Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD(DEBATE GOING ON, DO NOT TWEET!)

[infested999]

Even if Satoshi has all those Bitcoins, we don't really have to worry about him selling them off all at once and crashing the price. He is probably trying to live off of it and only cashes out what he needs to live a luxurious lifestyle, and if he cashes out any more he will just lower the value of his own coins.

[Littleshop]

Even if Satoshi has all those Bitcoins, we don't really have to worry about him selling them off all at once and crashing the price. He is probably trying to live off of it and only cashes out what he needs to live a luxurious lifestyle, and if he cashes out any more he will just lower the value of his own coins.

The blockchain is public.  We would see early coins being moved.

[Herodes]

If Sathoshi is a single individual and his worth is 100M USD - then it's all okay with me.

But I have seen no conclusive proof in regards to that.

[Etlase2]

Even if Satoshi has all those Bitcoins, we don't really have to worry about him selling them off all at once and crashing the price.

Why don't we have to worry? Because you think you know what Satoshi is going to do? Sorry, that should not fly for anyone looking to invest in bitcoins.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Gmaxwell and DeathAndTaxes have many BTC. They are here from long ago.
They may don't like that the idea that Satoshi is rich because that news threatens the arrival of new Bitcoin owners, which in turn increases the monetary value of the Bitcoin.

OK can we stop paying bullshit detective for a second.

1) I have far less Bitcoins than you think.   Whatever number you think, cut it in half and then drop a zero and you likely are closer.  Starting Tangible Cryptography was capital intensive.  Fiat funds are pathetically slow it takes a massive amount of working capital to get anything done.  Hell our company even Borrows Bitcoins because it makes sense to borrow then to keep the kind of capital we need locked up in BTC. I kept a small holding as a hedge in case my company fails and Bitcoin succeeds but I am no early adopter just someone who sees real value in Bitcoin and put the relatively modest amount of coins I mined to work as capital to expand the Bitcoin "ecosystem".  

2) I got no problem with RESEARCHING the early history of Bitcoin but honestly that is not what you are doing it. Posting "Satoshi has 1M BTC" written as a statement of fact and then looking for items which support it, is intellectually dishonest. Do some real research and then propose the findings.  The "fact" in your OP is obviously wrong.  Multiple people have shown they mined the first year ... Period.  So even if Satoshi "only" has 900K BTC (which I doubt) you OP is still blatantly false.  The fact that you keep the headline in light of the increasing absurdity of it shows how dedicated to the "truth" you really are.

3) I never said that Satoshi was poor so can we put away the strawmen and red herrings.  Please?   I indicated multiple times that is it is highly likely "he" mined the entire year and contributed some significant fraction of the hashing power (just not 100% of it).  Using the v0.1 client a high end PC in 2009 would be about 80KH/s.  The average hashrate for the first year was roughly 4.402 MH/s (34272*2^32) / (387*24*60*60) = 4.402 MH/s so that puts the number of PC at ~50.  Of course the earlier part of the year was significantly lower and there were significant variations in block rate.

4) Now maybe Satoshi did have 100 PCs and adjusted the number running to make the hashrate appear dynamic and hide his true involvement in this purely academical (at the time) project for almost a year, but even that can't explain away the first hand reports of early non Satoshi miners (inducing Hal Finney who is the earliest known solver of a block beyond the genesis block and receiver of the first non mining transaction).

5) As many have pointed out it is unlike Satoshi was a single person.  So the idea there is a single $100M winner is dubious.  When you remove the effect of other Satoshi miners the "satoshi share" is much smaller.  If you then divide that among multiple participants it is likely the initial adopters have tens of thousands of coins and could sell them for millions.  Say "Satoshi" mined half the coins, and Satoshi is 10 people, and a third of them have been sold.  Oh noes each creator has ~80,000 BTC.  BTC which is worthless unless the economy continue to expand.  I don't lay awake fearing what the creators will do with their wealth.  If they wanted to dump it they had plenty of opportunity especially last week.  Note: before this gets misquoted I am not saying each creator has 80,000 BTC but it is just as plausible as the $100M headline number.

6) Why hasn't a large portion of those first year coins sold?  The most likely answer is many saw it as an academic project and the coins were lost forever.  With multiple bubbles and bust and recent media attention it is highly likely that any miner from the difficulty 1 period has been reminded of Bitcoin and exactly how much their small hoard is worth.  The fact that despite the bubbles there has been no move would indicate either they are true believers (these coins will be worth $B someday) or they just don't have access to the keys anymore.  It happens.

How many blocks did Satoshi solve?  I don't know.  The sad thing is someone doing some genuine research would actually be pretty interesting.  I do know your claim that Satoshi solved all blocks for the first year is blatantly false.  The fact that you cling to it despite facts to the contrary shows you aren't the one which will do genuine research anymore than the Enquirer is looking to genuine reporting.

[deepceleron]

I just put in a virtual order to liquidate 1M BTC if that's the OP's hypothesis (and yes, you could sell them, there are currently book orders to buy twice as many BTC as will ever exist) - :

Sell 1000000 BTC for 14239194.29 USD

I would love to see all the coins dumped. That would end this FUD and the temporary crash would only bounce up as people realize there is no more mystery coin.

The "early adopters are rich" is played out; besides Satoshi (who may never move coins or may not have early wallets - Bitcoin implementation may have been merely a proof of concept in his head), other mined coins have been lost or changed hands for things like pizzas and early investors have sold many times over. There are just a few, like casascius, who are strong willed enough to never spend their Bitcoins. I'd be relatively well off if I still had every BTC that's ever been in my wallet or knew the magic time to exchange them, but I spent them.

[BTC Books]

I don't even understand why any of this can possibly matter to anyone, frankly.

Whatever the hell the entity Satoshi did, it worked.  And nobody would be here if it hadn't.  If you take all the variables that go into bitcoin - especially those which have the greatest impact on the very beginnings of it - and start playing around with them, it's pretty easy to see what an incredibly narrow range of possibilities there are for this thing to have worked at all:  let alone to have worked as well as it did.

Every single proposal I've ever seen, in all the years I've been reading this board, involves changing some variable that would certainly have doomed bitcoin to the obscurity such proposals would have richly deserved.  And every one of those proposals is deeply rooted in envy, ego and undeserving greed.

It's so fucking easy to produce conspiracy theories, and so goddamn hard to do anything productive in this world...

There is no doubt in my mind that Satoshi was a human geek(s), and no doubt that Occam's Razor applies to geeks as well as to the rest of us mortals.  'He' didn't take any care at all with the bitcoin he mined - nobody at the time did.  My personal and unquenchable belief is that damn near every one of the bitcoins from 2009 that will ever surface, will be shown mostly to have survived out of pure, dumb luck.  I can't conceive that for someone who could create this thing, the insanely long odds of it ever actually working weren't obvious.  And I doubt that anywhere near as many of those first coins still survive, as the conspiracy theorists endlessly 'prove'.

Jesus - read the old postings.  Try to understand what people thought in 2009.  Forget about all the weird, unlikely, and self-serving interpretations of a bunch of numbers that were never either created for or intended to be used as any kind of history:  especially not a history of the people involved.  Bitcoin was a cool little geek toy that attracted D&D card collectors for fuck's sake.  Some basement-dwelling early adopter (bless his heart...) paid 10k for a couple of pizzas.

It is far more interesting to me what bitcoin has done to those first people who were involved with it, than who's got what.

It works.  That's all that matters.  And you've got whatever you've got and you'll earn whatever you earn - just like everything else in life.

[darkmule]

Indeed.  If anyone is now wealthy for having invented Bitcoin, there is a reason for that.

They deserve to be wealthy.  I fail to get how there is anything whatsoever wrong about someone being rewarded for doing something successful that has improved the world.  People who improve the world should be rewarded, as this creates an incentive for future innovation.

[Mjbmonetarymetals]

He' didn't take any care at all with the bitcoin he mined ........... (quote from post above) ....... Was he already taking precautions in regard to his anonymity at the point he first mined?

[Etlase2]

They deserve to be wealthy.  I fail to get how there is anything whatsoever wrong about someone being rewarded for doing something successful that has improved the world.  People who improve the world should be rewarded, as this creates an incentive for future innovation.

I don't think anyone would have misgivings about Satoshi becoming fairly wealthy because of bitcoin. However, the type of wealth that satoshi is likely to possess is more than just "fairly wealthy" if bitcoin were to supplant a significant amount of the world's wealth store. He would be put right in the place of the bankers on Wall Street. Massive amounts of control over the liquidity of the currency. Able to bend political will to suit his own interests. No one can say for sure what those interests are or how this will play out. But to pretend this is only about jealousy that somebody got rich is a child's game. For the well-respected members of this forum to consistently reply in carefully crafted answers refined over time to downplay the significance of this is unsurprising due to the fact that they are also likely to benefit significantly if this becomes the case, regardless of what they say.

He' didn't take any care at all with the bitcoin he mined ........... (quote from post above) ....... Was he already taking precautions in regard to his anonymity at the point he first mined?

Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.* You can be damn sure he knew quite well how this could play out and that every coin he ever mined is absolutely secure. We're talking about genius here, but it is so easy argue that he was so smart up until it came to keeping track of his money.  

* This is wrong, it was discussed several months prior, quite late in the process of designing an entirely new currency.

[BTC Books]

He' didn't take any care at all with the bitcoin he mined ........... (quote from post above) ....... Was he already taking precautions in regard to his anonymity at the point he first mined?

Of course.  That's obvious, well-documented in 'his' own words, and trivial.

It is also, however, an entirely different thing than taking care with the bitcoin.

[Stunna]

I'd imagine he cashed out a fair amount when they hit a dollar or less even.

[BTC Books]

I'd imagine he cashed out a fair amount when they hit a dollar or less even.

* sigh *

Learn to read the blockchain.  Those early coins haven't moved, for the most part.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I'd imagine he cashed out a fair amount when they hit a dollar or less even.

* sigh *

Learn to read the blockchain.  Those early coins haven't moved, for the most part.

Well roughly 1/3rd of them have.  Maybe not at $1 but the portion moved would be worth a significant amount at $10, or ~$32 (prior peak), or $266 (recent peak).

[mobile4ever]

This assumption is at least partly wrong based on what Hal Finney says in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I noticed the above as well. Hal Finney seems to have been in things very early.

[BTC Books]

I'd imagine he cashed out a fair amount when they hit a dollar or less even.

* sigh *

Learn to read the blockchain.  Those early coins haven't moved, for the most part.

Well roughly 1/3rd of them have.  Maybe not at $1 but the portion moved would be worth a significant amount at $10, or ~$32 (prior peak), or $266 (recent peak).

A third?  I thought it was more like a bit under a quarter.  Eh.

And of those which haven't moved, D&T - got a guess as to how many are lost essentially (yes, quantum...) forever?

[DeathAndTaxes]

I'd imagine he cashed out a fair amount when they hit a dollar or less even.

* sigh *

Learn to read the blockchain.  Those early coins haven't moved, for the most part.

Well roughly 1/3rd of them have.  Maybe not at $1 but the portion moved would be worth a significant amount at $10, or ~$32 (prior peak), or $266 (recent peak).

A third?  I thought it was more like a bit under a quarter.  Eh.

And of those which haven't moved, D&T - got a guess as to how many are lost essentially (yes, quantum...) forever?

No idea.  It really depends on how distributed and casual mining was early on.  If the people who downloaded the client, solved a dozen blocks, and then turned it off and forgot about it is large then the lost coins probably are large also.  If I had to guess I would say 20% to 50% of those early (i.e. difficulty 1 period) coins are lost.

[deepceleron]

Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.

Wrong: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html

[DeathAndTaxes]

Bitcoin was never once publicly discussed prior to its release.

Wrong: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html

Wow didn't even notice that FUD. 

Here is another post about the whitepaper (2008-10-31):
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588/

[hobbes]

Why does Satoshi not slow down / stabilize the price rise...  mid term the Bitcoin price would then rise faster.