Bitcoin Forum

I like to play with different scenarios, what would happen if this or that, or how would I do it if I were in that situation? So let's run this scenario (and try to work with me using the rules) and examine the different possibilities:
Let's say you are Satoshi owning 1 million BTCs and you decide to cash out. These are the rules you have to follow:
You want to get the possible most value for your coins.
You want to do it in a relative short period of time, so no cashing out slowly in 5 years version.
You want to keep your anonymity intact. At the end you want to have a shitload of money but still be the mysterious founder whom nobody knows.
I understand that the first 2 points could be economically contradictory, but that is why this is a thought experiment to be solved....
I am curious how would you do it, but please keep your plan according to the rules...
Here are my versions:
a/ The simplest version could be if I were able to find an investor who is willing to take off the coins from my hand all at once, but getting the cash eventually without giving up my identity would be a huge problem. I don't see the buyer mailing a bunch of cashier checks to an address as a workable plan. But if someone can solve this problem, that would be an acceptable solution, and probably the simplest.
b/ Now I could keep sending coins to a brokerage, then later on cashing out even without trading, but that way at least the owner of the brokerage could follow the money path and identify me. So maybe a better version of this would be opening up a brokerage and running it while laundering all the coins. This would be also good for plausible deniability if later on I have to explain, just how I got rich, I could say, by running a profitable brokerage. This plan probably needs more workers, I don't see one person alone running a brokerage. Maybe buying out an already existing one would work and it is faster...
c/ Another version I thought about and it is a relative quick way, although it needs to sacrify quite a few of coins. First I would start to move coins to new wallets and through tunblers, so people would get used to that old coins are moving. After the initial scare, they should be fine with it. After a few weeks I would start to donate big amounts to a bunch of charities. Let's say 20-30 charities well known and smaller ones. Among them one would be my own charity. In the long run the charities would start to use the coins so after a few weeks, months, most of the coins are in circulation and it is really hard or impossible to follow anymore which coin went what way. If some coins can be traced to me personally, I can always just say, I got it directly with the initial charity distribution... In this version I might have to give out 20-30% of the coins to others, but that would cause enough coin distribution that I would be just one out of dozens of recipients, even if eventually a coin is traced back to me...

If he cashing out his bitcoin, he may exposure himself, his identity will be revealed, which he didn't like it. So I think he may never cashing out his bitcoin.

start a somewhat shady exchange like btc-e, and put your own coins on the orderbooks.

I thought it would never happen, if it really happened means he destroy what has been during this time he fought

I very much doubt it will ever happen, did you even read the OP, it's doesn't say he has sold it basically says 'what if' he sells. 

I can do the escrow. If he finds a buyer.

Slightly offtopic-ish but: Does anyone know the wallet ID that his 'million' BTC are apparently sitting in?

It's a whole bunch of addresses dating from the early blocks mined since 2009. Most of those blocks are Satoshi's.

Well firstly I do not think that he would compromise himself due to this. It would take time to sell out 1M Bitcoin and his ID would probably get revealed.
Secondly we would face enormous problems. Bitcoin is just not at the stage where it could easily accept Satoshi cashing out. Maybe once we have hundreds of people on board, it won't even matter because people would still want to buy in?

It is a double edged blade because everyone wants to know who Satoshi is so that would be revealed but then it would probably crash the price of BTC.

dump his btc empty, that was a disaster

but he is so intelligent that we are not aware of his dumping slowly  :-\

First of all, how many coins Satoshi really have? Do we have good numbers of his wealth? Is that 1% of all coins more or less? Secondly my opinion is that Nakamoto created bitcoin but he will never interfere with it again, he will be quietly watching its creation from far away. It seems that Op  thinks than early adopters are unfairly rewarded...

He can have 10 % of all the coins  very easy to be more.  Maybe 2 million coins.

I suspect  he sold a lot to lower the diff /btc rocket to the moon.   The op's thought game is not going to happen since I think he already sold many coins to get the price down to 180 around Jan 13 of this year.

I suspect he sold a lot off around sept 10 of last year dropping the  price down again

And I suspect he sold a lot off around apr of last year dropping the price

finally when coins took off in apr of 2013 I suspect he off loaded then.

 While I am picking 4 of the 5 major crashes being caused by him  most likely it was only 2 of them .  He has no need to crash the market right now and he won't.

@ op why not ask of the 5 biggest crashes of btc price how many did Satoshi cause.


For those that say but those big accounts are not touched.  Here is how you do it .  I Satoshi go to a friend hold newer coins in smaller accounts and tell him cash out.  bang instant money and a btc price drop .  All the while the big 100,000 coin account from 2009 just sits.

There are  people that owned entire city blocks on handshake deals.  So Satoshi could do the same.  Maybe Satoshi and bitmaintech are in partnership.  Last winter bitmaintech sold a big amount of coins.  maybe they did it for Satoshi.

I think he is dead, so he will never cash out a satoshi again.
Anyway, changing 1 Mio BTC to fiat will end his anonymity.

the point two ruine this pla so badly, because of anon, there is no way to keep it anon and cashing out this enourmous amount, perhaps the only thing you can do is face to face with some very rich guy

for this plan to work with those tree rules, you must have

sold at 1200
sold those coins in one day
sold those coins face to face

Id let someone I personally trust create a (semi)public auction similar to the silk road coins.

To start with, if I was Satoshi I wouldn't cash out ;D

But playing this scenario... Pretty impossible for him to remain anonymous. Even if he sold the coins OTC with an alias, and with fiat coming in through a fake account of some sorts...

I think the only way to remain relatively anonymous and sell those addresses with big balances would be selling the private key directly to someone, through a trusted intermediary. But that intermediary can quickly become untrusted.

He could also sell the coins at a small discount to "buy" anonimity ;D

Just some thoughts...

The first solution seems like the simplest indeed. I think it could be possible to find some member of the community who would buy and still respect your privacy. The problem is of course the sheer amount of money. It would be a bit of a problem, whether receiving it or even depositing it into a bank. Your best bet may ultimately be to leave the US (if that is where we are assuming Satoshi is). Fiscal paradise ftw! The easiest ways would probably leak some identity information. Depends how well you plan everything.

I can be the broker, just ping me up.

Satoshi will never sell. If you ever created revolutionary technology after years of efforts, you would treat it as your kid. Satoshi will die before he sells a single BTC, for the goal is to not even need to sell to adquire any commodities.

He has already sold his coins back in early 2011 when the price were 31$ per btc. He dumped it to 1$ . I don't think Satoshi anymore owns any significant number of bitcoins. He didn't imagine that bitcoin will become the biggest invention of the last 500 years.

That wasn't satoshi. That was done by a hacker trying to bypass the withdrawal limits of hacked accounts in mt. gox[1]. Most of the addresses he mined on remained untouched intentionally except the gensis block which he can't spend.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#2011

Yes. it seems that no one actually read the OP. Anyway I almost got heart attack after reading the thread heading. Thought it will just crash the market.

That's nice to read from this link. I really didn't know about that before today. What I had heard is that Satoshi dumped those but now it is clear and thanks for correction . I would say things are more clear now.
Bitcoin now has been adopted largely so these ups and downs in prices would be seen often just like other things listed in markets.

Satoshi created it. He made all this possible, so shouldnt there be an award for him? Other people made money out of Bitcoin, why shouldnt he?
I think Satoshi owning some btc worth millions isnt anyhow bad

He is probably dumping as we speak, but we can't know. He would probably dump small amounts of coins to not get attention from media and etc. Another scenario is that he has lost the private keys of the addresses and is crying himself to sleep  ::)

I can be a buyer. If you find him.  ;D

I think that if he sold coins he wouldn't sell them all, he would probably sell enough to be able to live from it. He can't just dump $2 million worth of bitcoin and deposit it on his bank account, the feds wold be all over him. He probably waits patiently to see bitcoin grow and be more accepted.

I doubt Satoshi has/have even retained acces to their wallets as many doubt he/she/they have got private keys anymore :P but if Satoshi is cashing out bad timing they could have made more profit earlier or were they making profit then anyway ????

Will be glad to know bitcoin earlier  :(
I think Satoshi can conqueor some country or buying island  8). He's the creator and he's just don't realize his creation become a millionaire.
He will more richer if he was cash out on end 2013 (the highest price point)

I agree, satoshi deserves the biggest piece of the pie. After all he created the popular crypto currency on the planet, he deserves to earn  something and that is the 1 million bitcoins.

This is similar to central banks around the world cashing out 1000 tons of gold, that will crash the gold price to single digits or even cents and does not give them any benefit financially

Holding large amount of asset reserve have many benefits, Satoshi surely understand this

I think that basically there is not enough depth market for that huge amount of bitcoin
But he could create an auction and he would probably sell them.

Just disgressing,nobody has 1million bitcoin, not even satoshi

Was not satoshi, im sure satoshi has sold some for obvious reasons, is just sane to diversify. But that does not mean nothing. His big stack is still on BTC.

Lets say i did not read OP's retarded post.

What now ?

people like to think he has 1 million bitcoin as that is super exciting. satoshi could have dumped his coins at much better price ranges. but then again, i don't believe he has as it would make him less anonymous.

No one is sure how many Bitcoin he might be having but he has created it not for public service. But does anyone have any idea what is the total number of Bitcoin present right now all over the world?

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Why?

Cashing in a short period of time would crush the price and he would effectively lose money. Cashing over longer period of time would allow him to get more FIAT for his coins.

This is how I will do it :

1. I would identify say 30 000 "poor" people and true Bitcoiners and give them some coins. {This will keep the NSA or whoever is tracking me, busy for a long time....}
2. I will also split those coins into smaller amounts... and start to mix.  ;)
3. I will fund my travelling expenses from the first batch of mix coins. {Staying on the go, paying for everything in fiat}
4. I will not convert huge amounts of coins in one go... it will hurt the price too much.
5. I will then "create" my own mixing software {remember, we are dealing with a skilled individual here} and then mix the remaining coins and then destroy the evidence. {Logs}
6. Once these coins are broken up, I will slowly extract small amounts from different locations around the world.

When I have travelled the world and I helped all my friends and contributed to the need of the poor. {Paying it forward} ... I will die in peace, in a bed on a island, with a grin on my face.  ;D

No need for him to sell it better to give it away and create more bitcoins. ;D

It's funny that one of the most favourite topic of newbies is the satoshi stash.

In reality he couldn't really sell it anywhere near the market price, as soon as those coins would move the markets would crash immediately.

I think that will be disastrous , that will drop the btc economy and the faith in Satoshi by people but as you say given certain circumstances and condition ,it would be nice

Another reason is that if he is selling all the coins he have, he would be selling near 1 million of Bitcoin. If large amount of money gets to his bank, the FBI would definitely find him. Also, the seller would be suspicious too.

How the FBI is going to find him, if he is living outside the United States, and using exchanges such as BTC-e, which are not that friendly to the US government agents?

I wouldn't be so sure. The US government's powers often exceed the borders of the US. You don't think it would be possible for the US government to force another country into revealing that sort of information? Remember Kim Dotcom? He was a German guy with German citizenship living in New Zealand. The FBI was even able to seize his hard drives too. And that's assuming that Satoshi isn't a US citizen living aboard. If he is, then both the IRS and the FBI would be after him.

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

so you're saying he's never going to sell them? what if he found himself in a desperate need of money?
there's only 3 possible reason why Satoshi haven't sold his bitcoins yet
1. he lost access to his own wallet
2. he doesn't need money yet
3. he's dead. (or if my assumption on a certain thread are correct, deleted/selfdestructed)

btw, he = he/they/it. whichever is correct

Yes. That is true. The US government's powers extend to its vassal states, such as the UK and Germany.


With Germany and New Zealand, may be. What if Satoshi is actually living in Russia or Belarus? Or even in Venezuela or Bolivia? What the FBI is going to do if he is a resident of Russia?

Why couldn't anyone cash out and stay anonymous?

I sold a lot of coins and my personal information is not floating on the internet. Satoshi could have sold too. Nobody knows.

Sorry, but:
http://blog.writeathome.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/apple-no-equal-orange.jpg

That's because you're not the creator of bitcoin and don't have an army of people watching your addresses like a hawk. If you were satoshi and was spending your coins freely without a worry for security then people may already have tracked your coins or what you purchased and where. Bitcoin isn't as anonymous as you might think especially if you're sloppy with your usage of it and it could possibly be quite easy to trace your coins or get personal details if you didn't know what you were doing. Thankfully satoshi probably does.

I don't know about those ideas but have anybody ever figured out that maybe you can use a portion of that btc to a luxury yacht or even sports cars where the sellers are actually a bitcoin fan and is willing to accept btc. Work out a deal to get somehow to purchase the item on your behalf and once you own the item, just sell it off to any of the sports car enthusiast or any of the dot com mogul living in Silicone Valley. Either way there are bound to be buyers, it's a matter of knowing the right people. So what do you guys think? Workable?

I am more interested in the question, why is Satoshi hodling a such huge amount of Bitcoins? Does he still own the private key or are there any particular plans for it when Bitcoin will reach the mass?

Well that would be great, except it's called money laundering and could land you in jail. Sure, there are ways to do it and not get caught but if you do you'll pay the price, but this wouldn't help satoshi because as soon as he spent his coins people would know. They then might be able to trace the coins to the person who got them from satoshi and then find out details of who he sold the car to. That's why it's not as easy as him to just spend or even launder his funds like this as it could potentially expose him.

This would be the most plausible way to do it if he wants to sell his coins and protecting his identity at the same time.

Better yet, he would create a decentralized exchange. What better way to cash out his coins and providing something really cool to bitcoin community at the same time?



Edited because I quoted the wrong post initially

I wish that the addresses would be dumped today because if they do anytime in the future it will hurt bitcoin to the point of no return. Yes, it will crash the price today, and for many months to year afterwords. But because everyone is so fucking schizofrenic about these coins, nobody vested in bitcoin will be able to sleep at night and these threads will appear 10 at a time every day. Get it over with already.

Think about this:  Not only have Satoshi's coins not been sold or spent; Satoshi's coins haven't even moved.

Except for a 10BTC test transaction he spent to Hal in 2009, and maybe one or two coinbases that nobody noticed or tracked down to him, they are all still sitting there untouched in his mined coinbase txOuts. I have a list of over 5000 of his coinbase addresses, and they have not budged.  He hasn't consolidated coins in one wallet, he hasn't tumbled coins, he hasn't bought anything from overstock.com or anywhere else.

We're talking here about someone who could cause deep unrest, perhaps bordering on panic, just by generating a new address and sending 50BTC from one of his old addresses to it.  I can name dozens of places that would light up like Christmas trees if even one of his known addresses moved; hell, my own computer would light up like a Catharine wheel.  I'd have a text message within fifteen seconds of a transaction spending one of those addresses hitting the Bitcoin network, and that message hasn't been sent even once in the months since I set up the script. 

But are you sure we know ALL of Satoshi's addresses?

If Satoshi was still mining in 2011 like any other 500+ people mining at that time, how would we know?

And just to add; apparently Satoshi was the only one (or at least one of only a few) who didn't choose to combine his mined coins into a few large addresses. So the coins that he mined are distinguishable from other early adopters who mined back then.


Uhh... Hundreds of people on board? You mean hundreds of thousands right? And even then, 1 million BTC is still A LOT. That's over 1/20th of the supply. It would still completely devastate the price. In fact, he probably wouldn't even be able to sell all 1 million BTC at once simply because he would run out of sell orders to dump his coins into (yes even the ones at 1 cent!).



The most common figure is 1,000,000 coins, or slightly less (e.g. 900,000 coins). The number was deduced by looking at the addresses containing 50 BTC which were mined by Satoshi in the early days of Bitcoin and left untouched since then.


There are no big accounts. Just thousands of small accounts which have remained untouched. It's possible that he could sell 20,000 individual private keys or his wallet.dat file containing 20,000 individual private keys to a friend in exchange for fiat but the buyer would have no way of knowing whether Satoshi has or hasn't kept backup copies of the private keys or wallet which would make the coins not truly "theirs" since Satoshi would still retain shared control. And if the buyer moved them, then that would be instantly noticeable by looking at the blockchain.


As I already mentioned above, it's impossible to know if the seller still retains copies of the private key(s) when buying a private key. And if they moved the coins, then that would be visible on the blockchain and would defeat the whole purpose of selling the private keys as opposed to simply doing a conventional sale since the coins are going to be moved anyway.



I think it would depend on his financial situation. If he was a poorer person, then I can definitely understand and possibly see him selling a few coins while still remaining undetected. Assuming that he didn't abruptly stop mining in 2010, it's only once he starts trying to sell millions upon millions of dollars worth of BTC that it would become noticeable. I wrote about this possibility in another thread here (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1028203).


Agreed, although $2 million is still a tiny fraction of what Satoshi owns. The value of his bitcoins surpassed $1 billion at one stage.


This is probably what you're looking for:

http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins

Currently, there is little over 14 million BTC in circulation. Satoshi is estimated to have slightly less than 1 million BTC.


Nice link. For those who can't be bothered to read it, the important part is this:


And here's another interesting pattern discovered by the same author which distinguishes addresses mined by Satoshi from others:

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/


If Satoshi ever chose to move his coins (mixed or not) then this would be instantly visible from the blockchain. The news that Satoshi is possibly preparing to cash out would depress the price significantly since people would be preparing for a massive dump before it even happened. Satoshi wouldn't get anywhere near the current market value for his coins. By the time he is in the airport and ready to begin his traveling, BTC might be trading at $30 per coin.


Definitely.

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:


Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal. ???

I just met with him he sold me 2 addresses. He liked my  thread on the genesis block and told me I am worthy of holding the keys for it.  So I now can remove the 15 + btc added to it if I chose.

He also wonder If I could buy an early address for him and keep it untouched for another 67 weeks you know right after the next half happens.

So I took out my stash box and hand him 1,000  100 dollar bills and said sure man no worries.

 My point is  I could send him to 10 buyers of his coins that would keep the address frozen for a few more years.

So you can't possibly know if he sold them all to a trusted few.   Unless of course you are him the great satoshi. Just playing with us.

You can't compare Bitcoin's early history with that of Litecoin. The potential ramifications of Satoshi selling 1 million BTC far outweighs the impact of coblee selling his stash of LTC. When Bitcoin was first announced, Satoshi was the only one mining it. Even 1 year after it was created, Satoshi was still pretty much the only person mining it (check out the historical difficulty charts for proof of this). Compare this to Litecoin which was publicly announced on Bitcointalk and already had many people mining it when the genesis block was launched.

Secondly, coblee sold his LTC long before Litecoin even became significant. Had Satoshi sold his coins in 2010 when the price was still mere cents, it would not have the same impact as selling today.

But what about this part:


Why does coblee selling his LTC not constitute an acknowledgement that LTC is a failure and yet Satoshi selling his BTC does?

I didn't write that though. And personally, I disagree with the idea that Satoshi selling part of his BTC stash constitutes an acknowledgement that BTC is a total failure. Whether or not others want to believe that a dev selling a portion of their creation constitutes a failure of said coin is their choice. And for the record, some people did think that coblee selling his LTC was a negative thing for Litecoin and it has been mentioned numerous times as well.

Example:


Also, a Bitcoin core dev sold half of his coins too during the GHash.io debacle:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/

The crux of the matter is that Litecoin is far bigger than just coblee and Bitcoin is far bigger than Satoshi or Peter Todd. And whether or not either coin amounts to a failure is something for the community to decide, and not individual people.

Weirdly enough, you aren't the first person to mention that I might be. 

But the fact is, I'm not.  Really and truly, cross my heart, I'm not Satoshi.

Which, of course, is the exact same thing I'd tell you if I were.   ;D

Getting to the heart of the OP's question, the way I would go about it is by having a chain of intermediary brokers do the transaction with a buyer. Still though, at best it's pseudonymous.

Here is a very basic idea of a chain of intermediary brokers, it's very similar to a generic mixer in computer theory:

-Tell one proxy that you are looking for a buyer for some sort of item, the code item, and to work with particular groups/sets of people.
-Inform a subset of parties that if they are approached with a seller of the code item that person is actually selling BTC.
-Have a trusted escrow agent work with proxy for transaction purposes.

The simple chain can be expanded to as many "obfuscation" layers to complicate true nature of sale (Code Item 1, is Code Item 2, is Code Item 3, and so forth until "BTC level"). Similar can be said for proxy agents, and with trusted escrow agents. Once again though, the moment chained parties work together anonymity is lost.

Mix the coins for an extended amount of time and then cash them out privately or on shady exchanges over time. I think it's difficult but doable for Satoshi. But on a serious note: I don't think Satoshi will ever cash out a single Satoshi (no pun intended) of the coins that people know belong to him!

Interesting, but i don't think he is dead, he said "he is not Dorian Nakamoto" in a hacker forum after Dorian Nakamoto was reported by that journalist last year.

Add the netherlands to that list
I know for a fact that the USA has a huge impact on some EU states, especially because of the huge financial power they have over them (think of import/export)
The top developer seems to know who he/she/it (Satoshi) is and claimed to have talked to it about btc 2.0.

If he does cashes out his bitcoins there will be a big drop in the price of bitcoins, and we can buy Bitcoins in a much cheaper price as there will be more bitcoins in the rotation than the  current  demand of the bitcoins. High supply than the required demand = lower price, I will buy more bitcoin if it were to happen :)

What if Satoshi is dead ? Nobody would know and his bitcoins would be stucked forever...

Well, he's going to get taxed to hell if he does cash out, no matter what he does.
He's not going to find enough people in Localbitcoins with 1 million cash, he would need years to cash out the whole thing. Any other method will require that he pays measly amounts of taxes, which would mean it's not worth it to get these Bitcoins out.

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140218230735/walkingdead/images/c/c4/Didn%27t_read_lol.png

You know why?

Someone doesn't know how to properly format their posts....
It gave me a headache....

Choose one.

If Satoshi cashes out 1 million bitcoins, it will drive the price down, as there will be more bitcoins available than the usual, which is only few thousand bitcoins which are supplied by the miners daily, this will let the price fall significantly and boy i will buy so many bitcoins if that will happen .

Someone said on a hacker forum.

Well you could always try and go the illegal way - which I don't recommend - but it is probable that some people may choose to do so. In that case you could try to sell them to someone in a dark alley and live off of dollar notes for the rest of your life.

A total of 2,650,000 coins were mined in 2011. So Satoshi might be having around 5,300 coins from 2011 (considering the median scenario). It will represent just a small fraction of the coins which he mined during 2009, and so we can ignore them. But proof seems to indicate that he gave up mining in 2009 itself.

I always suspected him to have some coins we can't trace back to him. Of course we know about the first blocks that have been mined by him, but what about the blocks that have been mined in the following years? He could very well have mine them in the pool.

Every bitcoin up to the first transaction to Hal Finney belongs to Satoshi.

Well, you see scammers disappearing with coins everyday. If he really wanted to, he would just have to wait until brick-and-mortar stores or online stores accept BTC as a form of payment and he could spend those BTC directly there, no need for selling them first.

Exactly this. When you stop selling BTC for fiat and instead use it to buy products from brick and mortar stores, you are no longer devaluing bitcoin, instead, you are helping it grow, distributing it more, nad make it more viable as an everyday currency. This is what he would have wanted.

there were no pool at launch , he mined in solo for sure, with diff at 1 was easy to generate block without effort, even on a not powerful cpu, but my question is why he mined 1M coin or more, if it was for testing he could have stopepd at 1000 or less, there was no need to mine that much...

There are already many stores online and in the real world where he could spend his coins. Regardless of that though people would go crazy as soon as the coins moved anywhere and would spend a lot of time trying to trace them. They then likely would be able to be traced to the stores he used them at.

Wouldnt that require knowledge of the store's wallets? As far as I know, many of the brick and mortar businesses simply use one of those bitcoin readers that automatically transfers the bitcoin based on a customers wallet.

Let's ask btc-e.com and maybe they will confess to being Satoshi!
Who's with me? If several of us ask, it will have more of an impact.  ;D

Yeah, I agree that Satoshi would have wanted people to spend Bitcoins in stores and use it for legitimate purchases and trades, but if Satoshi himself started to sell some of his early-mined coins, people would sure freak out, yes. This would prove that he still has access to a ton of coins.

Huh, what do you mean by "Bitcoin readers that automatically transfer the Bitcoins based on a customers wallet"!? I think many stores simply have a single address, maybe have the QR code for that address printed out so they can show it to the customer, who can then send the coins with his/her mobile phone. Online shops of course have to use changing receiving addresses, otherwise they couldn't successfully discern between different customers' payments!

Trick question.  He already has enough money to last the rest of their lives Without even trying.

If the coins is moved then expect bitcointalk is gonna be a mess since people will thought that satoshi is coming back here and the price might have a short rally . If he used it to buy at a stores or cash them out , the anonimity of satoshi will be reveal since it can be very easy to track on

Satoshi's addresses have remained untouched, so the only way for such a trade to happen would be if he sold the actual private keys for the addresses and the buyer didn't move them immediately afterwards.


Wasn't that an April Fools joke?


It's likely that the account was already hacked at that stage since he didn't sign his post with his PGP key and it was proven to be hacked just months later.

And it was posted on the P2P Foundation website. The message seems to be missing now:

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto


Difficulty remained constant throughout 2009. Satoshi had multiple computers mining BTC from the beginning and most of the BTC mined at the time were sent to addresses containing 50 BTC which have remained untouched since then so it's very likely that these addresses belong to Satoshi.


Except merchants tend to use payment processors like BitPay who do the selling for them. The selling still happens, only it's just done out of sight.


If you want to keep the network going, then you have to mine. Satoshi actually could have mined 2 million bitcoins (since 144 blocks are generated per day and 50 BTC per block equals 50*144*365 = 2,000,000+ BTC) but because of the low hashpower throughout 2009, he was only able to mine 1 million BTC.


Perhaps he was referring to POS terminals like Coinkite:

http://www.coinkite.com/


I disagree. If news gets out that Satoshi is moving his coins then I predict the price would drop. Why? Because it means that Satoshi could be preparing to sell his coins.

it can't destroy bitcoin, but the price will collapse more than 1 time, but it will finally recovery it, i believe that.

Here's an interesting thread about this very topic:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504149

If Satoshi chooses to dump his coins (and all of them), the price would be brought down to the single digits for a while but it wouldn't go to $0 except perhaps momentarily depending on the depth of the orderbook of the exchange he dumped his coins on. Across all exchanges, there are more than a million buy orders at $1 and several times more in orders above this so it's unlikely to go too low before climbing back up again.

Since most of the coins are mined using various addresses that aren't affiliated with one another, there would be no way to prove that they belong to satoshi or others. There were no evidence that satoshi stopped mining right after 2009 and he could have mined throughout the years using other addresses. Satoshi has also made a transaction to hal finney so the addresses were not all untouched.

Most early miners combined their addresses containing 50 BTC into a few large addresses. To my knowledge, that transaction to Hal Finney was the only address which Satoshi didn't leave untouched.

Satoshi's addresses also have a pattern and distinct characteristics which separates them from other addresses:


Link: http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/


Link: http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/

Satoshi could have chosen to continue mining past 2009/2010 by changing his habits and following what other miners were doing in order to remain undetected (i.e. by consolidating his mined coins into a few large addresses). Even so, the vast majority of his coins would have been mined during 2009 when the difficulty was 1 and he was pretty much the only person mining.

Satoshi might use his coins when his becomes smaller proportion of the existing coins and bitcoin is well accepted.

Lazlo (the pizza guy) said he coded the first open source GPU miner for Bitcoin. That must have been available in 2010 and Satoshi would likely have wanted to try it out. The first people to use it were mining thousands of Bitcoins a day. At that rate it would be difficult to start a new wallet for each mined block, so Satoshi could have changed his habits and sent all his mined coins to the same wallet.

From that point on we would have no way to guess which wallets belong to Satoshi.

I doubt Satoshi would be moving any coins at all as that will reveal his identity.
And even if he decided to do so, it wouldn't be for $250 each.