Bitcoin Forum

1) i HAVE REAad in many places that Satoshi owns still around 1 milion of BTC (or even 1,2 milion). Is that a rumour or is it true...?

2) Is the adresses (on blockchain) of these coins known? Can they by tracked? (if he moves them?)

3) Did he move the BTC sometime after his disappearance?

1) There was analysis done on a specific pattern in the nonces in blocks generated by Satoshi. From this the estimate of ~1M coins was made. But it's all on different addresses, so it's impossible to give an exact figure.

2) Yes & yes.

3) The ~1M coins that Satoshi is assumed to have, have not moved since they were first mined.

he could bail out gox if he wanted to and still be a very wealthy man .......lol

Wow, I must say the idea of him trickling in bitcoin slowly and getting pass each day without having a job make me very jealous.

and BOOM - just like that you have clear, simple and correct answers  :)

Now would certainly seem an opportune time for him to make an appearance ;)

oh ya what's his address then if it is on blockchain

As one of the million Goxxed customers I would like to state I in no way expect Satoshi to come rescue us. I did not use Bitcoins as he intended  :'(

I will however promise to use bitcoins as intended if he did happen to rescue us lol  ;D

How was Bitcoin supposed to be used?

The BTC price implication in this is....unthinkable

The answer is in the blockchain! Start from here https://blockchain.info/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048 and move forward. This is the first block, by any mean mined by Satoshi. You can see to which address the 50 newly mined bitcoins went and if they moved or not. Since the blockchain is open to everyone, you can see if those coins move.

that's only for one block what's the address for the million coins he owns?

Nahh :) I do not think Satoshi own 1mBTC but I am sure he have a lot of them :P

And I am sure he is a rich man right now :) drinking a champaign in his office ;P

My understanding of it is as a replacement for the current financial system.

So for me It would mean maybe earning some bitcoins and spending some bitcoins on things i needed/want.

As opposed to what I did which was trade back and forth from btc to euros to btc like a madman.

Edit: My view on it anyway I do hope thats ok with you.

Oh... so its pretty clear, with i dont know, over 70% probability that he reall owns around 1 milion BTC, so this info wasnt rumour...?

Lol thanks for informing me about that. Learning new things everyday!

Hey you asked a stupid question so I dumbed my reply down for you.

Sure, that's only the first block, but you can "easily" guess how many blocks have been mined by himself alone. For several days, if not weeks, he was (or they were) basically mining alone, testing the system, if you calculate 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes for the whole period he was mining alone, you can guess how many bitcoins he has. Has Rannasha said, there were many previous threads on this and based on several technical patterns (including the way his computer was generating nonces to come up with the right hash), the 1 million was estimated.  

ok, to be honest, you should start from this, Block 0, the Genesis Block: https://blockchain.info/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

And what is hilarious is people constantly throw out the SCAM! accusation when developers of other coins premine a few thousand for themselves. I know Satoshi obviously deserves more credit for actually inventing the Bitcoin protocol but it is a bit of a double standard.

What makes you so sure that when he released the code, nobody else started mining as well?

Double standard how?

Satoshi released the code with only one block mined.  That bitcoins in that block are not spendable.

as far as i know ,he could spend the early coins if he wished
some estimate 1-1.5 million coins were mined in the early days that may still be under satoshits contorol...
why he never spent any is anybodys guess .......maybe hes already  rich/dead/forgot his passcodes..etc  ......maybe hes the NSA

The loudest are the most unhappy,  but they do not  make up the majority

Satoshi was an early adopter.  He was not the ONLY early adopter.  When he made the source code public, there was only 1 block mined (the genesis block), and the block reward in the genesis block can not be spent.

It is not Satoshi's fault if you were not an early adopter.  It was not his responsibility to contact you personally and ask you if you wanted to get involved.

So, one person holds 1/21 of the entire coin supply?

If he (or they) has that many, I believe he should; and not bc of the people who are getting cheated (people will always get cheated in one way or another) but for the sake of bitcoin itself.  This is a critical point in bitcoin's life, with over 99% of the public not really understanding it.  they are curious about it but don't want to get burned.  when they see thousands of people lose their bitcoin and money, there will be almost no public adoption of it, and it will get further pummeled by draconian regulations or as one Senator wants, to ban it entirely.    

Sometimes you have to help your child up when he falls and sometimes you have to let him get up by himself if he can.  To me, this is a time to help the 5 year old child up.  

If I were in his shoes I would give it up for several reasons.  One being to save bitcoin.  One being that having 500,000 bitcoin at $10,000 is going to be worth a lot more than 1.2mm bitcoin at $100.  In any event, what is he going to do with all that money?  In a weird way it also helps increase the number of bitcoin holders bc he definitely wouldn't want to dump a big amount on the market.  I still believe there is a decent chance that he (or they) will do this.  Hopefully, something is being planned.  Hell, even Karpeles himself saved some bitcoin owners when mtgox took over some other defunct exchange that had been hacked.

This is obvious, he can spend those coins, but not the coins of the first block.
We can't really know if he has access to these coins now.

Sorry but I just see no difference between someone who pre mines a crapton of coin for a few dollars of electricity versus someone who buys back their own creation for a few dollars within days or weeks as well. Either way it is a massive amount of speculative wealth obtained at an insanely cheap price by those on the inside. And don't get me wrong i'm not begrudging Satoshi, nor do I begrudge any other coin developer who wishes to profit off their own creation, I just think it is unfair how a lot of developers are attacked, if you don't like the way the game is played, don't buy or mine in, it is as simple as that. Face it, at the end of the day most of us are here to make money, and i'd rather the creator of a coin get rich v.s the early miners with expensive equipment who mine the hell out of a coin and then dump it en masse and move on to the next coin leaving all the late bloomers without big pockets holding the bag.

Why should Satoshi bail out MtGox, unless he is the owner of MtGox?
Some people claim that Satoshi = Mark Karpeles... who knows?

???

You don't seem to have any understanding of what you are talking about.  You just spew out nonsense based on your own imagination rather than paying attention to the facts.

Satoshi did not "pre mine a crapton of coin".

Sathosi did not "buys back their own creation for a few dollars within days or weeks".

Stop spouting silly nonsense.  You make yourself look foolish.

Satoshi MINED a million coins at a very low difficulty rate and spent very little money to acquire those.

What I am trying to say is what difference is there of a developer premining a few thousand coins for himself in a few days versus Satoshi mining tens, if not hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks when only he and a few dozen other people even knew what Bitcoin was? Either way it is still the developer taking advantage of knowing his own creation in advance before the general public catches on.

Satoshi took very little risk to acquire all those coins, did he go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and run up seveal thousands of dollars in electric bills like the later guys? No.

You seem to talk in philosophy, I am talking in dollars and cents. Either way it is the creator of a coin gaining future obscene speculative wealth for what was a very small investment.

I lol'd.  Satoshi's genius would never have allowed Mt. Gox's accounting issues to happen.

This subject again............
It doesn't matter that he owns 1M coins, because he cannot spend even a small amount of them without revealing his identity in some fashion. He clearly wants to remain anonymous.

I personally think he's(if a single person) is dead or hiding in plain site with no public ties to bitcoin or they(if a group) agreed the destroy the private keys for the coins they mined in 2009. I also believe he was already well off and wouldn't want to sell them for fiat anyway.

I personally love the mystery of it all, you have to realize how many enemies he would have, because bitcoin can potentially be very disruptive to many established oligarchs. Comparing Satoshi to these copycat developers is a non-starter.. they were motivated by different factors.

And you could too if you wanted to.  It was publicly released.


What difference?  One way allows a developer to stockpile a bunch of bitcoins before anybody else has a fair chance at participating.  The other way equally allows everyone the exact same opportunity.


No.  One is a developer helping to support their creation without any knowledge about whether it will catch on or not.  The other is a developer locking anybody out of participating while they run a printing press for themselves for a while.


The coins were worthless at the time.  They were imaginary internet points.  If you look at the ratio of value spent vs. value received at the time of the mining, he was spending WAY too much money.  The later guys are getting actual value received for the value they are spending.  If they are doing it right, they are getting more value received than what they spent.


Except that one leads to a trustworthy system of exchange, and the other is a pump&dump coin of the day.

Yes but let's be realistic, if I invent a magic slot machine that pumps out money, and place it in the middle of the desert and send out a few forum posts and a PDF that explains what it does and where it is while I sit and play it all day, I am still going to have a huge advantage being the creator of it because odds are it is going to be a long while until the general public finds out about it or accepts the premise.

The evidence is in the massive amount of coins he owns himself, logically if "everyone" had "fair" access to Bitcoin at the beginning, shouldn't there be a few other people who have a million coins themselves that started at the same time as him? No, because Satoshi mined the hell out of it at the beginning when it was mostly unknown until the difficulty rose so high that NO ONE could ever hope to mine as many coins as he could in their lifetime being the sole initial creator and miner.

The "fair" thing would have been for difficulty to have been set at a higher bar at the very beginning, 1 person being able to mine 1/21th of any coin is sort of against the spirit of what Bitcoin intended to go out and achieve. There is not one person in the fiat world who even owns CLOSE to 1/21th of the whole world's wealth or a single major currency!

The "satoshi premine" theory bugs me. When Bitcoin first started, the difficulty stayed at 1 for 11 months (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png) because nobody was interested in mining it.

I think I recall reading about it on Slashdot in 2009 2010 (http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/bitcoin-releases-version-03). I thought it was a neat idea, but that it would never take off. One year later, Bitcoin is worth actual money (http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/online-only-currency-bitcoin-reaches-dollar-parity). Suddenly, I can't CPU mine anymore.

Fantastic logic.

This situation is comparable to me moving my business to the middle of a desert, releasing a new physical product and starting to reap the rewards for myself immediately.

I released the product to the public so what gives? Ain't nobody out in the middle of a desert is what it is...

When Bitcoin was released to the public, how many people knew about it?

Owner of Mt. Gox is NOT the founder of it. Jed Mccaleb is and he may be one member of the group Satoshi Nakamoto.

Not based on facts but on common sense: I guess that years of study that led to creating a world changing protocol, can't be defined as a "very small investment". 

I hope Satoshi Nakamoto come to here and can give explanation about that :D

I have a hard time thinking of that as being "realistic".


Anyway, what are you going to do in five years when people complain how it is not fair that you are an early adopter of PMC, BTC, MAX, VTC, DOGE, and DRK, and that you were able to buy those coins at a cheap price or mine them at a low difficulty? Are you going to be a hypocrite?


First, early adopters wrote all of the software and created all of the infrastructure that you are taking advantage of right now. What have you contributed? Have some respect and show some appreciation for goodness sake!

Second, you seem to forget that the early adopters spent/risked a lot of time and money on something that was worthless at the time. How much time and money would you spend to obtain two pizza's worth of BTC? I guess if you make minimum wage, you might spend a few hours. Laszlo Hanyecz spent a lot more than that 4 years ago.