Bitcoin Forum

In this video I discus how many bitcoins satoshi is believed to own. I also go into how he mined these coins and talk about why I think they will never be spent.

Enjoy :)

Video: http://youtu.be/AWtNeaZxT54 (http://youtu.be/AWtNeaZxT54)

Thanks for the link.

Nice :)

Well thank you very much :)

Nice one but how about posting the links of the sources of everything you mention in the video. Some are very interesting stuff and i want to look deeper into them.

Has satoshi more bitcoins than there are threads about how many bitcoins satoshi has?

One day there will be more threads about Satoshi's Bitcoins than there are Bitcoins. ::)

And more threads about who is Satoshi than satoshis:)

So excited everyone likes the video, I'll go back and add sources

Offtopic: The christmas socks rock!
Ontopic: 980.000!!!!??? Woosh

lol funny :P but yea it's crazy that he has so many

One wallet with 980.000 BTC might just be a time bomb.

yea but you also have to realize satoshi was very big about having a different address for each block reward, hints why we see a lot of 50BTC wallets

There is no BTC wallet with 980K coins. The richest wallet contains 144,341 BTCs and is tagged as DPR Seized Coins.

In my opinion, Satoshi is not possessing a large number of coins. He created the BTC for ideological reasons. Stashing up a large number of coins will be against his morals.

I find it hard to believe that Satoshi would not obtain at least a few examples of his own work, at least in celebration of his accomplishments and the potential for them to take off. A man has to take pride in his work. I'm not necessarily implying he has tons of bitcoins but I'd be surprised if he didn't have at least a few.

Yea, but if he still had the keys, it would be a temptation, how would he handle that when he knows the amount of money could feed every hungry person in the world? it's too much temptation, that's my .02 cents

The world will not know who Satoshi is until his will is read.  I expect he will leave his bitcoins to someone.

Does anybody here knows how many coins were premined?

Satoshi did not premine this coin per say, what you have to realize is at first Satoshi was the only person on the project, then slowly people found out about bitcoin and joined him. I also find it hard to believe he would leave it in a will, even after he is dead the media would be able to tear every aspect of his life apart. I could only possibly entertain the idea that he would transfer the coins to someone maybe lol

None. The mining started on January 01, 2009. Not a single coin was not mined before that date. And dozens of people started mining on January 01, so we are sure that nothing immoral happened.

wait are you sure there were multiple people out there mining at the very beginning?

Yes. Either way, bitcoin needed the people there at each step of the way for it to grow into what it is today. if there wernt people before other people, bitcoin wouldnt have ever grown. The closer people are to the start, the more deserving they are of what they have. Everyone at each and every step of bitcoins life has had a chance to buy in at its current price before the price went higher.

Satoshi didn't premine a darn thing.  He had way too much class for that.

That said, he did sic something like sixty computers on mining for the first two years of Bitcoin's life, starting when there were only about fifty people who had ever heard of his cryptocurrency protocol, only about thirty became miners in the first year, and most of them (remember, everyone is CPU mining at this point) were only using single computer.   ;D

So, yah, he's got a lot of coin. About a million by my estimate, making him the first Bitcoin Billionaire as of a few weeks ago when we poked our noses over a thousand bucks a coin.  A bit less than a billionaire now that we're under the thousand again, but let's face it; he's filthy rich if he ever wants to start using his Bitcoin.

I agree that the first block was mined by Satoshi on 3rd January 2009. But a few days later, people were posting in blogs and forums about mining BTCs. So in the first month, there were probably dozens of miners.

Satoshi was an idealist, it is very doubtful that he mined a hoard of BTC greater than or even equal to a minute fraction of the Winklevoss brothers or that chinese millionaire.

it's still just crazy that bitcoin is almost 5 years old soon :0
Any way I still hold my belief that he will never spend those coins

It isn't at all doubtful that he mined that much.  He wanted to prove the concept and he felt it absolutely necessary to secure the blockchain so nobody could come along with a really good computer and force a chain reorg. It's all about trust; he wanted Bitcoin to be trusted and therefore it had to have mondo hash power.  Until other people were providing enough hashing power for him to be confident of security, he mined like crazy.

That said, he's an idealist and it isn't very likely he will actually start spending the coins.

that's actually really interesting, I always thought he had so many computers because he was so passionate, I guess that makes a lot of sence

I think it is foolish to assume that satoshi was an idealist, we know very little about him/them. No one man should control that much power, this is one of bitcoins fatal shortcomings.

Thanks for making the video, nice video!

Nope.. atleast in the beginning the hash rate was extremely low. No more than 10 computers were used for mining at any given point of time during the first month. Mining picked up only in mid-2010.   

yea, but bitcoin was the first coin so the idea and concept of a premine had not yet developed and I don't believe that satoshi has any evil intentions, I believe he started it for moral and idealistic reasons

He did in fact announce it.  As widely as he could anyway.  He published the paper, he discussed his paper on the cryptography list, he did everything but jump up and down and wave his arms.  Hardly anybody from the crypto list mined it mostly because hardly anybody thought it would succeed. 

Remember bitcointalk didn't exist, and if it had existed there'd be nobody on it. So announcing it here would have been pretty meaningless.

lol yea bitcoin is far different than alcoins, I mean basically bitcoin was the original idea

I was one of the early Bitcoin miners. My port forwarded node had around 15 to 20-ish stable connections for around the first few months. On occasions it would drop to around 10 connections. At around 6 months to a year the total number of connections increased quite quickly.

You had to mine with the Bitcoin client wallet back then using the CPU - it was the only way to mine. I dedicated an older Asus Terminator A7VT as my mining rig running 24/7 to support the Bitcoin project. Its single core Sempron CPU and VIA chipset had some limited crypto accelerator functions and it therefore got a much higher overall hash rate than some of my dual core PC's and other laptops I used at that time.

Most of the early network connections were via proxies / VPNs or through the Tor network. Aside from the IRC node I was one of the few individuals that published a port forwarded static IP. I also ran a Bitcoin node through Tor.

I knew deep down that bitcoin might get very big some day, although sold and traded almost all of my bitcoins within the first 2 years and well before any major price increase. Due to personal cirumstances I had to stop mining for quite sometime and it sadly wasn't 'worth' mining with my limited resources when things started taking off.

If you look at some of my early posts you will see that I predicted a price increase similar to gold/usd. My predictions were correct, although my timing was off - it just seemed to be taking way to long against my calculations for the project to be gaining momentum.

I'm proud to be an early Bitcoin supporter - I helped to advertise Bitcoin and did one of the most important things to help the project i.e. I traded, spent and donated my Bitcoins.

Thanks for sharing.

There was not a reason for the coin to be premined because even after satoshi announced it he was mining almost by himself  :P

that was a very interesting story, thank you so much for sharing. I must also say thank you, it's early adopters like yourself that really made bitcoin and I can't thank you enough for it.

Sure, but there are people who are in possession of such or maybe slightly smaller number of coins. And any one of those people could cause a massive price crash to below a 100 USD/BTC. US government has that power too now.

Well also you have to realize that the FBI has the seized silkroad coins, that could do a number to the price if they try to sell them off

that's true, or it could be the wallet was encrypted and the fbi honestly has no way to get to the funds and as a result the coins basically die :(

yea your right there are a lot of possibilities, personally I'd love to know what they did with them :/

I mined early on as well.  Was generating 50btc every other day on a macbook pro in late 2009, and expanded with a dedicated video card setup a little too late.  I've seen all the ups and downs.  I have also spent many coins in the past to acquire things for my life that helped it improve.  I still have some, and I carry no regrets about decisions of the past in selling (I'm talking about selling lots at $3 each).  When I started they where worth $0.15 each.

There was an article that a wheel chair bound comp sci professor wrote that was published in maybe Wired?!?! <-- help would be nice

He went on about working with Santoshi early on and taking part in the startup of the block chain (it was restarted quite a few times because of bugs etc.), he contributed code and was there when it went it took off.  He said he's left all his early coins in trust to his kids.  He said that he never met Santoshi but communicated with him via email often.

I think the estimates for what he holds land around 40% of current and 15% of future total (or more).


peace

wow that very incredible, thank you also for sharing your story, I love hearing things like this, and that's crazy about the computer science professor, I would love to know his name too :)

Also could you expand on what you mean by the blockchain was restarted?

The first time you write a program, maybe, "hello world," it never works the first time you run it... it needs some tweaking!  Same thing with building a server/client based protocol.  The first few times it runs, it isn't right.  So you change it, and it works better, until it doesn't.  Then you change it again and start it back up... eventually it works good enough that it can be set sailed into the public... to be improved more.

Ask more detailed questions if you want more detailed answers.

Ullbricht is still claiming that he is not the real DPR. So why he should make a deal to transfer the DPR Bitcoins?

You don't know that. Wallets can contain any number of keys, and you would have no way of knowing how many coins are in it.

Read from here:
Bitcoin and me (Hal Finney) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0)

Yes, I would love to know way more and in more depth about how the block chain was tested and then retested and then finally we get to the one present today :)

anyone have stories about satoshi?

It's not me who is assuming. It is already flagged as "DPR seized wallet", which means that the BTC community think it is indeed the DPR wallet.

I remember talking with him in email when he announced stuff to the crypto list way back in the way back.  He was very intense, in a way you started to realize only slowly.  If you explained a problem, he'd shut up and listen, then work night and day to fix it.  If you *told* him there was a problem, but didn't explain it, he'd badger you until you broke it down and made it exactly clear what you were on about.  Then you wouldn't hear 'boo' from him until it was fixed.  

Sometimes I remember thinking he didn't ever sleep if there was work to be done on the code; he didn't seem to have anything like a schedule other than 24/7 when working on code -- he was as likely to be online at any hour of the day or night as at any other, but wouldn't stay in contact for more than about 30 seconds.  But if there wasn't work to do on code (or if he was talking about the code or trying to get feedback) he seemed most active early in the morning (US/Pacific time). I have no idea if that was 'morning' wherever he was.

I have source code for the original Bitcoin client and miner, from November 2008.  in a RAR archive, if you can believe it.  RAR is obscure now.  Hell, it was obscure in 2008.  Nobody but an olde-skool dyed-in-the-wool download geek from way back in the 1980s would be all that likely to use it, and the number of people who'd even heard of it was dwindling fast by that point.

No RPC, no UPNP, no QT, barely any use of Boost.  It's just two files of C++ code.

I can confirm that the blockchain restarted several times while the kinks were getting worked out. The original code  has a different 'genesis block' hash.

wow that is so incredible, it must be awesome to know you got to send him emails :) I wonder if he's reading these very messages about us talking about him :0 but again thank you it was a very interesting story to read about and you gave some perspective as to the fact he must be at least around 30 or older if he was using a rare obscure file format like that 

No.  The chain that started on January 9 2009 is the chain that is still active.

But there were several blockchains that started on earlier dates with different Genesis Blocks, in November and December of 2008 - each of which ended when it became clear that the protocol needed a fix and the fix couldn't happen leaving the early blocks valid.

This is why we have a 'testnet' now.  

yea me too, I'm also very very curious !!

I only ever saw it in email, on three different cryptography lists.  Metzdowd, Cypherpunks, and one that's no longer funct. I heard that some people talked to him on IRC a few times but I never did.

that's crazy, it really just expands the whole mystery of satoshi

But the FBI also seized falsified identification documents from him (such as driver's license and SSN). Do you still believe that DPR is someone other than Ulbricht?

Prediction: In 2014 or 2015... Satoshi cashes out all of his bitcoins, making him the world's first trillionaire driving the price of BTCs back to single digits

Very interresting video. Hope we will know the real character anytime soon.

Is Satoshi alive? Maybe he is dead, and all this discussion is worthless and all his bitcoins were lost forever.

that's the thing, we will most likely never know

If he is having one million coins, then BTC should reach $1,000,000 mark for him to become a trillionaire. If you ask me whether it is theoretically possible, then I'd say yes.

But the second part, i.e BTC crashing from $1,000,000 to $5. No chance. Not even a slight chance.

and who knows if we ever will?

One day Hollywood will make a movie about Satoshi and the bitcoin story, I guess  ::)

I'm starting to think Satoshi is dead. I mean he is the guardian's 2013 man of the year and he is still hidden? hmmm....

But I understand him. I hope he has still all keys of the first blocks.

He can spend them, after bitcoins are not crazy exponential growing anymore :-)

But maybe he is a group of people or institution, who knows?

I don't know I kinda hope he deleted them....

He could be a we.

And that we could be dedicated to staying anonymous for various reason.

yes very true

thank you very much for you video :)

Well thank you for watching :)

And who are you going to believe, a man that is already known for using falsified documents?

yea there is still a lot up in the clouds in terms of information :/

he must have a lot !!!!

probably satoshi isn't only one guy

We will see in the future... if he make it he can stop it..

becasue idea was All people can mine Bitcoin...
Now only big farm with 3th/s or more ;] KNCminer ... and this is about 50% of all bitcoin ? ( all 21,000,000 ) ?

it is to small for global econony for 8 bilion people that Bitcoin will be "second money"

ThePanCakeKid95 thanks for sharing the useful information with us well everyone has started accumulating up bitcoins as it is the modern currency. By the way how many bitcoins you got in your wallet. I got only 20 yet but planning to get more in January. 

he litearlly owns 1 satoshi.  that's why he called them that. duh

good video like it a lot :)

If you think's that's fun, you should think about all the people who started with bitcoin in 2009 and have lost their wallets over time just how many bitcoins that are out there they will never be re-claimed or re-used again.

For those of us who flatly refuse to install flash on a machine we're trying to keep secure, would you care to post the vid in a non-flash format, or even just type here about why you think they'll never be spent?

Get yourself a firewall! :)

Mathematicians Modus Operant  ;D ( A $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts has been declined by renowned Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. He is famous for solving seemingly impossible mathematical problems and also solved the Poincaré conjecture for which he is being awarded this prize )  Its also reminds me my childhood's bestfriend he is japanese descendant, and he is f*cking good in maths, boy I telling you they follow their passion and their passion no money can buy ... probably Satoshi still more interest about those blood elliptic curves ...  ;D

http://youtu.be/7FnXgprKgSE?t=10m15s  

 8)

I know how many satoshi bitcoin has.

100000000

I'm so glad that even weeks later people are still excited over all of this :)

Thanks for the video, OP.  Interesting stuff..

u better tell who satoshi is =)

lol I wish I knew, I have a few people I've considered based on my own research, that no one has yet said, but morally I believe no one should ever know who he is, so I shall not give ideas :)

Install flash, and just use noscript?