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I know, that it has been discussed extensively through the years, who Satoshi is or why he disappeared and I also have my theories about it. Now what made me open this topic, is that I can't understand why somebody could be alive and sane and at the same time miss the opportunity to sell at least some small part at the time when it went over 1000$. He practically has not touched any of his known wallets after his disappearance. Every theory that I find on the net, doesn't fit to some of the publicly known facts, so I am now trying to collect ideas and bring them in order here in my OP.
If you can add a theory that is holding up against all facts, I will add it here and open the discussion.

The assumption of SN having 1 Mio Bitcoins are based on this article: https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Why is it important to reveal the Satoshi Nakamoto secret anyway?

I know that people argue, that it doesn't matter who SN is, because it is his invention that counts and nothing will change when we know his identity. I don't agree here, because if you understand Bitcoin  and take it serious, you can't think, that - a man with a fortune of 1 Mio Bitcoins, who can easily disrupt the entire Bitcoin market, if he starts to sell some bigger amounts from his known wallets - is not important.

If Bitcoin really makes it to a common digital world currency and the price raises with demand, this question "Who is controlling the private keys to this 1 million Bitcoins" will also raise more and more importance, since 1 Mio. BTC will have even a bigger impact on the market then.

edit: http://www.coindesk.com/dangerous-satoshi-nakamoto/

I will start with the most obvious:


1. Satoshi Nakamoto is dead

This is surely the most obvious reason, why one would not take his chance to become a billionaire. He could have died in an accident or he lost a fight against cancer. He could have been killed or maybe he committed suicide. The fact, that Satoshi said goodbye and gave some keys to Gavin, take out all of the "death by surprise" causes, like an accident and such. It would be a big coincidence, when this two remarkable events (1. Satoshi leaves Bitcoin and 2. he dies in an accident a few days later) happen in a short time frame. So, possible, but unlikely.

Disease
Let's say he had cancer and therefore had the time to say goodbye, what would he do? Leave his project and give the keys for the domains and other stuff and disappear? He would not use his money to spend on technology to save his life or something like that? He wouldn't even be giving the money to some anti cancer charity? I find this very strange and pretty unlikely, that a dying man would react like that. Strongly unlikely.

Suicide
Suicide is one of the theories that at least doesn't fail against the known facts. There is a manifold of reasons, why people kill themselves. If he didn't care about living, than he might not care about what happens with his one million Bitcoins after he death. His project "Bitcoin" could have been important  enough for him to make sure, it will continue.

Murder
I must include the fact, that short before Satoshi left the building, Gavin Andresen was invited to an interview by and with the CIA to explain the Bitcoin concept. This can be coincidence or probably be connected with his disappearance. We don't really know, so to me the conspiracy theory about the CIA or some other high tech criminals killing Satoshi Nakamoto still holds up a bit.
Edit:
The question, that needs to be asked regarding the murder theory is: What would be the reason to kill him anyway? They were after his Bitcoins and he refused to give away the private keys? His anti bank invention pissed of some of the "big guys"? Maybe he didn't want to corporate with the agents? Perhaps a "Death by accident" á la Pulp Fiction or while torturing him? Hard to say which of these is more likely. I really don't expect the CIA guys to be that ruthless, but after these corrupt Silk Road agents one never knows. Could be, that Satoshi has been visited by corrupt and ruthless officials, which would make a murder theory more possible and at the same time it would explain how they were able to find Satoshi's identity, which is easy with their super duper high tech surveillance stuff and some help of the bros from the NSA.

This theory would explain,

- why he disappeared
- why his coins kept beeing unmoved (he died without revealing his private keys)
- why he never cared about the hacker who was using his email account for a decent period of time and he never changed the password for it until GMX closed the account.

The hacker story could even be a try of the conspirators to let the public think, that SN is still alive after the actual murder.
EDIT: In this case, they even could have flipped Gavin after the murder and made it look, like Satoshi handed over the control of Bitcoin to him.

This murder theory is the strongest of all in my opinion.



Next common theory is my number 2


2. He is super rich already without his Bitcoins, so he doesn't need to sell them.
 
It is indeed possible, that Bitcoin is the product of a guy who was super rich and for him having "1 Billion more or less" doesn't matter. He could have the ability to create the Bitcoin white paper and start working with developers to evolve his baby and mine 1 Mio Bitcoins and then disappear. One question that would be raised is: Why would he do it?


3. Satoshi lost the private keys of his early wallets

That would be a good reason to not spend a good part of your "now worth alot" coins. It would also be a reason for some people to commit suicide btw.
But: Would this be a reason to give up and give all the keys to somebody else? I doubt it, really...



4. He wanted to stay anonymous.

EDIT:
We can all agree, that Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to stay anonymous.
I am not sure if he has ever stated the reason why he did this, so I stick with the most obvious one: He knew that his code provokes the system and it could lead to his arrest or death.

---

There are some reasons why he could be ducking after Bitcoin rose to a certain point:

- CIA involved in his invention could have scared him away, because he feared for his life.
- He fears that banks will go after him
- He was too shy/ugly/greedy/whatever to reveal his identity
- He is a famous person and doesn't want to be connected to his invention
- He thought it was to early to get too much publicity and when it became too big he planned his disappearance (He wrote about Bitcoin should be kept small until the network was big and stable enough - link will follow - so this one has a credibility)
- Satoshi Nakamoto could be the nick of an organization, that wanted to stay secret.

All of these points need to be checked with the fact, that none of these early coins have been spent.

- CIA and banks theory can indeed bring someone to even fear touching his Bitcoins, despite of them beeing needed or not. He simply wants to hide, maybe because he has been threatened. He knew, that the CIA might have technologies to reveal his identity at that time, so he could have been too paranoid to even log in to old email and forum accounts etc and also he wouldn't be spending one Satoshi of his known wallets. He didn't even tried to change his GMX password after the hack, so the hacker could continue until GMX closed his email account by themselves. Makes sense.

- all other theories - but the organization one - don't hold too much. There would have been ways to spend some coins, without directly revealing his identity, so simply because you are shy, you would not give all the keys away, never spend your coins and disappear.

The "Satoshi is an organisation" theory is kinda more complex, so I will put it as an extra point later.

EDIT:

Organisation theory

I can imagine some kind of a libertarian group, with a goal to get rid of banks, but why would they give Gavin all their legacy, right at a point where Bitcoin started to get attention and let their pseudonym disappear? Again, fear of the three letter agency? I don't support that.
I would say, that if this group exists, their plan must be running on some long term deeper meta level. Those guys must have been exited, when Bitcoin was as worthy as gold, but they didn't touch it. When the price was going down, not one of them got nervous. They all kept their secret?
What must be their plan? World?

I think, this organisation theory is pretty weak. When that amount of money is at the table (1.2 Billion USD is pretty much), there will be somebody wanting his share. There will be disputes about this and about that and there will be somebody feeling treated unfair and so on. It will end up with a drama story on Gawker.

No, I think Satoshi Nakamoto is one person. A programmer with a vision. Remember when Wikileaks started accepting Bitcoins, Satoshi was not amused. He didn't like the early publicity. He stated, that he wanted Bitcoin to raise slowly to have a secure network. Now lets say he was disappointed with the development. Why shouldn't he use his reputation to make a change instead of turning his back and disappear forever? (oh, I forgot: One must give all the control of the website and stuff to Gavin before disappearing of course and never touch his 1 Billion $ again)

This theory of SN wanting to stay anonymous for whatever reason has too many failures. It would make sense when his life was in danger, like somebody threatening him "Get out of Bitcoin or we kill ya", but does this really sound realistic?

Now if a lot of money is involved, I bet, that there are indeed some people out there who would kill somebody to get it. It is not hard to imagine, that people also kill for 0 day technology or national security. Satoshi could have imagined this also and when he heard the magic letters "CIA" he dropped his nym, gave all the keys to his most trusted buddy Gavin and fled the country, (without ever spending one Satoshi of his fortune?).

Possible, but not my fave.



5. Satoshi wants to wait for the right time, when 1 Bitcoin is worth 2.000/5.000/10.000/100.000/1.000.000 USD

Could it be, that we are facing a genious megalomaniac (or an organisation) who is planning to take over the world in the case of Bitcoins super success? Wow! That really sounds like some Matrix like science fiction, doesn't it? But, let's say he (or they) is/are crazy enough to resist all temptations of selling his Bitcoins until he reached his magic goal, just for the plain moniez and/or power. He is genius and crazy enough to believe, that Bitcoin will be worth a lot more than 1000$ and this at a time when it was worth 0$ actually. At a price of 1000$ he doesn't sell, because he believes it will raise a lot higher. Even when the price falls he is still confident and holds and never moves a Satoshi to not scare the public, because "when he moves a coin, there will be a panic sell" (I don't buy that "panic sell" theory anyway. Why would him selling a few coins indicate, that he doesn't trust Bitcoin anymore? Sure, if he would dump all at once,  I agree, that this would be resulting in a panic sell, but simply selling a few coins or buying some stuff with it would certainly not mean more but "Satoshi is back!"
If Gavin was telling us the truth about the CIA meeting being nothing more than some interview about Bitcoin tech, than why this megalomaniac Satoshi, would disappear just a short time after? OK, maybe he had some paranoid or psychosis tendencies and feared, that the CIA will reveal his evil plan and kill him and destroy Bitcoin. Who knows....


6. He is an idealist and doesn't care about getting rich, but about helping with decentralizing money.

Probably the most positive theory. I will get into this one later in more detail.

EDIT:

This theory is about one rich, Bruce Wayne type-o-guy. A rich programmer with a plan to help the world to get rid of banksters. He creates his code and because he doesn't want to be associated with it, he chooses to do so with a nickname. He wanted to use Batman, but it was already in use, so he chooses Satoshi Nakamoto instead.
If he wanted Bitcoin to get big, why he leaves his project at a point where it actually goes big? Why mining a million Bitcoins and leave them untouched instead of using it for his project? Why let the hackers hack his email and do nothing against it for months? This all makes no sense!

---

I will go deeper into this and other questions and theories later. Meanwhile, if you have a good and rational theory about why SN didn't spend a Satoshi, don't hesitate to write it down here. I will add new ideas to my OP with a reference from time to time.


Edit 2. of March 2016: Since Mr. Craig Wright made his false claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto and Gavin Andresen believes him, I back up the "Satoshi Nakamoto is dead theory (chapter: murder)" more than ever!

how do we know he didn't mine a lot of BTC to an unknown address during the early days and is spending them gradually?

As far as I know no body (even billionaires) have half billion ready to use . It's always there net-worth but it's not the case for Satoshi .
The fact that he believed in Bitcoin and he worked years on the project to get it done means that he was just fine for what comes to the Financial part so he was probably rich (not like now) but he was rich . Either that or Bitcoin is behind a group of people (BIG COMPANIES) or Governments .

EDIT :


That's a good point too .

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

Nopes. Many coins, that were attributed to Satoshi, was mined by https://www.reddit.com/user/btcthwy

There are other possibilities like maybe satoshi is waiting for more price rise as he is not convinced with the current btc/USD rates. Or maybe he mined the first early coins to a random addresses to keep them untouchable which may be safe for bitcoin network.

still can't prove that satoshi didn't mine using other computer(s) around that time. plus gmaxwell and theymos claimed that they and many people they know of mined around that time.
maybe satoshi did mine most of those blocks and never planned to spend it because he had some concern of what so many bitcoins can do to its economic growth. but did mine a safe amount of bitcoin using other separate computer(s) for himself.

all the block dots are NOT owned by satoshi.

the angle of the dots is the easiest way to work out who is who. because the angle is the eqivelent measure of CPU speed. the more vertical it is (10degrees) is super fast cpu. but the closer to 90degree's they get those are slower and slower cpu's

satoshis 'angle' can be easily counted.. if you have the time to manually do it

so far, this is an example.. the light blue is satoshi. the other colours are other people/other PC's
https://i.imgur.com/EMNWeJW.jpg

(my image is not exact because first i sorted out the satoshi angles and then moved onto colour coding different users individually.. but still not perfect)

as for saying satoshi never spent the coins.. he did move some coins. even on the first day he and hal finney were mining.. just not all of them were moved/spent.. for him it wasnt about selling for profit but for testing purposes.
as for other people, they also spent coins too.

by block 500(day 4) i can easily see 4-5 different patterns that represent 4-5 different users/computer mining. (still trying to manually sift through the data)

if you think about it, having the first 1m coins not owned all by satoshi, it's not exactly a good thing

having one  millions coins holded by 5 guys instead of one guy(satoshi) can actually be even worse, those other 4 guys probably are more greedy than satoshi and an easy dump can occur with more probability

I don't really know why he never spent a satoshi out of his stash (or how sure we are that he didn't) but I'm pretty sure that he doesn't want to sell because if he does all the world's newspapers' headlines will be about "Satoshi Nakamoto (who) lost faith in his own creation and sold his coins". Just imagine the effect that it would have on the market. It could end up in a disaster.

How about
Satoshi Nakamoto is NASA

Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto is some government agency of some country and did bitcoins without approval from the government, and now they are afraid if they expose their project nothing good will come out of it.

Just my two cents.

i have data of the first 222 days. and i know in the first 5 days atleast 5 computers were mining at the same time.
so far my data has shown in the first 11 days that the satoshi dots accounts for 60% of mined coins.
which i know from day 12 to day 222 dilutes down to a lower percentage as more people join in.

im pretty sure someone else must have done more research then the dot graph of previous research. and i hope so too because its giving me double vision going through this data manually

Its better to assume he is dead which is also quite reasonable. But he may also have other unknown wallets which have lots of coin lying around.

The last one sounds the most possible to me, it is something I can relate to happening.

Why can it not be that he has morals and doesn't want to hugely profit from essentially premining Bitcoin?
The whole idea of bitcoin is that it is for the people, if the creator crashed the market by selling out for a few million dollars, that wouldn't make him or his idealogy look very good!

I would assume that someone who came up with cryptocurrencies, and put it together as well as Satoshi did, would be rich enough or content enough with themselves that they wouldn't need to sell out.

I guess over time option 1 becomes ever more possible, but I would rather believe my reasoning.

I'm surprised no one have sited "due to security reasons" perhaps. If he comes out, he will be known well enough for him to be a target for either governments or some people who will surely try to get their hands on him for their own benefits. What his doing now (staying out of radar) is the ideal thing to do. Some thing coming out will benefit him only but there will be harm as well. plus he will never have a privacy again on his life (something only famous people would wish for in trade for fame).

All are theories, we don't know anything about how many bitcoins have, he or she could be minning with another bitcoin address. The only think that i suppose its important its if anyone want to sold in few time all these bitcoins price could go down.

Or maybe he's waiting for the halving as well so he can dump his coins at a higher price with more buyers than it ever did during the first halving.

Or he lost his HDD :)

dont think he lost his HD, but he was endlessly debugging bitcoin-qt so easy t presume due to lack of real value bitcoin had in 2009 that he didnt even care about deleting the wallet and use fresh new addresses in new wallets

First of all, we don't know, and we never knew Satoshi's financial status before creating Bitcoin. What I mean is, he could have been a millionaire already, so this wouldn't mean he didn't need the extra money Bitcoin gave him, and he had some ethics and decided to leave the initial mined coins untouched.

Second option is, he simply lost the coins, and he can't take them back: the coins are lost forever.

Third option: He died before he had a chance to move some of the coins/got killed by a triple letter agency.

I am going with option 3, He simply didn't think it was going this big and just can't access his old coin's
A guy like that probably has a new pc/hardware  every week.

Or maybe he is just waiting for the price to go up more, till he can declare himself the richest man!
And build a better world, that would be awesome.

But I don't really chase the truth about Satoshi, like other people because there is no point.

Every one know that if satoshi spend = move his btc it would be a new revolution, because yes "we are all satoshi" but there is also an original one, the first one! and no know can't ignore his movement.
I think is this the really think about it.

so you think he predicted a higher price for this halving than the 2013 run up, and after all the dump that occured and the desperation phase?

ok satoshi is like nostradamus when we taalk about bitcoin, but those kinda of prediction is putting it overboard...

I guess many people are monitoring these addresses. The moment one of them is spent, the whole world will know => resulting will be massive drop in bitcoin value to close to nothing due to fear.

Satoshi is a smart guy and he definitely understand that he will not be the richest guy in this world. All we know is that he wanted Bitcoin to be successful and therefore he will not be moving those coins.

I'm going with theory number 5. The CIA and the big banks of the world would want him arrested as Bitcoin disrupts their financial power of the world. As of now, the fed can simply print US currency and control the wealth of the world. With Bitcoin, this is decentralized, so nobody can control Bitcoin. This also means the modern citizen in the future would have more control over their finances.

If he spent any of his known addresses, there would be a massive hunt for him from governments to see if they can tax what he hasn't spent.

I think it would be funny if every now and then he chose a random address from the web to send a small amount to, just to watch various governments hound the poor clueless recipient for info on who Satoshi is.

I think they wouldn't arrest him... they would simulate a suicide, or they would make it as if he disappeared, but I don't think they would even want him alive and captive since he could become some sort of hero like Julian Asagne has become for a lot of people, and this would bring worldwide fame for Bitcoin pretty much overnight. I hope Satoshi is good but that's what I think. The dude is rivaling the status quo at the most fundamental level and some people aren't aware of this yet it seems. This isn't a game.

its dudes that still use IRC and know how to program machine code

do you realize how much cash these guys make, they where aleady

making a killing of preventing spam attacks selling Hash cash to email

servers, the choice of a Japanese name is not surprising as their

first take down target was also a Japanese base ceo whom they

pilfered off more coin than they prob own,

I added the "Idealist" theory, which is good, but why his short good bye and disappearance? Wouldn't he be better off helping with the process of evolving Bitcoin instead of hiding and letting everybody think he could one day crash the price? Pretty strange for an idealist, I think.

I think you want to talk or think this through with some software engineers.   Its not always a mistake to lose something like this.   When I tie a knot sometimes, I never want it to come undone ever and I would rather just buy a new rope then let that happen.  There is a usefulness in a lock that can not be easily opened, obviously we know this and thats the basis of bitcoin and that logic is easily extendable to these foundation stones that are the very big wallet deposits that were never touched.

You can say well its wasted money but this whole deal is virtual.   Bitcoin should be appraised by its total worth, move these never before seen coins and you will certainly devalue every other persons wallet in my opinion.  A market speculator I do expect to react almost instantly in that respect and sell on margin, in fact it'd probably happen before the news the wave of selling so much would touch every exchange

mass sell off is not bad.. because you can then imagine the massive buyup of cheaper coins. and eventually back to equilibrium. so dont waste days of thought on worry. even in a flashcrash. it will recover

Ye I don't think he will be so stupid to sell them all in on time, then Bitcoin will fall hard.
He is a smart guy, I just wonder why he wouldn't be active in bitcoin anymore.
But maybe he is still under us just under another name or he is working on a new project.

I don't know.  I've always imagined Satoshi to be like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.  Maybe Satoshi created Bitcoin but then looked at his creation and thought, "Ugh, Oh! I created a monster!" And then disassociated himself from his creation to avoid any type of repercussions, either legally or morally.  Just a thought....

As for the private keys:  They're probably in Hal Finney's safety deposit box which is waiting to be unlocked on a future date.  One never knows!

Because he's a space alien from Alpha Centauri and has no need for bitcoins. He only created Bitcoin to keep libertarians, anarchists and Bernie Sanders supporters busy to keep them from learning of his plan to take over the world.

I doubt that Satoshi Nakamoto would lose the private keys.  Of all people, he would know to protect that.  Could it also be possible that he purposely sent some coins to an address that can't be used?  They weren't worth much at the time.

Just take a look at Dash as a example, the developers pre-mined the shite out of the coin within the first 8 hours of it's existence and then people started to complain and scream pump n dump. Nobody wants to invest in something that may end up as a scam or a Ponzi.

If Satoshi touch those coins, people will scream Pump n Dump again, and investors will pull out. 

There are many ways to avoid this situation. He could step forward, dox himself and donate his Bitcoins to charities for example. He could even stay with a good part of it, without a great panic. He could also invest in a Bitcoin company or whatever. I even think, that this status quo weakens Bitcoin, because we never know, when this pandoras box will be opened.

He trust in his invention. He know that a lot more exxciting things are coming. I think that we'll have to wait until 2028 to know what happened. In this year, Bitcoin would be 20 years old, and would be used wordwide or forgotten. I think that it will be used worldwide, and Satoshi thinks the same I think.

Nice Graph. How did you retrieve that and what are the axis?

I had also speculated he would donate some to the unbanked.
Or he could use some for solving some hard Future problems, e.g. fixing scalability or buying and running some miners for better decentralisation & trust.

I think it's a mix of options 4 & 5. Satoshi probably doesn't want to draw any attention to himself right now in these turbulent times and is waiting for that rocket to reach the Moon upon which he will be the richest man alive  ;)

I asked this question myself and I came to the conclusion that there could be only two reasons (except of possible death, I did not really think about this yet  ::)) First, he (deliberately or not deliberately) lost the key(s) of his wallet(s). Second, he would like to exchange the Bitcoin for cash but he need to reveal his identity then. It is impossible to exchange such an amount without revealing identity. Even if he would decide to find someone who is buying bigger amounts for cash, he could not be sure that this person is not selling his/her knowledge of Satoshi's identity to a news magazine or to the authorities (FBI, CIA, whatever).

Because up until the time he disappeared there pretty much wasn't anywhere to spend a single Satoshi? Maybe some socks but even they might have come long after. Even if there had been a healthy commerce scene I assume he would've been wary of spending on digital or real products for paranoia reasons.

Imagine you have a million Bitcoins and the price goes to 1000$ and more. Wouldn't you or any normal person sell at least some part of it? Don't tell me he doesn't care about money or he wants to wait for a higher price. This makes no sense.

What price anonymity? Only he can tell you what value it has for him.

A $1000 price means thousands of people will be constantly scanning his known coins for signs of life. As soon as something did twitch people would be going all out to find out where they were headed. He couldn't use any type of exchange for fear of being dug out. He'd be depending on exchange owners to be secure and they don't exactly have a great track record nor could they resist digging around either.

You couldn't use them to pay for a product because it has to be shipped somewhere. You couldn't buy anything digital just in case it's been marked somehow. He kind of scuppered himself a bit.

So if he knows, that he can never spend his Bitcoins, just because he wants to stay anonymous, why he has collected them anyway? Also, there is no need to spend a big amount.

1.He is super rich already without his
Bitcoins, so he doesn't need to sell
them.
All super rich people are well known to entire world Satoshi cant be the pseudonym of any of them so the only way SN can be super rich is bitcoin
2.Satoshi lost the private keys of his
early wallets
He knows the importance of private keys so chances of his losing them is least
3. He wanted to stay anonymous.
Bitcoin is not evil it is one of the greatest invention why would someone who invented something like to stay anonymous? He certainly is not criminal why dont he just come out and disclose his identity? what's the point in staying anonymous? I dont think anyone wouldn't want to be known
I subscribe to theory that btc is the creation of some Government secret agency like Mossad,CIA or KGB

If you get the chance have a read of Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. It offers some eye opening insights about the very early days. For a decent amount of time there was pretty much no one mining other than Satoshi. Some of the curious tried it and then fell away. If Satoshi hadn't been there to keep it chugging along alone then it wouldn't be anything other than a white paper today. I'm sure he would've been over the moon to have had miners piling in from minute one and probably regarded the piling up of block rewards in his own wallets as a failure.

I like option 4, 5, and 6.  I am idealistic with btc and like to think that Satoshi is as well.  Perhaps he is holding for the right moment, maybe to distribute income.  Realistically I think he wanted complete anonymity and in order to have total anonymity he could not touch or move the coins.  I just do not think that he is deceased, I think he is watching his project unfold.

No matter what he does, it would get criticized. When Dash developers wanted to Air Drop those pre-mined coins, people still got mad and wanted to crucify them. The best thing he or she can do, is to stay out of sight. Those coins must stay out of circulation and we must accept that those coins are possibly lost forever. I still think the private keys for those addresses are gone and SN is too sad to admit it. It would not look good, if the inventor of the best financial instrument ever invented, lost his private keys. ^hmmmm^   

Jail. I don't actually believe this one, but it is different than anything else on the list.

it was said that his amount was only 200k and not 1M, even so selling 1k at the last peak will not be seen easily, so it may be possible for him to sell something without none notice it

maybe he is betting on his own prediction, about huge volume or no volume, and wait for a very high value

Maybe Satoshi is waiting for the coin to become mainstream before using it.
If he or she uses it now, it is very detrimental to the bitcoin price and the community and even the global economy. Bitcoin has raised attention not only the media but also the governments. I believe that some of the bitcoin users are tracking the wallets live. If the 1 million coin is liquidated then it will cause and oversupply sentiment. The bitcoin will literary crash. This is just my opinion

At the time he disappeared, Bitcoin was worth about 0.30$. Short after it broke the 1$ hurdle and Satoshi was a (theoretical) millionaire already. Now imagine Satoshi when it went 10$, 100$ and then it even goes over 1000$. One needs balls of steel to resist to sell some at this point, I think.
If this hodl theory is real, I would think that this Mr. Nakamoto is kind of a psycho. Why disappearing then and give control over your code/website etc to a stranger? If money would be your motivation, wouldn't you act different? I think, this theory only works, when thinking of Satoshi being a programmer with an inferiority complex. He has this genius moment where he invents Bitcoin and as he knows about the importance to the world.
So far so good. Up to this point he still looks like a normal genious and pretty idealistic, but the fact, that he instamines a big part and keeps it secret and untouched for years, makes him look pretty much like a freak. I would then assume he was going for "power" instead of "money" and he was waiting to "rule the world when Bitcoins is worth 10.000 or 100.000 or more". This sounds pretty much like a freak to me.

There is a few possibilities I see.

1. He did not want to be rich

He had created the bitcoin protocol for the sole purpose of a creation of bitcoin protocol. Look Zuckerberg once created the same design that all AOL messengers now uses. He created the equation that Pandora now uses. He never cashed a cent. The mentality of some people is different. The Internet is a place where some people do stuff for free, for a global use. Most people here are some kind of investors so they do not get it, but I believe, honestly, he had no intention for bitcoin to go this big. Maybe it was just a try whether it could work, and it got way too big. For some the creating - the product is more valuable than the price tag e.g. Jobs.

2. He had already sold it

Because you have not seen the transaction on a blockchain it does not mean it did not change hands. He might have sold the private key to someone directly, He might have wagered it. It might be a pledge for something. etc.

3. It is a safe guard

Allegedly, he holds a portion of Bitcoins that is big enough to create a price drop when dumped. If the owner of those decide that there is time for something new, he might just drop it to lower the price or If the bitcoin goes somewhere he did not intended to go he might just dump it. These coins represent a certain power.

I see the being Anonymous the most reasonable one.

Why would he show himself at this point? Are there benefits for him?

I don't think so, keeping it in secret makes people talk about it which should be fun for him I guess. Again, he has nothing to win showing his identity and a lot to lose, at least, If I was him, I would do what I said.
And about his 1 Mio BTC, I think that he has a lot of money without the BTC anyways or he's just not interested of being ultramega rich, either of those 2 would make sense for me.

Anyways everything thats not confirmed leads to imagination.

Seems likely, he may just spend some newer coins and no one would notice easily. Spending huge amounts of coins is problematic anyway, just imagine how much problems you get with just 100 Bitcoins selling to USD (like taxes). Another option is he might be dead and the private keys lost.

I still remain in my idea that satoshi is dead, i find impossible that a smart guy like satoshi could lost the private key of the early wallet

Satoshi changed his nym and moved on to the next phase of his master plan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote#cite_note-CN2-6).

He walks among us.  He laughs with us!   8)

Even if he has the private keys, at some point he will die and those private keys are lost forever.  If he doesn't spend the bitcoins or give them away, they will be lost forever.

This wouldnt be a problem. 20 million is still enough.
But the true reason lies within the possiblity to go for the sunken chest.
Everyone will try to find those million btc. thats better than advertising.
The lost BTC of Satoshi Nakamoto. Come, join the treasure hunt!

BTW, you should update your signature, aardvark15

You are over thinking it lol :D     Its been said before just this one person doesnt exist, it was a group of people who resolved to start this coin but not retain the power to flood the market with so many coins.  So between them the key was put out of use, no one can use these coins.   

Its either that or the long con to end all others and he'll appear out of the mist and be an insta billionaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sting

i kinda have to agree with AGD though.
it also sounds very strange to me that satoshi have created something as big as bitcoin and then dissipated. i can understand the wanting to stay anonymous part but i can not understand why not weighing in from time to time in important matters like block size.

I think dead makes the most sense. Wasn't there a lot of speculation about him being a computer engineer with health problems that died alone in like 2011?

In any solution I always look for the most natural occurance.   People saying death here which of course along with taxes is the most normal thing in the world.   But one point is the original group of creators planted an acorn not the finished product.    Yes very clever, well founded and apparently in demand by the world but at that time it was just a tiny seed that grew and is now a branching Oak tree that may last a hundred years.   We dont know, they didnt know the future but merely put down the origins of this situation we are at now.   I find it most likely they cared about the destination too much to endanger its progress with this kind of premine account.

It is a massive question no doubt though, I dont know if the core team now can put it out of hand now entirely or not

He probably is doing that. Why wouldn't he want to use his own creation? He might have just bought a lot of Bitcoin in the early days and used a different address.

One thing to bear in mind when you're spending Bitcoin these days is that 9.5 times out of ten you're not spending Bitcoin. All you're using it for is as a convoluted way to send dollars. If I was Satoshi that would offend my purist sensibilities.

Because Satoshi Nakamoto is a fucking god

I think that "he" is an organisation, a group of companies or people
united in common goal witch is global curency.
That may be a case of him being employe, one person but just on a task
directed by others, unknown personas.
Any way, that single article can still be a work of fiction, if not this is the case of anonymity.

The question is, why would this group a.) never touch their money? b.) give all control to a stranger and disappear? c.) let hackers sneak into their email accounts without a reaction?

Further more, I don't think, that a group or even a group of companies wouldn't be able to keep it secret for more than a year - esp. when a billion $ is in the pot.

I too fear this may be a reason in my thoughts. Satoshi would have never lost his private keys as he was more aware of the important of private keys. But I too believe there would be multiple reasons (not a single or two) why Satoshi did not spend his coins.

He waits for the moment where Bitcoin will be a worldwide recognised way of payment, so he wouldn't have to exchange his money for paper with a number printed on it.

how can we know that satoshi didnt used bitcoin?

I am quite sure satoshi used bitcoin, afterall its his hardwork to create bitcoin, maybe he spend it using a different name or maybe he didint used many bitcoins to keep the bitcoin price stable, up until now nobody sure who is Satoshi Nakamoto

Maybe he just didn't want to disrupt the market with all his currency, but that's unlikely because he could sell small amounts like you said. Maybe he just didn't want to use the currency he invented.

Can't we do a full blockchain analysis of bitcoin wallets that total to 100k+ BTC that haven't moved in the last 7+ years? How do we even how satoshi has 1 million BTC?

@OP, probably never spent any because he doesn't need to, or doesn't want to. For all we know Satoshi is actually a decent person and has chosen to forget about those coins or destroyed the keys to either artificially inflate the value, or he just wanted to get the network going.

This is exactly what I think happened, the coins which are untouched were attached to his identity and for him to become anonymous it was vital that he didn't touch those but.. he invented it, sure enough he must have mined a whole lot of it(even more what's there in his addresses) to other addresses and kept them aside and he must have sold a lot of them too when the price went up.

The early coins may also have been sold off-chain to other hodlers.
These could be the most collectible coins for historic reasons.
The collectible value being destroyed when they are moved on chain may be the reason for this.

So economic forces may keep these off chain.

If Satoshi was the genius that he is, then he would consider unfair that he would spend the coins that he mined when it wasn't a fair challenge. Rather than spending what would possibly be considered "premined" coins, he just holds them and spends from what he probably mined when Bitcoin was still new, but where it was fair game and many other people were mining. He probably has so many of those that he doesn't need to touch the others.

And his "disappearance" is nothing more than taking the anonymity of Bitcoin to the next level. It follows as logic.

Satoshi died on May 23, 2015.

is that true?if you joke about this,you should put kidding emoticon. sorry i'm just kidding man.
but i never meet people that mentioning about satoshi dead,i'm wondering about this,tell me if that was true ???

Actually, nobody could know except Satoshi. All his/her behaviour so far tends to that s(he) destroyed the private key of his/her account or s(he) still has the keys but he wants to give them away when Bitcoin becomes more mainstream. This is my theory. I do not believe anymore that there is a selfish reason for holding and not spending the Bitcoins.

It wasnt just one person, it was a key held by a group and destroyed collectively I think.  It is a big question hanging over though.   Its quite common to have a joint bank account in a business or similar and no one person can access unless all agree, I would guess it was done that way so that if one person did die with their part of the key then that certainly ends the possibility.    

I would like to think number 3 is very much possible lol


he must have lost it or purposely burn his access to his wallet so he can't spend it and so no matter what bitcoin will always have value.

Satoshi might not interest to spent bitcoin,they create it and leave it on his team,but i'm actually wondering what satoshi doing now with bitcoin,is he still concerna and care about bitcoin development.

He wouldn't be that foolish to do so.If he had to burn or destroy them he wouldn't have kept them in the first place.I think he must have some good reason to keep them with him

I believe that he just want to stay anonymous, or he don't want to use that chance to be a rich guy. Because he invented this technology for the world, not for himself.

he is either dead or he is so freaking rich. because any human being who would have that much of money will think about spending it everyday to buy what ever he desire

He lost his private keys, guaranteed!  It wasnt a big deal to him when bitcoin was a few pennies, but now everytime bitcoin rises, it eats at his soul. :D

that's right,Nakamoto will not doing fool thing by destroy any access to his assets,its fool action. i think satoshi nakamoto have team that manage heir bitcoin.

Probably died much sonner, when he dissapeared from Bitcoin development and forums and nobody else knew the passphrase to his walet or simply the HDD is reformated already. Sometimes even young people dying all of sudden like in car accident, heart attack and many other possibilites - just bad luck.

So 1) in OP seems to fit data best imo

The theories I contemplate nowadays are the following:

1) He has other addresses that no one knows are his addresses, with some money there too, enough to live a comfortable life for the rest of his life. He is not greedy so he doesn't want to move the coins from the 1 million stack because that would cause uncertainty.

2) He forgot the pass for his keys or simply lost his wallet

3) He was already a millionaire in fiat/assets before starting so doesn't want to damage Bitcoin by fucking around with the massive 1 million stack.

4) He doesn't want to move the coins because the movements would get scrutinized and it's a risk for his identity (he is a target worldwide already)

5) Guy actually got killed already

6) He's just a long term hodler

Something along those lines.

mr satoshi Nakamoto is currently  doing what he does best being a full time crpto miner :P doesn't need the 1 Mio BTC
he is surely over clocking his computer skills at the moment

Its most likely a backup as the man/women was purely a idealist and believed in what bitcoin can achieve. If he sold some it might show lack of faith.

Where in the blockchain I can find his known addresses?

How do you know that Satoshi has passed away?
well let assuming that you just said is true, it means that there is no access to his address and it just an memory, anyways i'am going with theory number 4, stay anonimity as we know that SN wanted to stay anonymous thus, he won't spend or sell his bitcoin. Just saying.

Satoshi Nakamoto whoever that is probably doesn't need a lot of money right now and if Satoshi wanted to liquidate his/her stash of coins that would have drawn all the public attention to him/her and would have endangered his/her privacy. There are a lot of Blockchain security experts monitoring the network so if Satoshi tries to cash in his/her fortune that would inevitably allow someone to match Satoshi's alias to a real name and face. And there are a lot of criminal organizations that would like to get hold of this Bitcoin stash so Satoshi better stay in the darkness if you ask me.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the Cosmical Jesus sent to us to free the humanity from the New World Order. He can't die, that's impossible.

+1 for the headlines

1) I think at least one of the group of Satoshis has died. (I think Satoshi was a team)

2) I think he/they has/have other bitcoins he has been able to spend.

3) It is definitely possible that some or all the keys have been lost - perhaps deliberately *

4) He does want to stay anonymous

5) I don't believe he wants to spend them. But maybe he wants to solve world poverty.

6) I do believe he is an idealist and more interested in the project rather than the $

Added reason:

7) I believe he has deliberately left the first addresses as a "bait" or "lure". If the first addresses move they will prove the private key has been compromised and the "system is at risk".
But the first coins will be near impossible to spend without attracting attention.

In my opinion the strongest reason is Satoshi Nakamoto wants to wait for the right time. Because from the beginning he was created
he had predicted the price of his created bitcoin will continue to rise in price. Because the limited supply is only 21 million BTC, it is no
wonder Satoshi Nakamoto until now didn't spend a satoshi from his 1 million BTC. If it's really my guess, then satoshi nakamoto is really
a person which takes into calculated everything from the start.

Re: Tell me why Satoshi Nakamoto didn't spend a Satoshi from his 1 Mio BTC

Did Satoshi think that quantum computers will exist? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5172573.0

He mined until 2010

He locked them up for 10y

Maybe cause of tax / legal issues.

He hasn't said anything against CSW until now

What if the coins he left in his wallet are like the foundation or should I say value? I can’t really tell because if you check other coins their creators/founders reached a point where they sold their coins to make money. Bitcoin is the only coin I know that the founder never sold his coins to make profit and make themselves rich. Or maybe he had another wallet and decided to abandon this one.

It’s quite possible that he may have two wallets, the one we know and one that he kept secret from everyone and when the price went up he sold that other one and made money and decide to leave this one. Or maybe Satoshi Nakamoto is an organization and they have decided to let it stay this way? I just can’t tell.