Bitcoin Forum

In a hypothetical situation, if satoshi ever comes back, does he has the power to kill crypotcurrency?

What can he do to make bitcoin valueless? What if he comes back and spread some ugly news about bitcoin? What if he comes back and sell all his bitcoins away? What if he comes back and say xxxcoin is the way to go? What is going to happen to bitcoin?

If satoshi is nsa or some scamming group, can he/they potentially use this power to control or destroy the whole world once bitcoin is accepted into the mainstream? If thats the case, all the mining gears, stock exchanges and all industry that builds around bitcoin will disappear in a day.

What if satoshi is a sadist or has emotional problems? are we all too naive to follow the tail of an anonymous person?

will that day every come?

No. Everything is open source.

Don't worry CIA Gavin is already sabotaging and will kill it when his masters give him the command

Code wise, bitcoin has grown beyond the control of any one person now.  However, Satoshi does own close to 1,000,000 bitcoins.  If he sold them all at one time, it would likely seriously depress the market price of bitcoins.  I think that's about the only serious negative thing he could do, and I can't imagine why he'd want to really, as I'm sure he wants his bitcoins to be worth as much as possible, just like most everyone else does.

Give me proof that Satoshi is even alive. What if I claim that he died of drug overdose in 2012?  ;D

From SilkRoad ?  :P

He could severely disrupt the market price if he chose to dump all his coins all at once. How long it takes to recover is another question. Hopefully we'll never find out.

Very little that he could do.  He could try and disrupt his own chain with his own coins by moving the market, or some kind of paid vandalism (e.g. buying up 51% of asics world supply)

All he has is the alert codes, but Gavin could change them if they were abused.

But that would be kind of foolish.  He's on his way to becoming the richest person in the world in 1-2 years if momentum continues.  You would suspect that he'd be incentivized for the project to be successful then.

I suspect he's probably working on something.  He may be with us under a new pseudonym of course.

lol ... give me proof he's even HUMAN! :D

Let's be completely honest here. If he did drop all of his coins all at once on mt.gox the price would just go back to about 75% of what it was before the dump. Why? Because of every single person who wishes to have more bitcoins. I can already hear the pants of thousands ripping apart because of the massive boner they'd get at the sight of 0.01$ / btc.

You know you'd grab some.

Haha. I wonder what amount of coins it would take to have a catastrophic effect on the price.

Pictures or GTFO. Again with the unsupported accusations. Effen trollwad.

edit: spelling

NO
Nothing. News like?. We will buy all of them. We will call him insane:). Nothing.

If satoshi is nsa or some scamming group, can he/they potentially use this power to control or destroy the whole world once bitcoin is accepted into the mainstream? If thats the case, all the mining gears, stock exchanges and all industry that builds around bitcoin will disappear in a day.

What if satoshi is a sadist or has emotional problems? are we all too naive to follow the tail of an anonymous person?

will that day every come?

NO

If Bitcoin is ultimately successful, Satoshi Nakamoto will go down in history as being one of the most brilliant minds of our century, and will be studied in history classes for generations to come.  *not to mention the wealthiest person to ever live*  To think he would intentionally or deliberately do anything to negatively affect Bitcoin is a vast stretch of the imagination.  There are many things that could destroy Bitcoin, but Satoshi Nakamoto isn't one of them. 

This

What would stop Satoshi from launching a 51% attack?
I'd say yes he does have kill switch capability but I don't think he's interested in using it at this time.

wat

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I've heard he tried to get the miners for that 51% attack from BFL , so we're safe for a few decades.

Killswitch engage. Satoshi destroyed any chance of destroying Bitcoin the moment they disappeared; The project diversified the moment they left. You should check out this video, notice what happens when they fade away, their job was done, it was time to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg4mCKB3RVs

Too many people are in it already. He has a large portion but not large enough!

If the amounts of coins he owns would be a threat then we might really have a problem.
Fortunately , you can't kill Bitcoin buy owning 1 million coins.

What will alert key do?

Ha! - Nice. :)

Just as the name implies, it can send alerts to the reference client.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alerts

exposed is very hard to erase. If bitcoin is not open sourced, then able to do easily.

To kill, Governmental policy may do, people will try to bar this.

Satoshi can drop the price of bitcoin to zero if he decides to sell his massive stack. Other than that you are not following anyone except yourself with bitcoins.

Even he won't be able to drop it to 0.
There are enough orders on gox alone to buy all his coins at 1$ :).

Hey what if they sold their coins for litecoin? That could give a hell of a ticker boost to another currency.

Don't forget buying orders, the price will drop to something FAR above $1

And once he sold them, almost all coins are in circulation. He can only pull of that stunt once. That removes a large uncertainty so it may bounce back higher.

Not to zero. May be to $300-400 levels. 1 million BTC is approx. the volume of all Bitcoin exchanges in a 72-hour time period.

I mean if he comes back and make an announcement like "I've made a mistake in the past and believe that xxxcoin is actually the way to go, therefore I was immersed in this new coin for the past few years and this coin has now matured". What would you do? Are you going to ignore him and keep investing in bitcoin?

Don't you think this announcement will cause massive panic in bitcoin value? If he ever comes back, everything that he says or do will be big news and can shift investments, unless we can prove that he is a lunatic.

First he will have to prove that he is the "real" Satoshi. Not going to be easy. And he will have to face hundreds of thousands of Bitcoiners, who have put a lot of investment in to BTC. Not going to be easy either.

Noo. He doesn't need to prove anything.

If his announcement is signed with this PGP key it's him. No doubt, no proof necessary.
If its not signed with his key, it's not him. Easy game.

If they did come out, they would rally the community without a doubt... hopefully :)  Whatever project they started would grow exponencially they wouldn't even have to do anything just discuss. I read a lot of the original posts and I have to say they focused on team building, technical craft, etc, It's unlikely they would come back and strip a project that they built, It's software it can only get better with time and effort.

But if they did wow, it could be tough they could easily build a new coin or take the current project in a completely different direction, possibly changing the balance of what the community has been building for years, There would be a lot of unhappy people, and things change when you have a real concrete person or group with their own vision... I think it would hinder the project, another bottleneck, a centralization to the community, but I'm hoping if they do come back that they are community builders, encouraging the innovation brought forth by the community. There is simply too many unknowns out there for a single person to think that they know everything... that's how you end up with dying communities, monolithinc organizations unable to cope with change, soon to be forgotten. Id rather the Cryptocurrency community not get stale, I really like all the ideas that people bring forward, good and bad, annonymizing and open, scammy and legit, they all give us pause to think of how we can make things better.

I doubt he/she/they would come back.

For one thing they would be JFK'd by the bankers.

if satoshi is a real person and people who knows him can vote for him, then it will give a lot more confidence in bitcoin.

Imagine linux is created and maintained by some unknown person/group, do you think it will be as widely used as today? Imagine nobody knows linus and his personality...

being anonymous can be good or bad.

I don't think that bankers could care less about satoshi. It's to late now.
Criminals on the other hand might actually care for his stack of bitcoins  :P

The Batman creed... They wear a mask to protect the people they love, Alone they'd face hell head on if it was not for them.

Why would Satoshi be a threat to them? He was just the creator, not the operator or in charge.

why should he do it? he probably does not need that kind of money...

Maybe he forgot his password. Probably why the coins have never moved :D.

If he is ideologically motivated..... then may be...


If that's the case, then even less BTCs are in circulation and the value of BTC increases further!

Satoshi has the same capabilities than anyone else in launching a 51% attack. Being Satoshi doesn't give you any advantage over this.

I think the main question now is if China can kill bitcoin ...  :-X

He would not be able to kill Bitcoin, No.

probably only united nations can kill bitcoin.

YES.

Let's say he comes back and says

"Okay guys, we're upgrading to Bitcoin 2.0.

This new digital currency has worked out all the bugs found in Bitcoin and is infinitely more efficient and has all these new features not seen in currency before.

Time to upgrade!"

Then everyone will switch over.

DUHHHHHHHHHHH

By your reasoning , if Bill Gates launches a new operating system , you really think everybody will switch to "Doors 8"?
More likely people will start arguing about the new features and about why he had come back and promote this.
Lots will see cia and nsa involvement with his re appearance.

Nope , he dint created it but he found it so theres no way for him to kill bitcoin

Probably be a good idea if the coins never get spent or our put into circulation. Dumping those coins all at once could put Bitcoin back to where it started from, but maybe people might see that as fair for everyone else, not so much people who have paid a lot of money for the coins though ahaha

YES. If Bill Gates comes back and says

"Okay look guys I just came up with the ultimate operating system ever made

EVER

It is 99999999x better than Linux and Mac OS X Combined

It is 999999% fully customizeable

Plus no matter what computer you install it on, even on a VHS, it will be faster than the fastest supercomputer today"

Then YES everyone will switch to that DUH

Too bad we can't have a bet on this.
You give both Bill Gates and Satoshi way too much power.

There are lots of example in the past of failed attempts to reinvent.

Name a few examples of failed reinvention you can think of that aren't the following:
-Qwerty keyboard
That's all I can think of that was a failed reinvention adoption

If you want to be more specific, both the Bill Gates and Satoshi Nakamoto update scenarios involve the creators vanishing and then returning. If you can provide a few examples like that where a vanished creator comes back and fails to convince people to convert then you win.

i truly believe that satoshi will have a lot of weight in what he says if he comes back. people will trust him. I think every word he says can cause sadness or happiness in exchange market.

I'd be on the contrary. I'd be suspscious of why he's suddenly come back. It would be interesting to hear his reasons for doing so.

A few failed Apple products? Here's some: http://www.oobject.com/category/12-failed-apple-products/

Satoshi could change the price by quite a lot by selling all his Bitcoins, but that wouldn't "kill" it, that would just temporarily make the price drop.

You have got to be trolling me  :D

Kill switch capability indeed. How have you made so many posts and still are unable to... No, its definitely troll. Fool me once. Shame. Shame on me...

Who is the other dude in the begging working with satoshi?

He could drop the price down massively if he dumped all his coins at once.

If he starts selling all of his 980.000 BTC, the price of Bitcoin would drop below 1 USD, he might not have the power to kill Bitcoin entirely, but he definitely has power to make people who hold Bitcoin lose a lot of money. FBI, by the way, also hold around 27.000 BTC seazed from Silkroad, that they said they will liquidate when legal proceedings are over. So expect a price drop when Ulbricht's trial is over.

When does his trial start? I wonder if they'll dump them or sell 'em slowly?

Fact: Irl satoshi is an al paca that shoots lasers out of his eyes.