Bitcoin Forum

Hi Bitcoiners! i heard that Satoshi Nakamoto has more than 1M Bitcoins, and i became really curious to see the wallet with all those bitcoins! so i did some research and i couldn't find any info on which are the wallet adresses that hold such bitcoins, in fact i found out that the most bitcoins held in a wallet right now is about 300k bitcoins held by the FBI or some shit... so i would like to ask the community where is the address that holds such amount of bitcoins and what info we've got about what satoshi did with his coins, did he sold them? does he still have them? where are they? thanks for your help!
Love from Colombia <3

its spread out amungst many thousands of addresses
pretty much the first 144 blocks on day one of bitcoin  95% sure that majority of them coins (7200coins spread over 144 addresses) are satoshis.
yes each block  different address of about 50 btc each 144 blocks each day adds upto to thousands of addresses

in the first couple weeks id say 90% are satoshi's. the first month 40% are satoshis first couple months 20% are satoshis
by the end of the first year under 5% are satoshi's but all of those addresses thousands of addresses have ~50 btc on them each.

They 100% for sure aren't all in one wallet and nobody knows which coins are his. It's something you can speculate on but there will never be a solid answer. I honestly think the 1Million is a made up number based on nothing.

a few studies on the patterns of the extranonce have seen maybe under 1mill coins are his as oppose to over 1mill coins

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=507458.0

eg
https://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/all-t1000-5.gif
black dots(blocks) that form a patterened line (probably satoshi)
red dots that form lines of different clants/lengths are lots of different people

also worth noting in the first 4 years (10.5mcoins produced) more than 10 people were mining.. way way more than 10 people.
plus ssatoshi disapeared within this firs 2 years. so mathematically over 1mill coins being just satoshis is a stretch

but the question is where are those coins now?

i am very curious to know what exactly did you search for, that you missed all the miners with LOTS of bitcoin, all these services, exchanges, web wallets that have huge amounts of bitcoin and instead found a wallet belonging to FBI containing 300K. and can you share that wallet with us too.

looking forward to seeing this wallet...

lots of addresses

ok. here goes go to
https://blockchain.info/block-height/1
click the hash
and you will see
No Inputs (Newly Generated Coins) ->
if the address after -> has an (unspent).. then its still on that address..

then
go to
https://blockchain.info/block-height/2
click the hash
and you will see
No Inputs (Newly Generated Coins) ->
if the address after -> has an (unspent).. then its still on that address..

repeat that by changing the block-height
there will be upto 52000 blocks you can manually go through that could be his

like i and others said. the coins are spread out over THOUSANDS of addresses

Is this specific wallet that which was confiscated from Burt W. I know Burt's around here, but I'm sure he's not likely to read this specific thread.


These coins are still in the wallet!  ;)

There are threads about the first wallet created and early transactions...these have to be owned by Satoshi. Anyone know the threads specifically?

In my opinion to found the bitcoin adress with most bulk bitcoin hold in the blockchain​ network is very hard to find and if we will use a super computer then probably it will take time about 5-6 ( avrage) years , so here it will be more better to say the it is impossible to find out .
Secondly , Mr satoshi himself is the owner of the bitcoin network , so surely he will use best technology to store his bitcoin like cold storage , so that no one can see the transaction or no one can track them.for his bitcoin that he holds in his wallet .

Why would the FBI confiscate Burt's coins,was he involved in illegal activities to take away all his coins.
So in hind sight all the talks about millions of coins that satoshi is holding is just speculation,some of the earlier wallets do have 50 bitcoins but that does not mean that he is still holding those coins nor does he have the private keys to those.

Why do you want to know? It is none of your damn business.

Are you planning on stealing them?

? ? ? i really like bitcoin and i like learning about its past and i am really curious to know if satoshi still has them or he ended up selling them when they were 5$ because if i was him i would have been really tempted to sell 1M btc at 10 or 5 dollars it would have been a tough decision to make

that is exactly why you are not him!
because making bitcoin was about making "bitcoin" not earning money from it. unlike altcoin developers these days who claim to be starting a new cryptocurrency for the world but instead they use methods like premine and ICO to make money from the project.

and FYI we will probably never find any answers for any of the questions you ask because Satoshi is either dead or chose to stay anonymous and it will stay that way.

p.s. don't miss my question above!

They're in an account that he owns or used to own, however the address has not had any outgoing transactions for years if I remember correctly. It would be relatively fair to assume that he's not going to use them and they are essentially burned, otherwise SN is essentially a billionaire. And he might be waiting to sell them off onto the market, but he hasn't made any contact or communications in any way for a long period of time so it's just a random guess at this point.

That is just the thing, back in those days most of the transactions being done, were only experimental and you could not really buy something with it at the time. I think Lazlo's Pizza's was the actual first transaction where the general public realized that you can buy something with it. < there might be others, but it is not that well known >

His coins has not shown any transactions, where it went from one Bitcoin address to another, but we know he tested it with Finney. ^smile^

As the main founder of the bitcoin community and network it self its not that shocking if he holds a million bitcoins or even 2million or more than,i known some altcoins owner which owns their own coin for about a 5 miliion or more.Thats no different

I don't think he got an opportunity to sell his holding because if he had sold them in early stages than market could have crashed long time ago. 1 million+ coins are so much that if anybody sell them in one shot at current market, it will trigger a series of crash that won't be good for bitcoin.

And satoshi don't like to crash bitcoin economy due to his greed.

It's not really possible to see all of the wallets that he used because he has probbaly used many addresses independently so there is pretty much no way that someone can track all of these addresses down.

And also, it is hard to confirm exactly whether or not a wallet belongs to satoshi, or just some other random dude who has adopted bitcoin from an early stage. 1 million bitcoins is only an estimate, it is by no means a figure that you should take 100%.

But welcome to the bitcointalk community, hopefully you can learn a lot about bitcoin here.

I don`t think that anyone other than the real Satoshi can answer your questions.
If the real Satoshi is hiding from the authorities,maybe he must have sold his bitcoins for fiat a long time ago.
I don`t know.This is just a suggestion.

There are many different logical possibilities, but the most obvious ones are these, to me:

A) Satoshi is a person
- he's dead and his heirs didn't know who he was
- he believes in bitcoin taking over the world's economy ; then it would be silly to sell his coins for a billion, when he can get a trillion and be "master of the world"
- he would have liked to sell them, but he doesn't know how to do so without giving up his anonymity: for sure, the exchange on which he sells the coins will know who he is, or to what bank account he withdraws.  He was already pretty paranoid in the old days.
- he didn't bother to keep the private keys ( <-- cannot believe this)
- he never had the keys himself, because he was working for someone.

B) this last point brings us to: Satoshi is an organisation.  In fact, the points are similar
- the association doesn't exist any more (for instance, the keys were in escrow, and the different signees don't agree to get together any more/are dead/are in prison /....)
- they are waiting for bitcoin to take over the world economy at which point they own a big part of it and will be the rulers of the world
- they don't know how to cash out without getting caught/found out
- on purpose, they didn't keep the keys, because they wanted to establish a system that would modify the economy/finance
- they were a group, doing this in command of a higher entity (a state, a rich family, a terrorist organisation, ...)

I have read somewhere in this forum that Satoshi is having around BTC980,000 in all of his wallets, which is worth some $1.4 billion as per today's exchange rates. But two important questions remains unanswered.

1. Is Satoshi Nakamoto alive?
2. If he is alive, then is he in the possession of the private keys to all of these wallets?

you need to look at all the new address that were generated between late 2009 and late 2010, the majority are made from satoshi, but i doubt he had 1M coins

the block reward was 50 and the diff was 1, 144 blocks per day, so only 7200 coins, basically he need to mine for more than 4 months alone to have 1M

Even if you happen to get the address as you are looking for it, what will you use it for? You can't neither access it, neither can you convert it to yours. So in my opinion its a fruitless journey. Aside that, how do you expect someone as smart as Satoshi to actually have that amount and keep it in one location where it can be found easily like you have been researching, it means the authority would have gotten hold of him since time immemorial.

It is possible, because there were hardly any others mining for long-term in 2009. A total of 2,625,000 coins were mined in 2009. It is not unfair to expect Satoshi to have mined some 35% to 40% of all these coins.

satoshi i think is alive though. he just want to live life privately.

hei may have purposely forget all the logins of these wallet addresses as its like burning these coins. but it leaves a hacker a chance to solve a puzzle for a fortune. its almost impossible to hack those address but if someone can, coins are all his.

Greed? seriously? put your head in a toilet and stay there.

I would rule out B) in it's entirety. It's simply impossible that an organization remains coordinated enough that after 8 years there isn't a single leak of who or what satoshi was, and none of the members of the organization have moved a single coin.

My take is that A) satoshi was a single entity, and this entity either died or somehow lost his coins. Even if he believed in his creating 100% and knew BTC was going to be worth $1,000,000 each in 10 years, he would be too tempted to cash out some of them just in case. So unless he was already a multimillionaire and didn't care, it doesn't make much sense.

So either dead, or lost keys for me.

yeah it seems really strange he hasn't moved moved any coin since he started mining them... it makes me sad just to think that he lost the keys to all of those coins, imagine what he would be feeling today if he's alive...

(I started this post because i am really fascinated with bitcoins and i would like to learn a little more about satoshi not because i intend to steal them .-. satoshi deserves each one of the coins he mined)

Where have you been for almost a year? don't you know things like that?
I bet Satoshi is Jihan Wu imagine that.
He owns nothing in the code or in the network, he can't change anything even if he wanted to.
Satoshi has never spent any Bitcoins unless I missed that information.
After the first transaction made by him immediately all the hackers or and government agencies will start to track and locate him physically.

There is no best technology to say that someone could use and others can't, everything is open sourced and it's just a simple Bitcoin address.
There are currently some people trying to crack his addresses by collision tests to find private keys for addresses which hold coins.
It will not take 5-6 years to find those addresses but only a few seconds searching in blockchain explorers.

When he ever gets released from Area 51, he will use these coins to buy Australia  8)

where does this 1 million figure come from? i'm sure there are some other early miners who've never come out of the wood work.

Yeah, I highly doubt he has this high a portion of all the Bitcoins that are and will be in existence at any given moment. I think investors would shy away from Bitcoin as they'd think that Satoshi could just crash the market at any moment if he was to reveal his identity and to sell all of / a majority of his bitcoins (As we know ALL wouldn't sell at once) at one time. I'm not going to say he doesn't have a lot of Bitcoin, as he probably has a good amount but NOTHING THAT HIGH.


Plus, after all this time do you really think he kept track of all of this? It'd be a bit insane to suspect someone would keep track of all the private keys for these addys.

I wasn't giving my personal opinion, but rather all the logically not totally implausible possibilities, from which we can then try to eliminate branches that are too much in disagreement with what is factually known.  I'm not entirely excluding "organization" however, because this may indeed be an explanation why the coins never moved: no single entity HAS the keys.  I agree with you that it cannot be a LARGE entity.  But 5 people or so, why not ?  5 people that are sworn together to become the rulers of the world and have the means to kill one another if ever someone fails ?   After all, how big is something like the Equation group ?  (I'm not suggesting they are the same, but of similar constitution).

That said, there is indeed no need for this to be a group: the work and the quality of the work are perfectly "deliverable" by a single relatively smart and competent person after all.

I'm also not entirely convinced of the idea that they will never move.  After all, you don't do all that work if you think it is shit, and will go nowhere.  You don't break your head to have cryptographic protection for centuries, if you think it will be forgotten 10 years from now.  As this stuff is perfectly designed to be a speculative asset with a price that "goes moon", and you think that this thing will take 20-30 years to go mainstream, why on earth would you expose yourself to being tracked earlier, if you can be the master of the world 10-20 years later ?  If you bet a coin will be of the order of a few million $ of today's worth, why on earth would you cash out on a measly exchange when it is thousand times below its value, and you expose your identity when it is not yet powerful enough to keep it safe at that moment.

I do not exclude that bitcoin is one of the biggest financial hold-ups in history, or at least, an attempt to it.  In fact, the potential to financial hold up is larger than anything that has ever been achieved by armies and politics: no single person has ever held 5% or more of the total financial system.  If the delusional dream of bitcoin comes true, namely, replacing the financial system, we have an entity that has more than 5% of the total system in hands and is entirely unknown.  Personally, I don't believe in it overtaking the financial system, but that was clearly not the PoV of the creator of the system.  So it looks to me like a perfectly logical explanation of why none of these coins have moved: they are waiting to rule the world.

It is this last potential aspect that makes me think rather of a group.  Why would an individual be interested in "ruling the world 20-30 years from now" ?  You can be dead.  You will be old (unless you are very young when you made it).  What's the point ?  However, an organisation with some "destiny", that's something else.  This is why I don't exclude the possibility of it being a group, even though the communications by Satoshi really sound like if he was just a dude in his basement.

not sure, according to this http://historyofbitcoin.org/ Hal was minign with satoshi very early, so you have already a competitor with satoshi

basically for all the 2009 there at least two mining, but no sign of other mining, if they really mined for an entire year before other joined then yes, he mined much mroe than 1M even accounting Hal there

i have a lot to know about how much is deposite.i think if he is created btc so he has so many btc.

within a couple weeks of genesis there were atleast 5 people mining.

within 6 months a couple dozen atleast.
figures get more murkier after that.

yep even theymos was around early on (using sirius-m username)

if you want proof others were working on bitcoin in january 2009
Nicholas Bohm- http://satoshinakamoto.me/2009/01/25/re-bitcoin-list-problems/
hal finney - http://satoshinakamoto.me/2009/01/25/re-bitcoin-v0-1-released-2/

theres other names too. should anyone want to research it.
google is your friend

There's the risk of the quantum attack on old addresses that never moved, as pointed by theymos which proposed getting rid of those coins, which I think it's insane even if it sucks that the government may steal satoshi's coins in the future (or whoever is first able to crack those). Well, good for them, it will just mean they are bigger investors in bitcoin. Whoever is paying attention and cares will have their bitcoin safe against any cryptographic attacks. There will always be people taking care of the development of bitcoin so we will always have it protected and up to date against any exploits. You can trust bitcoin more than banks getting cracked.

A quantum attack on a hash is not very easy, compared to a quantum attack on public key crypto (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, or EC style).  A quantum attack on a hashed value still takes 2^(n/2) quantum iterations (so 2^80 for one single address).  As a quantum computer is a very delicate *analogue* machine, there's no reason to think that 2^80 iterations on a quantum machine will be faster than 2^80 iterations on a classical cluster (on the contrary).

On the other hand, a quantum attack on a public key takes about 3n iterations, so all elliptic curve, or factoring stuff is essentially dead.

There's a way, way way bigger risk for addresses that don't move: a soft fork fading them out.  In fact, if segwit were activated, and later, one would decide that non-segwit addresses are invalid beyond block NN, Satoshi would have no choice but to move them, or lose them.
I fact, that's one of the reasons to be favourable for segwit: that this Satoshi's stash burden is finally cleared out.  There's a still bigger risk, of course: that is that bitcoin goes like black tulips.  The cryptographic issues with bitcoin are not on the top list of its potential failures.

put simply
sha is a very binary heavy puzzle
ECDSA if very vector heavy puzzle

quantum computers can play with vectors easily compared to binary.
trying to solve a binary puzzle with a non binary method and then have the result back in binary is not as efficient use of quantum.

some have estimated that solving a binary logic problem with quantum results in only a 2x efficiency. where as a vector logic problem can be something like 256x efficient

Satoshi Nakamoto is very sensitive and is also vigilant thus he want to be secured always. He is not keeping all of his coins in one wallet to protect it from hackers and invaders that may come and get it. Aside from that to keep his identity hidden he kept bitcoin in multiple wallets to avoid being monitored and traced by people. Satoshi is wise and he is spending his bitcoins right now and enjoying the profits.

Hmm, it could have happened. for there are some scientists who do not want to be famous but they have a soul that is very good in helping emerging problems in the world, one of them is satoshi. Maybe he just was a scientists or smart people who simply want to provide assistance without the need to be known. But do not close the possibility that satoshi just want to hide away from the media in order not happen something that threatens his own self or family
 

Hahahah, did you really expect him to store thousands of bitcoins in one wallet? This never happens. The best way to keep them secure is to split the total amount into smaller pieces so multiple wallets are needed.

What if satoshi did like this, what if satoshi done that...

If you want to find out satoshi's identity, ask the core devs. Find the bitcointalk.org domain's owner and ask him. Nobody can stay as a ghost after creating a billion dollar company.

Either his account were being used by numerous people (core devs), or his identity is being protected the secret service. There is simply not a third option.

"He is dead that's why he is not showing up." > bullshit

Maybe you can see it that way, but essentially, what kills discrete log and factoring problems with a quantum machine is Shor's algorithm, which is nothing else but a fancy version of a Fourier analysis, and the fact that a quantum computer can do a Fourier-like transformation (using the public key) in about 3 n steps on a *quantum state*, which is the superposition of all possible initial states (potential secret keys).  As the mathematical properties are such that only the right secret key gives rise to a peak in the Fourier spectrum, and all the others smear out in about uniform noise, the right secret key stands out immediately.

It is the "simple" mathematical property of exponentiation, or of factorisation, which makes this nice Fourier-transformation-like thing happening.  With arbitrary binary jiggling, such as in AES-256 or SHA-2 or the likes, there's no such simple mathematical property.  As such, the best one can do is to do "reverse searching" with a quantum state being the superposition of all possible keys.  However, the provable best general algorithm that exists is Grover's, which needs 2^(N/2) steps on the quantum machine.
Symmetric crypto is hence much more robust against quantum machines than asymmetric crypto based upon factorisation or discrete logs.

Good point, didn't think about it. Segwit could get rid of satoshi's coins finally. I hate this constant fear of waking up to "fuck! satoshi just moved 100 million dollars worth of BTC!! SELL SELL SELL!!"

So we are going to get segwit, all the great features that segwit deliver, and we get rid of the satoshi coins.

There's also the argument of it not being fair because BTC should be able to protect your coins forever even if you don't move them, but we have to face reality here. His coins will get hacked eventually.

in any case; If you don't move your BTC for 8 years you either don't give a fuck about them, you lost them or you are dead.

Someone would have to be pretty damn clever to invent bitcoin.  Seems like they'd be clever enough to anticipate that mining a lot of coins undercover, to sell later covertly, would be the prudent thing to do.  



Ironically, trying to fork out Satoshi's coins might be the only thing that would get him to move them.

Assume if you have a 100k BTC, you will store it in one wallet and let the world know that you exist?? I dont think the creator of Bitcoin is that stupid. ::)

As many of the forum members said, it is divided into small amounts and stored in lots of addresses.

This is also most probably why segwit will not happen on bitcoin as long as it is the leading crypto.

The reason is the following: bitcoin's value is bitcoin's belief in eternity.  If any action on it can "wipe out Satoshi's stash", then this proves that whatever mechanism that is, it can change in principle anything (which is true, but which is against bitcoin's eternity belief).  It could change the Holy 21 million coins, it could erase Donald Trump's addresses, it could create a million new coins in the hands of the Chinese government from scratch...  All those invested heavily in bitcoin's belief system will resist such a thing.

Ironically, ethereum got rid of that sanctity, by doing a vulgar hard fork to get the money of the DAO back in the hands of its favorite speculators. So nobody has any sacred belief in the immutability and the eternity of ethereum: it has no principles left.  And as such, it can move on.  Bitcoin, however, has this sacred belief system that your coins will still be there 400 years from now and your great-grand children will be billionaires.  If anything could wipe out Holy Satoshi's coins, that's a blasphemy that is unheard of.  So anything that even comes close to potentially do that, will be resisted with all the forces of heaven and earth.

Well, who is resisting that change? Only Jihan Wu and a couple other actors. Everyone else is pretty much on board about it.

The 21 million limit is a very different thing compared to what we are talking about. Nobody supports that. Satoshi's coins are going to get hacked sooner or later, they are a burden. I would like to find a solution to that, but it's either waiting for the coins to get hacked or solving it while deploying a much needed update.

We need segwit. Bitcoin will need to keep getting updates as new treats are found, nothing is eternal, you can't sit back and expect BTC to function as it is for 1000 years, that is idealistic nonsense, except 21 million limit because I don't think that will get enough consensus to get changed ever.

If you don't check if bitcoin has had any updates for 10 years and you have money invested in bitcoin you are dead.

Well, if "a few guys" can stop the whole network from doing what "everyone else wants", then the claim of decentralization is long out of the window, no ?  So there are only two possible conclusions from that:
1) bitcoin is totally centralized in the hands of these few guys
2) bitcoin IS decentralized, and contrary to what you think there is no consensus on the change - maybe partially BECAUSE one could consider that if it even were possible to force people to transact or abandon, bitcoin is not the secure vault "for eternity" it claims to be.


Nevertheless, that is bitcoin's biggest stupidity (even though it is its biggest propaganda factor).  It is what makes that crypto didn't turn into e-cash, and won't.


If ever they get hacked, then no bitcoin address is safe (unless you mean, they are going to find his USB key with the secret keys on it).
Each of his coins are in a 50 BTC containing address, and if ever one can crack most of them, it means that one can crack just any address on the chain.  But they are cryptographically really quite safe.  In fact, they are safer than if he has to move them.



Well, the point is that if you can change *anything* (and if "just a few guys can change just anything") it means that, say, the Chinese government can change that too, and that change could be that your coins are declared non-existing, that they decide to print more bitcoin for themselves, or whatever.  

If you can change something as drastically that Satoshi needs to transact or lose his coins, it means that bitcoin is not that sacred vault of value it pretended to be ; and if "a few guys can decide on change" it means that any powerful structure can change ANYTHING.


Well, bitcoin's "gold" was supposed to be secure for centuries.  If your vault is confiscated after 10 years, even a Swiss bank is better.

You see, we are touching on the very foundations of the belief system of bitcoin.  It was supposed to be eternal, cryptographically totally secure for centuries, and the bitcoin that were yours, were yours FOR EVER as long as YOU kept your wallet.  You could leave your wallet to your great-grand children, like you could have burried a gold tresury on an island in the Pacific, and leave a secret map to them.

Now, it turns out that people can just change things, and confiscate or declare invalid your holdings after 10 years or so.  That's a show stopper.

As long as bitcoin is the reserve crypto/digital gold im good. The concept of e-cash is as in a stable currency is stupid since it would need to be manually adjusted, so it wouldn't be a free market.

Anyway, once governments remove cash, people will use bitcoin as a substitute, since they will be forced to (they will not trust working for other currencies that may get delisted from exchanges, or their software crashing etc)


Not really. There is a technical difference between these old 1-input-only addresses that never moved and other addresses. Theymos explained this in detail in other thread. The rest of coins are safe against that hypothetical quantum attack. Anyway no such thing as "eternally safe", only reasonably long term safe. But with minimal mainteinance (keeping your software update etc) you should be good to go to not get your bitcoins hacked in your lifetime.



To change something you would need massive consensus as we see. And users are ultimately what dictate what bitcoin is. If 90% of users reject what the mining monopoly are doing, they can change PoW, fork etc. There are options. I would like to reach a consensus with miners tho, since that's a bumpy road to take.

Currently like 90%+ of nodes are supporting Core software, 75% of big players like merchants etc are supporting segwit, 70% are actively rejecting BUcoin.


Yes, I wouldn't like to see satoshi's coins invalidated, but we have learned so much since then. I suspect this will not be the case again. Coins nowadays will be safer than those ancient coins that never moved that will be the ones prone to a quantum attack.

More here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4isxjr/petition_to_protect_satoshis_coins/d30we6f/

It is a thought decision.

We have 2 options:

1) Leave the coins as they are, so 1 million coins get potentially stolen by the NSA or whoever has access first to the computer capable of the quantum attack, and that means they could control the market at will. This is not an if, those coins will sooner or later get hacked.

2) The coins in danger get taken out so a malicious attacker cannot ruin the entire thing for the rest of holders.

There are many ways in which this can be automated ; the most trivial would be to have the difficulty of proof of work as a fixed curve (say, following Moore's law, or somewhat steeper).  This would put an upper bound to the value of a coin and have automatic emission of new coins when the value tends to rise above this upper bound.  Indeed, if ever the value of the coin would be above the PoW economic cost to make a new one, people wouldn't provide so much value for it,  but would make the coins with PoW.  This debasement would bring the price of the coin down to the price of mining with the given difficulty-cost.

More complicated systems can use a governance model with voting to use oracles measuring the price ; many things can be done that way.


In as much as people are going to do so, I rather think they would use something else, that is not going to deflate so much.  After all, in as much as it could make sense to *obtain* coins, one wouldn't have a strong incentive to *spend* them if they rise in value.  And the maximalist vision that only bitcoin is going to have correctly running software is a bit strange.  In any case, if governments remove cash, it would be an extremely bad idea to use centralized fiat/crypto exchanges, as they will be controlled like banks and will have to report all crypto-fiat conversions to authorities.  You will have to explain where your coins came from - just as well use a bank account.   In fact, if the idea is to hide from government (which I think is the sole true application niche of crypto, apart from speculation), all transparent-ledger technology is to be avoided.  I'd only use monero or zcash or another cryptographically obscured coin for such.




That's not correct.  These addresses are hashes, and hashes are relatively well protected from quantum attacks, contrary to public key signatures.  In fact, ALL addresses as of now on the chain are on equal footing, and have a 160 bit strength which is reduced to 80 bit strength in the case of a powerful quantum computer.


This consensus thing is totally misunderstood.  The idea that a "strong majority vote" can do something without a centralized power, is suffering from the same fallacies as the "tragedy of the commons", illustrated by that biblical parable: the wedding and the wine.  All guests agreed (consensus!) to bring wine and mix it in the common barrel.   But everyone thought: "if I just add water, I make a benefit".  In the end, the barrel was full of water.  This is totally normal.
If a majority decides to fork and make an altcoin with a different PoW, there may be an individual incentive to use also one's coins on the old chain, which is, after all, the "real old bitcoin".   Even if you are favourable to fork off to a new PoW algorithm (and hence have coins on both chains), there's no reason not to consider your coins on the "original" chain - after all, you never know whether this is not the valuable coin 10 years from now, as it is the vintage one with Satoshi's original coins on !

This is exactly the reason why bitcoin cannot "upgrade".  It will only be possible to upgrade, when the bitcoin brand name doesn't mean much any more and there's no real hope for "true original vintage" recovery.  Because the undeniable problem is that the original chain will always have a natural claim on being "the original, true" bitcoin as long as it lives on ; and people are not going to risk to sell their "true bitcoins" for peanuts, as they can hodl them for free even if they "vote" for a new chain.


The choice is not "segwit or bucoin" ; the true choice is "bitcoin as it is, or modified bitcoin or both".   If the brand name doesn't matter so much (like with ethereum or litecoin), there's no incentive to keep the old chain alive.   But if the old chain can claim "true bitcoin", that's another story.


I don't know where you got that story about this quantum attack.  It is cryptographically totally wrong.  ALL addresses, since day 1, are 160 bit hashes, which are not so vulnerable to a quantum attack, and are in any case on the same footing.

The ONLY argument that could make some sense, is that actually, some entity *is already having a quantum computer* and *is running an attack* on these keys since years, so they have some years of advance on these addresses as compared to other addresses.   But if that is the case, then they have the means to crack MUCH MUCH more ; if I had a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running in my basement, the LAST of things I would do would be to crack Satoshi's 50 BTC keys with a very inefficient algorithm: I would be cracking ALL PUBLIC KEY stuff on the internet in a few seconds, and penetrate essentially all fiat banking applications, know all https data flows, get all the passwords everywhere sent over https links....  Bitcoin would be the least of my occupations, as I would already be the master of this world.

If this erroneous concept is (yet another time (*) ) a basis for a fundamental decision, then bitcoin's decisions are more and more based upon false statements.

(*) the other erroneous concept is that non-mining full nodes "keep the block chain honest" and is the true decentralization of the network, which is an argument to keep the chain small.  I've explained several times why this is wrong, and that bitcoin's decentralization is truly measured by the distribution of the hash rates of the mining pools.

Is there any coin that does this already? why don't you release your own coin?


If we could get segwit, then with Coinjoin + CT we would have an anonymous coin that actually scales. I think people would use that above the alternatives.


I don't know the details. I just remember reading about it, i think it was theymos that said it.


The centralized chinese chain with no segwit would end up a marginal coin like ETC. What I don't know is who would get to keep the BTC token. How was decided that ETH would be the new chain and ETC the original chain?


Anyway sooner or later we'll get segwit somehow. I think Jihan and Roger will give up eventually, once they have made enough money manipulating the altcoin markets.

Please check this

https://github.com/solinger10/hw5/blob/master/data/tenthousandblocks.txt

Because nobody is really interested in having genuine crypto money.  Most people want to speculate.  That's what I learned.  So in the end, Satoshi was right in making a speculative asset, selling it as a currency, knowing very well that it wouldn't become that.  The story was nice, it got some crypto anarchist naive souls marching for it, but there's no real demand for it.  If I would make such a coin, as it would be a coin with which one cannot get rich quickly, nobody would use it.

For those few people that really need to pay something that they cannot pay with cash, the current crypto eco system is good enough ; and we haven't yet discovered a good technology that doesn't suffer from the fact that decentralized systems, when they grow, always become more expensive to use than equivalent centralized systems (hence the bitcoin wars).

Now, for fun, I might give it a try one day :)


Why all those "ifs" when there's monero around that does the same and is up and running ?  Or ZEC (even though there are several aspects of ZEC I don't like, such as the fact that anon tech is optional) ?

Because there's one thing that should be clear: if you really use a crypto as a *currency*, you care much, much less about its longevity, its absolute long term security, and all that, so the "barrier" to go from sacred "bitcoin" to "measly altcoin" is even less important than it is right now.  A crypto that will serve as a currency just needs to be sufficiently reliable, and stable, during the time of acquiring it, and spending it, with no regrets that you have spent something that was going to make you a billionaire, and no fears that between acquiring it and spending it, a "whale decided to cash in profits" and the price crashed.  You don't need "currency" to be steady and reliable for decades.  You only need it for a few weeks or months.
The only long-term issue you might care about, is its sufficient privacy, because even if you don't use it any more, all your 10-year old spendings are still graved in stone somewhere, so you might hope that sufficiently strong crypto is protecting it if you don't want people to find out.


I can really, really assure you that quantum computers are not of much use against hashes (contrary to public key crypto), and that all current bitcoin addresses are of exactly the same cryptographic security as those of Satoshi.

It is true that Segwit intends to increase the security, at least for those people converting their stash in to segwit-bitcoin.  But for the moment, that's not active.



I guess the ethereum foundation possesses the name "ethereum" but I'm not sure.


I think bitcoin will get segwit indeed, once it is not the dominating crypto any more and its brand name is not so much worth any more, and/or if it becomes fully centralized, so that the few people commanding bitcoin can sit in a room and come to an agreement, like they did with litecoin (which, by doing so, proved it was centralized).  Until then, bitcoin should remain immutable.

What decides what is and isn't currency? For me currency is something you can use to buy goods and services. Doesn't bitcoin meet this criteria? You can use it to buy stuff, and you can use it to hold it long term.

Again, the big demand for crypto will come once governments ban all physical cash. But you can't say there's no demand, there's already demand, people use it to hedge against fiat currencies, and stuff that brings uncertainty (like Trump, Lepen, banking crisis in general etc)

People also use it to buy stuff on the darknet.

There's a certain demand, and we needed something like bitcoin. A coin that somehow has the same price always wouldn't cut it, we needed a digital gold to store wealth. You happen to be able to move it too and use it as currency with bitcoin. Who cares how satoshi marketed it, let's focus on what we have and how to make it better.

his tokens reminds me

Satoshi’s Genius: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet-1382996984/ (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet-1382996984/)

Wine is then a currency too.  I could exchange a certain number of famous wine bottles for, say, a sportscar.  Collector stamps too.  Silver.  Iridium.  Famous paintings.  Anything that has value and can be bartered for something else, can then be seen as a "currency".  True.   

But to be called a currency, it normally also has to be able to act as a "unit of account".  Now, people pretend that bitcoin is a unit of account, and express relative prices in BTC (like other crypto).  But in reality, BTC is not a unit of account.  From beginning of 2014 to 2015, it fell a factor of 6 in value.  The last year, it rose a factor of 5 or so.   You can't write a contract in such a "unit of account".  In another thread, I gave the example of a cleaning company, and an another company, the other company making a contract to clean their offices for the next 5 years with the cleaning company, for a price of $5000,- a month, say.   This contract cannot be signed when the price is said to be 3 BTC a month.  Because nobody knows what value BTC will have during these 5 years.  If it rises like crazy, the company will have its offices cleaned for the highest amount in town.  If BTC crashes, the cleaning company will clean the other office for near to nothing.

BTC is not a unit of account, because there is no mechanism that tries to keep the inflation/deflation of its price within reasonable boundaries (on the contrary: BTC is designed to be extremely deflationary).

However, it for sure is a mobile value that can be transacted relatively easily, subdivided in fractions, and is relatively fungible for the moment.  So it does display certain monetary aspects.  But it is not a genuine currency, because you cannot express prices in it without referring to a real unit of account (such as $).


Nope.  You shouldn't confound a greater-fool game with "hedging against fiat currencies".   And using crypto to replace physical cash is going to be much more difficult than you think, because you will still need to go through exchanges and the banking system ; and whenever "legal" companies accept crypto, they will have to report your crypto transaction, and you will potentially be asked to explain where your crypto came from.   In other words, to replace cash with crypto, you will have to have a closed economic cycle, entirely based upon dark commerce.   If you will go to a legal shop that accepts crypto, and you want, say, to buy an i-phone with bitcoin, you will be requested to give all your ID information, linked to that transaction.  Whenever you do your tax declaration, authorities will know that you spent such a bitcoin, and so you will have to have explained how you got it in a previous declaration.  If ever you pay with a bitcoin that you didn't declare as an income before, you will have to explain and pay a fine.

The only thing that you truly can do with crypto, is to buy stuff on dark markets, and sell stuff on dark markets.  For instance, maybe you want to buy drugs, and maybe you are willing to sell the service of homicide.  If for a killing, you can get, say, 100 BTC, then you can use those to buy drugs on dark markets.  Because then, the dark economy is entirely closed.  But once you will use it in the "white circuit", you're just as screwed with crypto than you are with a bank account.
And anon coins won't help, because it is not the chain that will be analysed: it is the act of buying that will automatically be linked to you (AML/KYC), and you will have to explain how you got it, which is necessarily a form of income.


This, to me, is the ONLY TRUE crypto currency application that makes sense.


A currency has to be a unit of account in the short term ; a store of value needs to be a unit of account in the long term.  BTC is neither.  It is a highly speculative asset where the hope of the participants is that it is going to be eternally deflationary.  This is known as a greater-fools game.  But that game can take a very long time, and in the mean time, it is a very beneficial speculative asset.

But the thing it has been doing well since many years, is exactly that: a highly speculative asset.

Yes, except no.   As many aspects of the bitcoin cryptographic design, there are inconsistencies in the explanations of cryptographic choices, even though the system works, overall, very well.  But the "reasons" one invokes often as a "genius move", are contradicted by other elements where the "genius move" is not applied.

Here, one seems to claim that the choice of secp256k1 was a stroke of genius, because the secp256r1 curve could have been tampered with.  Well, this logic doesn't hold water, for the following reason.

1) two kinds of curves are published, the "random" ones, and the "Koblitz" ones.  In general, the fear with elliptic curve crypto (apart from the development of quantum computers which *totally* kills it) is that one has chosen a *particular* curve that has *extra* mathematical properties so that the difficult discrete log problem it formulates, has mathematical tricks to it that make it simpler.  Many such "weak" families of curves have been discovered, and one doesn't know if there will not be more of these curves.  Now, Koblitz curves are a very special kind of elliptic curve, but one hasn't yet (publicly) found any way to use their properties to break them.  But as they are special, people think that chances are higher that one day, Koblitz curves can be cracked, than "randomly" chosen curves.

This is why the standard published two sets of curves: Koblitz curves, and potentially safer random curves.  In fact, for the highest degrees of security, no Koblitz curves were published.   So NORMALLY, random curves would have been a potentially safer choice in the long run --> but bitcoin uses a Koblitz curve and hence, didn't use the argument for the "safer" random curve.  

2) however, in order for random curves to be truly random, the randomness of the curve should be checkable.  And the nasty thing with the SEC curves is that the "random number" comes from the hash of another "random number".... of which never an explanation was given.  So people then invented the possibility that these "random" numbers were in fact not so random, and give us, after hashing, a very specific mathematical curve of which nobody knows that they are weak, except for a few secret mathematicians at the NSA or something: a back door !  

Now, that's a good reason, if you're paranoid, to avoid these curves.  But is one then obliged to use the Koblitz curve variant ?

Answer: no.  Because that worry (that dates from end of the 1990-ies) of the ill-explained random curves was known, and other standard bodies DID publish good random curves, which have *provable* random properties, and are hence superior to the Koblitz curves as a matter of "potentially flawed".  For instance, the Bernstein curves, or the Brainpool curves.  These curves were published in 2006 or so, hence, before bitcoin's protocol was set up.

So, in as much as Satoshi had doubts about a back door in the secp256r1 curve (a worry that was published since years), instead of using the secp256k1 curve from the same guys, he could have used the brainpool random curves, which do not have this potential back door, because provably random.

Most probably, Satoshi chose secp256k1, because they allow for a *very efficient implementation* in the calculations needed.

Guy you probably didnt hear anything because no one can share such. You would have read what majority have equally read about Satoshi at one time or the other that we tried to find more about the genius behind the project in which the whole world is currently rallying behind. But my question is even if you happen to find it, what will you do about it and more so, if Satoshi could keep that for himself when it even worth nothing, then he deserves our commendation because if he had known this will be the outcome as at today, he would have kept more.

It is safe to assume that 90%> of the coins mined on the first month is from satoshi alone, knowing that him and Hal were the first ones who worked on the project. I've read something in this forum a year or so ago about some estimates of the total coins Satoshi has on all of his wallets: 1.4 million bitcoins are from him, spread amongst thousands of addresses from the first year of bitcoin's existence. I do believe that most of these coins are already lost in the void unless Satoshi really plans on doing some things for them in the future and kept the private keys safely. In today's pricing, that would be a whooping $2.14B or more, which is not too bad for his magnum opus.

I think that only Satoshi know where is his all bitcoin go now. He did this on purposely and anonymously that he only knows. His the creator of bitcoin and he can do all of this.

People only talk about that first transfer to Hal, or some dust to Gary. But is there not others until he disappears? Didn't nobody else send more coins to him just to test?

If someone was sitting on 2 billion dollars, I find it hard to believe they would not be tempted to get some of it out, unless they were:

1) Super rich already
2) Dead
3) In prison

There might be also another reasons like he wrote into his testament private keys for his inheritors and until then he is not touching it.

Or he might just want to continue his ordinary life without thinking of the value of "his" bitcoins, it would ruin his life owning such huge amount of money

Speculation of Satoshi is always an interesting read :) I always wonder why if he was a single person, why wouldnt he not come out to claim the credit of bitcoin's founder. All the reasons of "he doesn't want to be hack/draw attention" doesn't really hold water in this day and age. Whatever it is, I hope he is alive and living in the free world to enjoy the fruits of his labour. He truly started something that has grown bigger than he had ever imagined.

Satoshi wasn't a person actually, this is the name of that team which created bitcoin.

it is possible that someone could really hold that huge amount of bitcoin....
but if ever it is indeed true i don't he will put all of it in a single address...
he must have it separated on different addresses in order to avoid being to obvious...
this person must also be a true believer of bitcoin's ideology for him to hold it that long...
:D

Thank you for this , and you are right, the coins were spread over thousands of addresses and the coins is still their on their wallet, maybe if that would be computed it will be over  1 million bitcoins.

the coins were spread out over different addresses which i think it is satoshi's coins but i am not really sure but we can conclude that it his coins thoufh since it was the early stages of bitcoin, if we all add up those bitcoin i think it would go over beyond 1 million bitcoins.

I think that Hal was Satoshi.

Guys, you have forgotten you consider one further option: that "the organization" having started the bitcoin project may in fact be a state's agency. Which in this case would disclose and entirely different set of options.

Perhaps someone stole Satoshi's computer or it was hit by a virus. Private keys lost forever and a millions bitcoins with it. Or perhaps s/he is waiting for it to be worth $1m each before cashing in!

So the 1Million Bitcoin people claimed Satoshi owned was just speculation? Even the media write like they are certain he owns a million coins. Where are the "mays" "mights" "maybes"  English teachers taught us to use when we are not sure of things?

Satoshi is one of the smartest person in the planet and a very few people know about his identity and I remember that theymos once said that board number 2/3 which is not for normal users had deleted by satoshi because he had put in some of his details and when he left, he made sure he didn't leave anything behind. And what will you do by knowing how many coins satoshi or anyone else has? Don't you anything else to do in life?

Surely it might not be accurate but the founder of such a currency must have enough faith on his invention to hold 1m of its pieces. Who knows who is this nakamoto? May be he is even richer than bill gates or may be he did not have enough faith on his invention and did mot hold it.

I say that Satoshshi and Hal Finney were one in the same https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0)

But here is another theory:

Bitcoin Was Created By DARPA

There is no way to stop what is going to happen to bitcoin. It's an issue of sociology. It's an issue of human greed. It's an issue as to WHO created bitcoin and WHY.

Who is the single largest holder of BTC right now? "Satoshi". Who is he? I will say it again. NSA/DARPA created bitcoin under the guidance of the IMF. The IMF has been openly calling for a digital, one-world, deflationary currency for 2 decades. OPENLY. It has been discussed and promoted OPENLY at G8 and G20 summits.

from the early 90s-96 the NSA was OPENLY investigating cryptographic money networks.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm)

One of their researchers and investigators is a man named Tatsuaki Okamoto. When they actively started writing the code they chose the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamura" to ultimately promote the idea that Tatsuaki Okamoto to any and all who investigated the source of bitcoin long enough. But Tatsuaki Okamoto is just a cog. He's not some rogue savoir out to topple centralized banks. Not at all. He is a crypto scientist who was paid by government and intelligence agencies to do research.

Bitcoin is an NSA/DARPA lab set into the wild. Scientific technology grants issued by government and intelligence agencies are how these labs are funded and promoted. The regulation and control of bitcoin has been actively developed alongside the development of the network. In fact, the controls, policy and regulation are WAY WAY more mature than the bitcoin protocol itself. That's why we see things like Greenlist written into law without a mention of bitcoin until recently.

This is not tinfoil hattish. This is just reality. No one forced ANYONE to believe the Satoshi fairytale.. The libertarian Satoshi myth has been promoted in stealth to specifically promote ADOPTION and DEVELOPMENT. It's no different than the internet and WWW itself. EXACTLY the same. That is why you see many www early adopters saying bitcoin "feels" the same as the early internet. I am one of those people.

In 94-96 the public internet was ALL about freedom of information. FREE COMMUNICATION. It was ALL about liberty and freedom. I wish i could transport some of you back in time so you could see for yourselves. The promise of free phonecalls with the freeworlddialup, free media with IUMA and the MBONE. All this freedom and liberty had people pouring their heart and soul into developing it. Now look at it. Facebook, google.. it is a GIANT SURVEILLANCE grid. And if you look for and read DARPA/NSA docs from the 80s and early 90s that was what it was always meant to be. I am not discounting all the socially great things that happen online.. But from the perspective of DARPA/NSA and control freaks.. it was created for the express purpose of control. A military purpose. A strategic purpose.

What is bitcoin? Bitcoin IS the one world digital currency. We all have a deterministic UUID that has been generated from our biometric data. This UUID will be related to all your datastores. This UUID is your mark. This UUID is what is used to buy and sell online and in the real world. This UUID is the primary key in your Greenlist identity.

Coinbase, blockchain.info and it would appear Coinsetter are inline to be the first to roll out the incoming policy and regulation. This policy and regulation is WORLD WIDE. It is CORPORATE. It is not about governments. Governments ADOPT corporate organized policies. If you think this is new than you need to investigate ACH and NACHA.
https://www.nacha.org/about (https://www.nacha.org/about) https://www.slideshare.net/Earthport/nacha-payments-2013-complementary-paths-to-global-ach-earthport-federal-reserve-financial-services-hsbc (https://www.slideshare.net/Earthport/nacha-payments-2013-complementary-paths-to-global-ach-earthport-federal-reserve-financial-services-hsbc)

Bitcoin is THEIR network. And for the minority early adopters that is going to be a hard pill to swallow.. But for those in the know.. Like Gavin, it's PAYDAY. Realization and monetization of their massive bitcoin holdings is being guaranteed by regulators. That is why they are all literally RUSHING to regulate.

Legitimization of bitcoin is all about hosted wallets. The centralization of bitcoin. Hosted wallet providers approve/dissaprove transactions before they are actually issued on the network. Greenlist enabled wallets will be the fastest. (offline transactions). Greenlist enabled wallets will be hooked directly to your bank account, ease of buying and selling. Greenlist enabled exchanges will have the largest market with the best prices. Greenlist enabled wallets will completely eliminate risk of stolen coins. No more security worries AT ALL. And this is what the masses have come to expect. And this is why it's going to happen. And Greenlisted wallets will be accepted everywhere. And in the physical world you will identify yourself and your wallet with your biometrics.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173715.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173715.0)

TL;DR bitcoin is a global digital currency, regulation was created in tandem with development and adoption, bitcoin is not and never was meant to be a liberty promoting value exchange. There is no "satoshi". The central banks are already the largest holders of bitcoin. Bitcoin IS going to the moon because of this.

Source from a conspiracy site:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2417375/pg1 (http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2417375/pg1)

The exact number is 99999 addresses (times 50 bitcoins in each). Do the math.
https://blockchain.info/block-height/99999

The 100000th block is the first one with different number of bitcoins.
https://blockchain.info/block-height/100000

Pick any number from 1 to 99999 and it's all 50 BTC in each one. So, Satoshi actually has/have about 5 million bitcoins :)

Satoshi Nakamoto is time traveller or travellers. Everything is simple: steal or create time machine in the future, go back in time, create "Bitcoin", mine big stack of it, put everything in cold storage (etc: encoding into stone). Go back to your time again, find that stone, decode it and make the World better place to live ;DDD

Yes what did you search and you see that FBI that has 300k in his bitcoin wallet. Can you share that to us and let us see what you see. Put some link as a proof of your research. I want to explore too and see who holds the most amount of bitcoin.

maybe you mean by the wallet 1M was broken into some purses.

it could be 1 wallet is made there is 100k, the second wallet is 100k, the wallet to three 100k and so even so its up to 1M.

and I'm sure Satoshi Nakamoto is the most Bitcoin owner in the world.