in order to make Bitcoin more democratic and decentralized ;)

What we do know is though that he was here he created Bitcoin mined a very very nice amount and then went totally of the public radar for what reasons we do not know, but we do know most if not all of his coins remained untouched in wallets that there are links to in some threads here.

Question is why would he not spend any of the coins at the first bubble if he could indeed get to them to spend, only someone filthy rich would leave them to never touch but i am talking filthy rich 100's of millions banked.

Everything related to Satoshi is pure speculation.

Nice stories, bad stories, speculations, anything that can go to a newspaper is actually welcome, if the newspaper has wider audience than the already informed bitcoiners.
If this "news" will make it into another paper - in a way or another, then it will not be wasted time. for now it is...

it's amazing if all this is true. but only satoshi himself knows that. we can only guess and speculate whether he still have them or not.

Aside from the evidence of course. Did you even read it?
It's not a watertight case but strongly plausible.

I agree, it's only speculation - but this is the speculation board, after all :) Well Satoshi still has access to master keys to send messages, I believe. Also he could sign a message from an address that's known to be his to prove his identity if he wanted to.

That band on the graph can only be him. Did he really keep 20,000 keys, or just a few to larger accounts?

The article speculates that keeping 20,000 private keys is "unlikely".

This is the only "evidence" that I see.

Maybe Satoshi generated them sequentially from some seeds. Then he only needs a unique seed per mining machine.

Maybe he wrote them out to a database or simple log file and has these files backed up.

I do kind of want to believe he threw away the keys, it would have been the best thing to do for the good of Bitcoin. (Shame he won't actually state he did that...) But I see nothing approaching proof.

That's possible, of course. But it's interesting they haven't moved since. It's speculation, but Occam's Razor suggests it's more likely than the alternative. Remember, the coins were literally worthless then, and bitcoin was still an experiment in its infancy.

You know, if this Dorian nakamoto really IS the satoshi nakamoto, and wanted to remain anonymous, he could've just lied to get people to stop bothering him?

Bingo

There is also the possibility that satoshi nakamoto thought it's possible that generating the coins into different adresses each block can make it harder to track which ones are his.
And it would have worked if it weren't for the sequential nonces that linked the different blocks together.

Plus AFIK solo mining sends generated coins to different addresses on it's own, at least using any client I am aware of, which doesn't mean they don't all belong to the same private key. I even think that was the default behavior from the start.
So IIRC the whole article is incorrect. Can somebody confirm?

Is there a way that he could have proved that the bitcoins were really lost? Even if the address he used to send them to was just some string, wouldn't someone eventually create that address and get the coins? xD
Or are you saying that it should be something pre-programmed to have an address that can't be accessed?


I don't think the bitcoins that are in addresses people know to be from Satoshi can be used. If they are moved people may think he is selling or something and make the price crash lol.

Yes: new address, new key each block. I don't follow your logic.

Each wallet can have several receiving addresses. And I'm pretty sure you don't need a new private key for that.
I'm pretty sure I remember that this is even the default behavior from solo mining litecoins.

Really? How do you get 2 addresses from 1 key? And we're talking about 20000 addresses here, untouched since they were mined.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses




So you just have a different public key with the same private key.



But the technical detail doesn't even really matter here, everybody who used bitcoin-qt knows you can generate new addresses and receive transactions to them for the same wallet.

That's not how it works.
A public key is computed from the private key. There can not be two different public keys for one private key.
The other direction is possible (multiple private keys can have public keys that hash to the same bitcoin address) but so extremely unlikely that the probability can safely be ignored.

Onkel Paul

It doesn't work like that to my knowledge. Privkey -> pubkey -> address, 1:1:1. The wiki suggests this too, surely.
Perhaps he has a wallet with 20000 addresses, or rather a series of wallets as he'd be running it on many computers.

when making complex software, my default is to log absolutely every minor detail to log files, for debugging. I can't imagine not logging the private keys.

he also specifically stated in early communications something to the effect "it might be wise to hold on to a few in case value increases".

Mining is supposed to provide value to the miner. This is key to the entire Bitcoin thing.

So I think he was aware of the potential. I think it's entirely possible he didn't keep the keys, all the same. But whether he did or didn't I'm sure it wasn't anything other than a deliberate decision.

This is essentially my view :)

I don't really know all that much about ECDSA and co, but if that's true bitcoin-qt generates new private key/public key pairs on it's own every block when mining.

Yes, this is my understanding. I think we are talking cross purposes.

Edit: there's some ambiguity in the article that I'll fix, I suspect this has caused the problem. Point stands: he had to have the keys to create the addresses, but I'm not convinced he still has every single one.
It's speculation. A discussion starter. With some interesting evidence from the blockchain for his habits. Take it as you will.

That he was aware of the potential - but still decided he couldn't be bothered?

...

Maybe buying back later...? That's certainly a route to lesser riches but much increased anonymity when cashing in.

The whole article hangs on a single assumption:

"Did he keep the private keys to every single one of those 20,000? Unlikely. Why go to the trouble for something that was worthless?"

Wow..   so Satoshi was intelligent enough to have invented Bitcoin, but was dumb enough to not save his private keys.

https://i.imgur.com/2r8zqal.gif

Smart enough to know you only need so much money, and when it's wise to stop? Yes, absolutely. That seems entirely in character. Hence also stepping back when he did.

As far as we know that would have happened automatically, which still would make that article sort of pointless.

No, because what people deliberately choose not to do can be as informative as what they choose to do. But I won't labour the point any further if you're not interested.

If Satoshi was clever enough to invent Bitcoin, I also believe with all my heart that his intelligence stretched to, like, writing stuff down too.

Face. Palm. Not the point here.

what?

Whoever or whatever Satoshi is must know the price would crash if those very early coins move. He was probably mining later on when others had started mining. In that case he would have plenty of bitcoins that were untraceable to spend without the need to touch the earliest coins he mined. Why would he crash the price moving his earliest mined coins if it devalues his coins he mined later?

I don't get that mentality. Why would the price crash because satoshi is using his bitcoins?

He was the first miner and it's estimated he must have mined between half a million to one and a half million bitcoins. If he chose to dump them he could clear out all the buy orders on every exchange in an instant. Look at the damage the bear whale did by dumping a tiny fraction of the coins Satoshi mined.

It is very simple to look that up.  Look at the first 20 000 blocks on blockchain.info.
There you will see Satoshi's addresses and their contents (indeed mostly 50 coins).

Block 0 (genesis block): address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

It has received some dust (and now has 65 coins in it) but never spend anything

Block 1 (first block) after genesis block: address 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX

It has received much less dust and now contains 50.025 coins, never spend anything

Block 2 : address: 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1 and contains 50.00038429 BTC

and so on.

Block 10000: address 1JoiKZz2QRd47ARtcYgvgxC9jhnre9aphv, still contains the 50 BTC and no dust.

Block 15000: address 1KzP9ideELyDMyjg4svrheub7Ttg6W2cdk still contains the 50 BTC.

Block 20000: address 1Gtj5h1u8yZJe32neQZB5C7efP9XeMd9SW still contains the 50 BTC.

...

In fact, I wonder whether the idea is simply not that instead of a total amount of bitcoin of 21 million something, to have exactly 20 million.  If you subtract the early coins that don't seem to move, it seems to turn out to be about that.

Thank you. This is a more detailed rundown of what the chart shows.

What is really at stake is whether he kept all 20000 keys. Ultimately there's no proof for that - unless and until the coins in one of those addresses moves. It hasn't happened yet, so all we can say there's an absence of proof he kept the keys. You can't ever prove he discarded them, only that he didn't. But given that no one else was mining bitcoin, that bitcointalk didn't even exist, that the coins were worthless - albeit if he hoped they'd one day have some value - it's a valid theory.

Each address ('pay to pubkeyhash') has its own private key.  Mining or not that is a basic of how Bitcoin works.

Why do you assume the first 20,000 blocks were all mined by Satoshi.  There were other miners.  Hal Finney even reported solving a block a few weeks after the genesis block and he wasn't the only one.  Also Satoshi did let some information leak.  He used a sequential extra nonce and didn't reset it between blocks.  Using that people have made projections on how many of the blocks in the first year were mined by Satoshi.  Nobody has reached a conclusion that Satoshi mined blocks 0 through 20,000 sequentially.

This is a far better analysis of the early mining.
http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2014/08/167-satoshis-hashrate.html

Nothing can be proven for certain but they at least limit themselves to the facts in the blockchain.  Reaching the conclusion he never intended to save the keys from the fact that the coins haven't been moved is pretty weak.  We do know that by even Oct 2009 Bitcoin had 'some' value.  ~1000 BTC per dollar so a million BTC would be $1,000 worth.  Sure not a fortune but I don't know anyone who would intentionally destroy $1,000 worth of BTC today.  Based on the 'extranonce leak' we also know it is very likely Satoshi mined at least through mid 2010 and decreased his hashrate as other miners took up the slack.  The exchange rate was rapidly rising before Satoshi stopped mining but the later coins show the same lack of movement.

Not every single one - but most. Estimates are he mined around 1m coins. And it's interesting that those blocks of 50 were never moved. Most other people presumably would have done, including Hal Finney - he says as much.
By the way, Hal Finney also said he then left bitcoin aside for a while (he didn't like the effect CPU mining had on his computer!) and only came back to it some time later. In the early days there weren't many miners.

Correct from the extra nonce leak the estimates are around 1 million coins and that would be 20,000 blocks but it was 20,000 blocks over the course of about 18 months.  Bitcoin wasn't worthless by even late 2010 but the later blocks and the earlier blocks show the same lack of movement.   Nobody is disputing that Satoshi mined a lot of the early coins but the articles claim that he intentionally mined with throw away keys isn't supported by any facts.


It is interesting and I don't think 'satoshi's million' will ever be spent.  If he protected his Bitcoin identity from his real life as well as he protected his real identity from his Bitcoin life then if he died it is very likely nobody who knew him personally even knew he was 'satoshi'.  His coins would have died with him.  It goes beyond just the early 'satoshi' blocks however.  There are about 58,000 block rewards in the first era which have never been spent.  I am just saying none of this supports a claim that he intentionally mined to unknown keys to ensure the coins were destroyed.

Sorry, that's a mistake of terminology. By 'throwaway' I don't mean in the technical sense. I mean that he didn't keep them! Like I say, it's not possible to prove that, only disprove.

It's noble to think that he/they never intended those early coins to be used and they're in addresses that can never be accessed.  But humans are greedy by nature, and I would be surprised if those coins went untouched for all time.  Hopefully some day they can be put to use for the good of the network (maybe that was the intention all along)...

yeah, if he dumps ALL of his coins, that wouldn't be good.

But if he sells 10 bitcoins, it really shouldn't be any different than you selling 10 bitcoins or me selling 10 bitcoins.

If only.

If there's anything the last year or more has taught us, it's that BTC holders relish a good panic sell.

Can you imagine if even 1 satoshi moves from his address? The entire bitcoin community would go into meltdown and panic mode. Part of me thinks its probably wise those coins never move but satoshi could do some good with them in the future and I'm sure he'd be wise about how he used or moved them. He wouldn't be stupid enough to just dump them.

If satoshi was going to spend any coins he would of by now. I think people would panic if he did spend even ten because spending the rest could be quite disastrous.

Disastrous? How so?  They were meant to be spent, spending them supports bitcoin.  Satoshi didn't design this all and mean for people to not use millions of bitcoins.

Satoshi deserves to eat, buy a house, vacation, etc too. Why shouldn't he be able to spend his money?

If he spends his btc and a crash came, I'd be extremely happy because I can be an early adopter.

Keep an eye out for people squealing about bitcoin days destroyed. If a large amount of old coins move then lots of folks hop around in circles and jump up and down.

For better or worse, any Satoshi coins that moved would set people off. It would've been sensible to keep them moving and circulating if only to prevent them gaining mythical status.

Yes, but that's irrelevant. It would be catastrophic if someone dumped that amount of coins on an exchange. Look what happens when people dump relatively small amounts in comparison. The price falls drastically. Its basic supply and demand.

i believe if satoshi wanted to spend his coins that was mined in early stages, he would have done it by now. someone like satoshi with that financial mind don't need these ways to earn money.

You clearly did not read the posts you're quoting.

You're overreacting again.  "Catastrophic", really?  I think you underestimate the robustness of the system and how supply and demand work.  FUD

How do you work that out? You're saying bitcoin were meant to be spent so it's ok and wouldn't be disastrous if all his coins were dumped but that is completely irrelevant to the point here so I don't think you are reading the posts you're quoting or if you are you're certainly not understanding them or articulating your point properly.


No I'm not. You two just don't know what you're talking about nor what effect dumping a shit tonne of coins on the exchanges has on the price. It's you who doesn't understand how simple supply and demand works because you wouldn't be saying this and it has absolutely nothing to do with the 'robustness' of the system. Bitcoin will continue working fine but the price you pay for them will be significantly less.

I didn't say it wouldn't have an effect, I said using words like "catastrophic" and "disastrous" are an exaggeration and FUD.

You could hard-code some 0-address into the Bitcoin protocol that renders coins unspendable for example. That way people could be sure that coins were destroyed. A pretty drastic measure, though...

This is not a concern

Suppose each wallet holds 100 addresses, he need to create 200 wallets to hold those coins, and he must constantly check if those 100 addresses in a wallet is used up, difficult to maintain on multiple computers (I suppose that he set up a group of computers to simulate the P2P network), highly unlikely for a coin that worth nothing at that time. (I don't even remember where is the wallet of my first alt-coin which holds at least 400+ of those alt-coins, since they worth nothing during that year)

Even if he stored all those wallets, that is 1/21 of the total bitcoin money supply, it is still much less than banks holding of fiat money: 4/5 of the whole USD supply stored at FED and the scale keeps increasing through each QE. So still much better than banks today

If bitcoin is very successful, he will be holding billions or even trillions of dollars, no need to cash out any significant amount, he will have a large reserve that can be used to stabilize bitcoin exchange rate

If bitcoin is not successful, he can't cash out that amount of coin without being caught, and that will crash the price to cents, it does not make a lot of sense either. In fact, if he really want to cash out those coins, he can do it slowly, to make sure the price keeps going up due to reward halving every 4 years

While we're in the realm of wild speculation based on no evidence... I operate under the assumption that satoshi still controls the keys to each and every one of his bitcoins. There is no evidence to the contrary. 

1. There is no evidence that Satoshi holds his private keys.
2. There is no evidence that Satoshi has lost his private keys.
3. There is no evidence if Satoshi is dead or alive.
4. There is no evidence that Satoshi has transferred / not transferred his private keys to someone else.

In short:
There is no point discussing this at this point until further proof can be acquired.

Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Economics > Speculation >
 :P

Pointless article, based on the hopes and guesses of an obvious bagholder.

Satoshis initial coin creation still leaves the question open if bitcoin is a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme. If Satoshi's coins would eventually be sold, then this pyramid scheme would surely turn into a ponzi.

Haha..  true!

I think it makes sense that we're discussing this in speculation forum.
What I don't like is how the original article claims to have found 'evidence' and then elaborates everything based on assumptions.

And your reasoning and logic behind this is what exactly? You just sound ignorant when you call an opinion you disagree with 'fud'. How would dumping half a billion dollars worth of bitcoins on the market (or how ever many satoshi has) not have an effect? Do you think the price of bitcoin will still the same? No.

You're a known troll, so I won't take it personally. In fact I'm surprised, I thought I had you on ignore. And no, I don't hold any bags.


You're right that 'evidence' might be too strong a word, at least in a court of law :)
There is information in the blockchain that proves a limited number of scenarios, one of which is not that Satoshi actively manages/managed his many coins, which we know are held in many, many addresses. We know that he must have around 20,000 private keys. Moving into assumptions and conjecture (and I'm pretty sure this is the right place for that) and educated guesswork, it seems to me possible but unlikely that he kept every one of them. Feel free to disagree, of course, but that's the most likely in my opinion.

I think that currently a sober-minded person should be worried if he isn't considered to be a troll in this place. Right now, anyone who don't want to be in this echo chamber, where "if we think positive thoughts, then good things will happen!" mentality rules over reason, then he will be considered a troll.
Just like people here are being called trolls or fudsters, just because they don't find any value in your article that is based on vague assumptions, but tries hard to look like it's based on evidence.

I hesitate to reply at all, but...
You assume the I'm a bagholder, with zero evidence. Assumption?
I've explained what's evidence and what's entirely reasonable guesswork. We work from fact to hypothesis all the time. It's a fairly standard process for most people.
This is an area of interest for me (and many others), not something that will inform my trading, because I don't.
And courtesy costs nothing.

Yes, I assume that you're a bagholder. There's no evidence that you're a bagholder, so I'm not writing an article full of demagogy, that claims about evidence of you being a bagholder.
So, this is my final advice. Next time, if you don't want for people to see your writing as the desperate cry of a bagholder, then don't bend the meaning of words this much, with the purpose to calm the minds of those, who might be worried about the fate of these coins.

No one but you has ever suggested that any of my writing is the desperate cry of a bagholder, so I'll take the advice with a pinch of salt. If you really think I believe Satoshi's stash hanging over the market like the sword of Damocles is the only factor keeping the price down, then there's not much I can say anyway.
 
For what it's worth, I put the article in the Spec subforum because I thought it would be of interest to a few people here. I maintain the conclusions are quite reasonable - and more likely than not - though I admit they do require a little imagination and empathy to reach. What I've learned from this unnecessary and unpleasant exchange is that it would have been better to put it in another section.

Would it be far fetched to assume that he kept hold of them as some form of insurance for the whole bitcoin network?

Let's say (the man) did muscle his way in due to the future popularity of our beloved bitcoin trying to take away from us, could Satoshi theoretically "cleanse" the whole system by using the dormant bitcoins in such a way as to set the price back to some years ago and render it useless for (the man) to keep his interest in it, leaving it once again to the people to re-build and for a new wave of early adopters?

The only way he can offload those coins is if there is an exchange with an 'Input private key' feature. If those coins relocate, Bitcoin is screwed.

The point is that it would have been simple for Satoshi to make these coins provably un-spendable: send them to an OP_RETURN script, no ?

How much are 58000 keys ?  Not even 2 MB of data ?  Not so difficult to keep them I'd think.

I think a principal reason for Satoshi not to use those coins, is that the danger to give free his identity is too high.  Apparently, Satoshi, whoever it/he/she/they are, doesn't want us to know.  Any spending of those coins would be tracked down and would increase the probability for his identity to be revealed (whether it is the NSA, the KGB, some or other banking group, a group of political activists, or a lone guy or girl).

It's trivial to keep track of 20,000 keys, any idiot could do it.

There are plenty of ways to introduce those coins into circulation without destroying bitcoin.  People keep assuming that, if there were to be used, they would all be dumped at once and crash the market.  Don't you think Satoshi is smart enough to know how to use the system he created without ruining it?

I don't know that they ever will move, but I hope they do.  I know they will be used for something positive, and their use will be done in such a way as to be a benefit to bitcoin, not its downfall.

I think that theory makes sense. Less the dumping, more the insurance against total domination of the currency.

Even if he does have them, I'm not sure he'd agree with the centralisation that would represent. It would be anathema to everything he was trying to achieve.

Oh yeh the ease in which you can keep 20,000 keys safe is not even worth talking about we all should know how easy it is.

A few posts above says if them coins start moving we are pretty screwed and have to agree with him that it would not be to great lol

I think he might the master satoshi might no longer be with us as that is where all evidence aims :(

Please re-read my statements.  I never said it would "not have an effect".  I am merely trying to calm your language down.  If those coins move, it's not the end of the world.  Have faith in the system's creator that he would know how to use his coins without crashing the whole thing.

you are correct, even if u dont have a private key to the wallet you can input a sequence of seed words that can restore the entire wallet..at least in electrum this is how its done.

All of said 20,000 individual 50 BTC mined blocks would or could be to addresses on one single wallet.dat  i.e. you wouldn't even need to know any of the private keys.

On a single wallet.dat a new BTC address was created for every 50 BTC mined block, thus the notion that the coins were mined to unique "throwaway addresses" is false.
 

In Bitcoin, a private key is a 256-bit number.  It is 32 bytes.

20,000 private keys * 32 bytes = 640 000 bytes. ( 0.5 MB )

==
It is less amount of data than 1 block in blockchain

I don't think this article adequately explains why these coins would actually never hit the market. It basically ends with a "well, they haven't moved yet so why would they now?"

Bitcoin's creator(s) is (are) smart enough so if he/they would spend some of coins they can do it OTC market.

We can't say that holdings of Satoshi hasn't hit the market. Till date we don't know exactly the holdings that belongs to Satoshi. With some data a wallet is termed to be his own wallet. Upon the same we can't conclude he hasn't got any other wallets. There is more chances for the bitcoin to hit the market than being idle in a wallet.

Actually there's some good research into Satoshi's mining activities. It's very compelling and the coins haven't moved.

I highly believe that the public doesnt even know the entire number of wallet possession of satoshi. There are a few numbers shown

but we can see that the coins werent moved yet as of now.We dont know if those wallets are already lost or just being reserved to be spent
by its owner.

Also,i dont see why people are really eager to know if those coins will move or not yet the founder/owner do had the full rights on how he
gonna spend up his money but somehow seeing those coins moved does shows or prove out that satoshi is just watching his own creation and
the entire crypto community.