Worried about coins being lost? You have bigger worries!

[allthingsluxury]

If he did mine millions of coins, I doubt he deleted them. I also doubt he would "crash" the market by selling them all at once. I believe he would be smarter than that. Of course all this is just guess work. I wouldn't stress about it.

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[xavier]

I was thinking that OP's concerns are extremely valid. There is no way that those original coins are lost.

In my opinion, Satoshi is more than one person, due to the complexity of bitcoin - I dont think a single person could design the whole of bitcoin.

I'd also say that the identity of Satoshi is highly critical to bitcoin due to the reasons given by the OP. The fact that Satoshi remains anonymous and has not touched their original coins is ominous.

My guess is that they 'Satoshi' realised the risks of remaining involved after the project started gaining mass adoption and decided, once the bulk of the design and development of the system had been completed, to let others develop further the concept. Satoshi would be happy to do this, as they would have accumulated the (max) 5M coins already and be happy just to sit on this huge amount of current & future wealth, without feeling any pressure to contribute further to the system.

So the OP states that Satoshi has not moved any of their coins since they were mined. This means they are still just waiting for the system to become more stable and adopted before moving coins out. If they were to move coins from those original addresses, it would be sure to cause alot of chaos at this stage in bitcoin's development (as noted by OP). I would guess that Satoshi, as the persons who invented bitcoin, would prefer for the system to gain mainstream adoption before they touched the original coins.

I'm sure that they have been thinking alot about what to do with those original coins. There is no way that those coins are lost. Someone smart enough to (1) create bitcoin and (2) leave the community to remain anonymous and just sit on the 5M (max) coins that they had created would definitely not loose such a huge number of coins.

Clearly 'Satoshi' is very much in touch with bitcoin and is tracking these forums regularly to work out a good time to release the coins and cash out. The problem for Satoshi is if they touch those coins, it's going to cause a huge amount of interest. Any cashing out would cause chaos. It doesnt matter if he only liquidated a small proportion - it would show in the blockchain that he/they is active and any action by itself that hinted a liquidation of such a large number of coins would be sure to cause a huge sell-off and problems for bitcoin, hence devaluing Satoshi's large holding.

Regarding the identity of Satoshi, there are some good existing posts already on these forums. (I'll leave it to the reader to run a search)

The New Yorker article I believe did not get anywhere to discovering who is Satoshi. As stated, I don't think it could be 1 person, simply because the design and code is so complex and well built. In addition, it is unlikely that Satoshi, given his/their need to remain anonymous after creating Bitcoin, would attend a cryptography conference.

http://cryptome.org/0005/bitcoin-who.pdf

I would also suggest that it is likely to have involvement from both US and Europeans, given that many of Satoshi's posts use American English, yet The Times of London is quoted in the blockchain.

The most convincing arguement for who is Satoshi that I've read is this article, which pins it to 3 engineers - not academics - who have coauthored a range of papers around cryptography. The author located their identities by performing phrase analysis on the original Satoshi paper.

Charles Bry

Vladamir Oksman

Neal J. King
http://www.facebook.com/neal.j.king

* a phrase in Nakamoto's Bitcoin paper is replicated in a patent application filed the same year
* the domain name for Bitcoin was registered 72 hours after the patent application was filed
* Satoshi's posts were made during European working hours and are a mixture of US and UK English (implying US and European involvement)

http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-mystery-reopened

Its likely that 1 of these 3 men, if not all of them collectively hold a huge fortune in bitcoins (a theoretical max valuation of nearly $250m) and are waiting to cash out, but have chosen not to do so yet for the reasons given earlier in this post.

Also, I notice that Satoshi was at one point a regular on these forums. Therefore one of the people out there who might be able to help with confirming this identity is Theymos, the forum admin.

[mestar]

http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-cumulative

Calculate the total number of bitcoin days and subtract this. You'll get number of bitcoins * staleness.

From that chart, you can't tell how many coins from the first, say, 6 months, were moved, and at what time.

Does anyone know if some code that generates that 'days destroyed' chart is available?  In fact, I would just need something that iterates trough all the blocks and looks up the point in time when they were moved.

[instaBoost]

what about actual transactions that seem to be lost in bitcoin land.   

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 3/11/2013 22:17
To: 1ABY6fqJtvxAjgMSijCCvXrrYHN33b8eNa
Debit: -3.159 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00004606 BTC
Net amount: -3.15904606 BTC
Transaction ID: 534125043490a5c0c53c1140efa3e4f0f1d4489435fc5a4840b3647f5a95d785

[darkmethod]

Not to be too pessimistic. But there is an alternative scenario that is likely to happen eventually. Satoshi may quite literally be dead.

In the long run, we all are. My family will be able to get to my fiat accounts but will have a hard time even comprehending my Bitcoin investments/stash/mining-equipment/etc. Something to consider.

[zooitje]

see also: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153238

It looks like there's no sound answer for this (huge?) problem. Is the solution mentioned in my topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153238), to disable the 'Kill-switch', even considered by the (core) Bitcoin community?

[christop]

what about actual transactions that seem to be lost in bitcoin land.   

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 3/11/2013 22:17
To: 1ABY6fqJtvxAjgMSijCCvXrrYHN33b8eNa
Debit: -3.159 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00004606 BTC
Net amount: -3.15904606 BTC
Transaction ID: 534125043490a5c0c53c1140efa3e4f0f1d4489435fc5a4840b3647f5a95d785

This transaction is not valid (negative fee and amount?) so it's not accepted by any other client (particularly the miners). Anyone with a (modified?) Bitcoin client can generate invalid transactions all they want, but if no other client accepts it, it's not recognized as a transaction and won't get added to the blockchain.

[zooitje]

I had a very good explanation on this subject by one of the mods of the board. For me it has become quite acceptable that the wealth distribution isn't that bad after all and gets better over time.

read it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153238.0

[jubalix]

Not to be too pessimistic. But there is an alternative scenario that is likely to happen eventually. Satoshi may quite literally be dead.

In the long run, we all are. My family will be able to get to my fiat accounts but will have a hard time even comprehending my Bitcoin investments/stash/mining-equipment/etc. Something to consider.

I have thought about this...until mass understanding...and the killer app....most people struggle with even simple concepts....let alone how to se bitcoin, for a deep freeze, signed armoury account.

They would guaranteed fuck it some how even if they knew it was valuable.

likley the would just throw everything out/mining rig, usb/wallet to some landfill

it almost seems that world is going to be divided like this those who understood bitcoin crpto early and the rest

[chriswen]

Some points, yeah I agree they wouldn't crash the markets.  If they sell slowly they can make craploads of money.

Secondly, its probably a good idea not to put it all in one address.  Like what if someone got the private key by accident then client computed it and like finds out he has 4 million coins in his account.  Splitting it up is safer.

And its not trillions of dollars.

[byronbb]

We can imagine a number of scenarios. Most of what I have read paints the Satoshi as a boogeyman out for profit. This is possible, and realistically if you can design an open source p2p crypto currency then, hats off to you, by default you are a prime adopter. Should those who started to mine on day 2 be painted with a similar brush? Maybe the 2nd guy who started to mine has such a plan, and which would be more likely.

I had been wondering what % of the total coins one would need to be the bitcoin 'central bank'; obviously such a position would need to be large, for no one can provide liquidity out of thin air, ie print, I am thinking more about the Hunt Bros attempting to corner the silver market. Perhaps our evil Satoshi is holding reserves to prevent an external force from attempting such a scuttling maneouver, perhaps when the captains of the world's banks fear the worst?

[jago25_98]

The problem with cashing out to a fiat currency is that you're then stuck with a lot of fiat. You might get taxed. You might get arrested for illegal proceeds. You might lose the proceeds a-la Cyprus. You might have to submit KYC to Mt.Gox.

Q: If you think you're going to be so rich as Bitcoin climbs how do you cashout when there's nothing safe to cashout into? Gold? Which country do you want that gold to be in? Think about it.

So ideally what you want is to spend the coins direct. There's only one guy selling his house for coins right now.

[niner]

If Satoshi is actually more than one person as many believe then
the coins would be divided among them thus decreasing the likelihood
that they would all agree on some concerted action.