Let's say satoshi is cashing out 1million BTC

[Bizmark13]

Satoshi will never sell. If you ever created revolutionary technology after years of efforts, you would treat it as your kid. Satoshi will die before he sells a single BTC, for the goal is to not even need to sell to adquire any commodities.

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have that many litecoins. I sold most of them at $0.20 because I thought they were overpriced then. Tells you what I know.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal.

[philipma1957]

Think about this:  Not only have Satoshi's coins not been sold or spent; Satoshi's coins haven't even moved.

Except for a 10BTC test transaction he spent to Hal in 2009, and maybe one or two coinbases that nobody noticed or tracked down to him, they are all still sitting there untouched in his mined coinbase txOuts. I have a list of over 5000 of his coinbase addresses, and they have not budged.  He hasn't consolidated coins in one wallet, he hasn't tumbled coins, he hasn't bought anything from overstock.com or anywhere else.

We're talking here about someone who could cause deep unrest, perhaps bordering on panic, just by generating a new address and sending 50BTC from one of his old addresses to it.  I can name dozens of places that would light up like Christmas trees if even one of his known addresses moved; hell, my own computer would light up like a Catharine wheel.  I'd have a text message within fifteen seconds of a transaction spending one of those addresses hitting the Bitcoin network, and that message hasn't been sent even once in the months since I set up the script. 

I just met with him he sold me 2 addresses. He liked my  thread on the genesis block and told me I am worthy of holding the keys for it.  So I now can remove the 15 + btc added to it if I chose.

He also wonder If I could buy an early address for him and keep it untouched for another 67 weeks you know right after the next half happens.

So I took out my stash box and hand him 1,000  100 dollar bills and said sure man no worries.

 My point is  I could send him to 10 buyers of his coins that would keep the address frozen for a few more years.

So you can't possibly know if he sold them all to a trusted few.   Unless of course you are him the great satoshi. Just playing with us.

[Lorenzo]

Satoshi will never sell. If you ever created revolutionary technology after years of efforts, you would treat it as your kid. Satoshi will die before he sells a single BTC, for the goal is to not even need to sell to adquire any commodities.

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have that many litecoins. I sold most of them at $0.20 because I thought they were overpriced then. Tells you what I know.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal.

You can't compare Bitcoin's early history with that of Litecoin. The potential ramifications of Satoshi selling 1 million BTC far outweighs the impact of coblee selling his stash of LTC. When Bitcoin was first announced, Satoshi was the only one mining it. Even 1 year after it was created, Satoshi was still pretty much the only person mining it (check out the historical difficulty charts for proof of this). Compare this to Litecoin which was publicly announced on Bitcointalk and already had many people mining it when the genesis block was launched.

Secondly, coblee sold his LTC long before Litecoin even became significant. Had Satoshi sold his coins in 2010 when the price was still mere cents, it would not have the same impact as selling today.

[Bizmark13]

Satoshi will never sell. If you ever created revolutionary technology after years of efforts, you would treat it as your kid. Satoshi will die before he sells a single BTC, for the goal is to not even need to sell to adquire any commodities.

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have that many litecoins. I sold most of them at $0.20 because I thought they were overpriced then. Tells you what I know.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal.

You can't compare Bitcoin's early history with that of Litecoin. The potential ramifications of Satoshi selling 1 million BTC far outweighs the impact of coblee selling his stash of LTC. When Bitcoin was first announced, Satoshi was the only one mining it. Even 1 year after it was created, Satoshi was still pretty much the only person mining it (check out the historical difficulty charts for proof of this). Compare this to Litecoin which was publicly announced on Bitcointalk and already had many people mining it when the genesis block was launched.

Secondly, coblee sold his LTC long before Litecoin even became significant. Had Satoshi sold his coins in 2010 when the price was still mere cents, it would not have the same impact as selling today.

But what about this part:

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

Why does coblee selling his LTC not constitute an acknowledgement that LTC is a failure and yet Satoshi selling his BTC does?

[Lorenzo]

But what about this part:

Satoshi selling any amount of btc for fiat will be like him saying bitcoin has failed and thats never going to happen

Why does coblee selling his LTC not constitute an acknowledgement that LTC is a failure and yet Satoshi selling his BTC does?

I didn't write that though. And personally, I disagree with the idea that Satoshi selling part of his BTC stash constitutes an acknowledgement that BTC is a total failure. Whether or not others want to believe that a dev selling a portion of their creation constitutes a failure of said coin is their choice. And for the record, some people did think that coblee selling his LTC was a negative thing for Litecoin and it has been mentioned numerous times as well.

Example:

Please tell me you bought back later. Saying you sold at 0.20$ and never got back in is quite negative for Litecoin.

Also, a Bitcoin core dev sold half of his coins too during the GHash.io debacle:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/

The crux of the matter is that Litecoin is far bigger than just coblee and Bitcoin is far bigger than Satoshi or Peter Todd. And whether or not either coin amounts to a failure is something for the community to decide, and not individual people.

[Cryddit]

So you can't possibly know if he sold them all to a trusted few.   Unless of course you are him the great satoshi. Just playing with us.

Weirdly enough, you aren't the first person to mention that I might be. 

But the fact is, I'm not.  Really and truly, cross my heart, I'm not Satoshi.

Which, of course, is the exact same thing I'd tell you if I were.   

[hellscabane]

Getting to the heart of the OP's question, the way I would go about it is by having a chain of intermediary brokers do the transaction with a buyer. Still though, at best it's pseudonymous.

Here is a very basic idea of a chain of intermediary brokers, it's very similar to a generic mixer in computer theory:

-Tell one proxy that you are looking for a buyer for some sort of item, the code item, and to work with particular groups/sets of people.
-Inform a subset of parties that if they are approached with a seller of the code item that person is actually selling BTC.
-Have a trusted escrow agent work with proxy for transaction purposes.

The simple chain can be expanded to as many "obfuscation" layers to complicate true nature of sale (Code Item 1, is Code Item 2, is Code Item 3, and so forth until "BTC level"). Similar can be said for proxy agents, and with trusted escrow agents. Once again though, the moment chained parties work together anonymity is lost.

[ensurance982]

Mix the coins for an extended amount of time and then cash them out privately or on shady exchanges over time. I think it's difficult but doable for Satoshi. But on a serious note: I don't think Satoshi will ever cash out a single Satoshi (no pun intended) of the coins that people know belong to him!

[fox19891989]

I think he is dead, so he will never cash out a satoshi again.
Anyway, changing 1 Mio BTC to fiat will end his anonymity.

Interesting, but i don't think he is dead, he said "he is not Dorian Nakamoto" in a hacker forum after Dorian Nakamoto was reported by that journalist last year.

[bronan]

I wouldn't be so sure. The US government's powers often exceed the borders of the US.

Yes. That is true. The US government's powers extend to its vassal states, such as the UK and Germany.

You don't think it would be possible for the US government to force another country into revealing that sort of information? Remember Kim Dotcom? He was a German guy with German citizenship living in New Zealand. The FBI was even able to seize his hard drives too. And that's assuming that Satoshi isn't a US citizen living aboard. If he is, then both the IRS and the FBI would be after him.

With Germany and New Zealand, may be. What if Satoshi is actually living in Russia or Belarus? Or even in Venezuela or Bolivia? What the FBI is going to do if he is a resident of Russia?

Add the netherlands to that list
I know for a fact that the USA has a huge impact on some EU states, especially because of the huge financial power they have over them (think of import/export)
The top developer seems to know who he/she/it (Satoshi) is and claimed to have talked to it about btc 2.0.

[sana54210]

If he does cashes out his bitcoins there will be a big drop in the price of bitcoins, and we can buy Bitcoins in a much cheaper price as there will be more bitcoins in the rotation than the  current  demand of the bitcoins. High supply than the required demand = lower price, I will buy more bitcoin if it were to happen

[Xprim777]

What if Satoshi is dead ? Nobody would know and his bitcoins would be stucked forever...

[BillyBobZorton]

Mix the coins for an extended amount of time and then cash them out privately or on shady exchanges over time. I think it's difficult but doable for Satoshi. But on a serious note: I don't think Satoshi will ever cash out a single Satoshi (no pun intended) of the coins that people know belong to him!

Well, he's going to get taxed to hell if he does cash out, no matter what he does.
He's not going to find enough people in Localbitcoins with 1 million cash, he would need years to cash out the whole thing. Any other method will require that he pays measly amounts of taxes, which would mean it's not worth it to get these Bitcoins out.

[S4VV4S]

You know why?

Someone doesn't know how to properly format their posts....
It gave me a headache....

[Beliathon]

-You want to do it in a relative short period of time, so no cashing out slowly in 5 years version.
-You want to keep your anonymity intact.

Choose one.

[umair01]

If Satoshi cashes out 1 million bitcoins, it will drive the price down, as there will be more bitcoins available than the usual, which is only few thousand bitcoins which are supplied by the miners daily, this will let the price fall significantly and boy i will buy so many bitcoins if that will happen .

[coinpr0n]

I think he is dead, so he will never cash out a satoshi again.
Anyway, changing 1 Mio BTC to fiat will end his anonymity.

Interesting, but i don't think he is dead, he said "he is not Dorian Nakamoto" in a hacker forum after Dorian Nakamoto was reported by that journalist last year.

Someone said on a hacker forum.

[ensurance982]

Mix the coins for an extended amount of time and then cash them out privately or on shady exchanges over time. I think it's difficult but doable for Satoshi. But on a serious note: I don't think Satoshi will ever cash out a single Satoshi (no pun intended) of the coins that people know belong to him!

Well, he's going to get taxed to hell if he does cash out, no matter what he does.
He's not going to find enough people in Localbitcoins with 1 million cash, he would need years to cash out the whole thing. Any other method will require that he pays measly amounts of taxes, which would mean it's not worth it to get these Bitcoins out.

Well you could always try and go the illegal way - which I don't recommend - but it is probable that some people may choose to do so. In that case you could try to sell them to someone in a dark alley and live off of dollar notes for the rest of your life.

[bryant.coleman]

But are you sure we know ALL of Satoshi's addresses?

If Satoshi was still mining in 2011 like any other 500+ people mining at that time, how would we know?

A total of 2,650,000 coins were mined in 2011. So Satoshi might be having around 5,300 coins from 2011 (considering the median scenario). It will represent just a small fraction of the coins which he mined during 2009, and so we can ignore them. But proof seems to indicate that he gave up mining in 2009 itself.

[ensurance982]

But are you sure we know ALL of Satoshi's addresses?

If Satoshi was still mining in 2011 like any other 500+ people mining at that time, how would we know?

A total of 2,650,000 coins were mined in 2011. So Satoshi might be having around 5,300 coins from 2011 (considering the median scenario). It will represent just a small fraction of the coins which he mined during 2009, and so we can ignore them. But proof seems to indicate that he gave up mining in 2009 itself.

I always suspected him to have some coins we can't trace back to him. Of course we know about the first blocks that have been mined by him, but what about the blocks that have been mined in the following years? He could very well have mine them in the pool.