Satoshi might be mentally derranged

[doobadoo]

You know, Satoshi's mind about how these things should come together would provide great incites for the project here.
Challenges:
1) How to prune the blockchain correctly
2) What to do about centralized trading houses (ideas for a decentralize exchange)
3) Suggestions for improving Bitcoin PR

Who is this fucking guy to put so much time and effort into building something so well thought out and engineered to such detail, and then to fucking disappear and not even put up an occasional post with suggestions to improve the project?  I'm starting to think that Satoshi may have been mentally unstable.  Working anonymously ---> paranoid.  Not checking in ---> greatly disturbed that things went in a direction he didn't anticipate and so he goes 'fuck it!'.

I think this fucking nut might have just deleted all those early coins he mined in a fit of rage, seriously, starting to think this.  Most of those early blocks never moved.  Many of those early guys just didn't think anything would come of it and deleted the client & wallet.  But a lot of those early blocks GOT to be his.  Maybe he mined about 1 million early coins (thoughts about how much of a stake he had).   You mean to tell me when the fucking thing got to $250 and priced his 1 mil coin stash at $250 mil, he didn't unload a few million bucks worth? 

Seriously, how wealth could this guy have been for not wanting to sell a little and greatly up his lifestyle by selling say 5%.  It does not compute.  I think the guy just trashed his wallet file in anger/paranoia that there would be some kind of backlash when they had wikileaks accept BTC.  He put up that paranoid post about how it would attract all the wrong attention and then bailed.

Its either this or he suddenly died without leaving instructions to loved ones for taking procession of the coins.

Well that's my official Satoshi is fucked in the head theory!  Hope I didn't offend the Crypto-Jesus disciples too much there.

[1714129363]

1714129363

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

You know, Satoshi's mind about how these things should come together would provide great incites for the project here.
Challenges:
1) How to prune the blockchain correctly
2) What to do about centralized trading houses (ideas for a decentralize exchange)
3) Suggestions for improving Bitcoin PR

Who is this fucking guy to put so much time and effort into building something so well thought out and engineered to such detail, and then to fucking disappear and not even put up an occasional post with suggestions to improve the project?  I'm starting to think that Satoshi may have been mentally unstable.  Working anonymously ---> paranoid.  Not checking in ---> greatly disturbed that things went in a direction he didn't anticipate and so he goes 'fuck it!'.

I think this fucking nut might have just deleted all those early coins he mined in a fit of rage, seriously, starting to think this.  Most of those early blocks never moved.  Many of those early guys just didn't think anything would come of it and deleted the client & wallet.  But a lot of those early blocks GOT to be his.  Maybe he mined about 1 million early coins (thoughts about how much of a stake he had).   You mean to tell me when the fucking thing got to $250 and priced his 1 mil coin stash at $250 mil, he didn't unload a few million bucks worth?  

Seriously, how wealth could this guy have been for not wanting to sell a little and greatly up his lifestyle by selling say 5%.  It does not compute.  I think the guy just trashed his wallet file in anger/paranoia that there would be some kind of backlash when they had wikileaks accept BTC.  He put up that paranoid post about how it would attract all the wrong attention and then bailed.

Its either this or he suddenly died without leaving instructions to loved ones for taking procession of the coins.

Well that's my official Satoshi is fucked in the head theory!  Hope I didn't offend the Crypto-Jesus disciples too much there.

This! There is no way he could just leave. Gavin did say that they communicated for a while after he left the board, but he is not revealing much, when he should. He even knows Satoshi's e-mail.

[Come-from-Beyond]

You mean to tell me when the fucking thing got to $250 and priced his 1 mil coin stash at $250 mil, he didn't unload a few million bucks worth? 

Start selling 1 million coins and you get only 10 million USD max. The market is too small.

[John Self]

How about he cared more about this project than personal riches and glory, and is helping under a new name. Just a thought.

[doobadoo]

Then slowly sell 50K on the way up to $250.  That would have been $10 mil+.  The market cap briefly touched $2.5 BILLION, there was room for $10 mil of sales.  And i think if 1,000 blocks worth of coinbase coins started to move, blockchain vigilantes would have posted about it.  

The dude is either dead, unbelievably concentrating his wealth into the success of the project, or he lost his coins.

It can't be that he's heavily invested without being drawn in to do SOMETHING to move the project along.  Why not sell $100K and fund the foundation better?  Why not come back and offer 100 BTC bounties for folks to push ahead on features, pruning, and performance?  

Dude is either dead, or had a meltdown and trashed his coins intentionally or accidentally.

Either way, you might as just as well consider the 'total supply goal' 20 mil, not 21 mil coins.

[DeathAndTaxes]

1) Roughly 30% of the first year coins have moved.  Maybe he did sell a good chunk of his coins, enough to cover his expenses.  If he is trying to live below the radar I doubt he is looking to buy 200 ft super yachts and trips to space.

2) IMHO Satoshi is almost certainly a group of people.

3) How do you know "he" (as in one or more of the individuals that made up Satoshi) isn't here right now just working under his/her real name.

4) People die.  Not even talking about CIA black team stuff.  Maybe bad luck he walked out in front of a bus and since nobody from his "real life" knew the connection to Bitcoin and nobody from Bitcoin world knew his real identity we will just see that as a founder who simply never communicates ... ever.

[BitDreams]

You are Satoshi just messing with us right?

[anonymous_acc]

May be he just a one of CIA agents, than he combine crypto hobby with his original job, plus create by government request a wonderful meme "Satoshi".

[BubbleBoy]

Roger is a crypto, tech and privacy guy. He's not a PR person, not a finance guy to fix exchanges, and not an economist - obviously form the macro design. So he can't help you with those problems.

He put up a rough draft of a privacy-oriented payment protocol, see it through beta launch, and moved on to other important projects like Tor. He chose to stay anonymous precisely because he knew what kind of freaks his design would initially attract, and being associated with this early cryptocurrency that anarchist and junkies love would affect other things, like getting grants from the US government to develop Tor.

[doobadoo]

4) People die.  Not even talking about CIA black team stuff.  Maybe bad luck he walked out in front of a bus and since nobody from his "real life" knew the connection to Bitcoin and nobody from Bitcoin world knew his real identity we will just see that as a founder who simply never communicates ... ever.

But he made a clear exit before disappearing.  So if he died shortly after its coincidental.

ONLY 30%.   Those first year coins are concentrated into only several dozen people's hands.  Some never thought it was going anywhere and deleted the wallet.  But that can't account for SO many unmoved coins.  

2.6 mil first year coins.   At least 600k mined by Satoshi, mostly in the middle 6 months when difficulty was anemic and a handful of computers would score half the blocks.  

2 mil mined by other early adopters, 500k deleted (25%) because they thought they wouldn't go anywhere.   That leaves maybe 1.5 mil that hung on.  Assume they as a group sold at least half in the various run -ups (750k).  That gets you to about 30%.   Not much room there for Satoshi to do much selling.

By early 2010 the difficulty started to shoot up, so his computers probably were only scoring a handful of blocks/day at most, and by middle to end of 2010, looks like only maybe one or two a week.  So most of his coins were made in the first year.

[Luckybit]

You know, Satoshi's mind about how these things should come together would provide great incites for the project here.
Challenges:
1) How to prune the blockchain correctly
2) What to do about centralized trading houses (ideas for a decentralize exchange)
3) Suggestions for improving Bitcoin PR

Who is this fucking guy to put so much time and effort into building something so well thought out and engineered to such detail, and then to fucking disappear and not even put up an occasional post with suggestions to improve the project?  I'm starting to think that Satoshi may have been mentally unstable.  Working anonymously ---> paranoid.  Not checking in ---> greatly disturbed that things went in a direction he didn't anticipate and so he goes 'fuck it!'.

I think this fucking nut might have just deleted all those early coins he mined in a fit of rage, seriously, starting to think this.  Most of those early blocks never moved.  Many of those early guys just didn't think anything would come of it and deleted the client & wallet.  But a lot of those early blocks GOT to be his.  Maybe he mined about 1 million early coins (thoughts about how much of a stake he had).   You mean to tell me when the fucking thing got to $250 and priced his 1 mil coin stash at $250 mil, he didn't unload a few million bucks worth? 

Seriously, how wealth could this guy have been for not wanting to sell a little and greatly up his lifestyle by selling say 5%.  It does not compute.  I think the guy just trashed his wallet file in anger/paranoia that there would be some kind of backlash when they had wikileaks accept BTC.  He put up that paranoid post about how it would attract all the wrong attention and then bailed.

Its either this or he suddenly died without leaving instructions to loved ones for taking procession of the coins.

Well that's my official Satoshi is fucked in the head theory!  Hope I didn't offend the Crypto-Jesus disciples too much there.

Here is the problem highlighted in this algorithm http://theconversation.com/out-of-our-hands-the-hidden-dangers-of-high-frequency-trading-3750

It's now an arms race between the whitehats of the Bitcoin community who want Bitcoin to be a success and the blackhats who want to exploit Bitcoin for their own profits.  It's an arms race between both sides because whichever side produces the better algorithm and code will win.

[DeathAndTaxes]

But he made a clear exit before disappearing.  So if he died shortly after its coincidental.

Most people don't plan on getting hit by a bus so yes it was implied it was coincidental.  Now when someone exception dies it is generally a big deal but in Satoshi case who would know.  I doubt he walked around wearing a "My name is Satoshi, and I invented Bitcoin" t-shirt.

[noedaRDH]

Does it really matter if Satoshi is not mentally well? What difference does that make?

[doobadoo]

Does it really matter if Satoshi is not mentally well? What difference does that make?

Just speculating.  I'm just amazed by the permanent departure.  We could use the guy right about now.

[bg002h]

I think he intended to become rich. I think he intended to remain anonymous to make it easier for people to forget that advancing Bitcoin makes him richer. In fact, all future Bitcoin users are what speculators are banking on for profit. It's not that different from a Ponzi scheme...but it's not technically a Ponzi scheme (Or, it's no more a Ponzi scheme than fiat).

[marcus_of_augustus]

Is it possible Satosi is actually an alter-ego for someone with severe multiple personality disorder?

Someone out there, probably a plumber or a farmer, who inexplicably finds himself on the web not knowing what he has been doing for the past 2 days when he snaps back to John Doe mode from cyber-Satoshi uber ninja mode.

Just think any one of you, in fact it is more likely if you are given to more paranoiac fantasies like OP, could actually have an unencrypted v0.1bitcoin wallet stashed away in random directory that your other half (satoshi) was using and it is worth $100 million (or more) ... better start trawling your sub-directories now for suspicious looking files from Jan 2009  

Of course if the MPD was severe cyber-satoshi would probably have gone the whole hawg and backed it up on USB pen drive and hid it under your house in the crawl space or in the roof space somewhere ... should check there also if you think you might be harbouring a cyber-Satoshi alter ego within ... maybe a session at the hypnotherapist will tease him out?

[Luno]

The lessons learned from the legal aftermatch of the e-gold venture, should be enough to have him regret having started this several times along the path of Bitcoin evolution. I don't think that he possessed prophetic skills beyond average, knowing that Bitcoin would challenge most legal frameworks concerning money and transactions. However realizing that this could fall back on him at some point if it ever became a reality, his move was smart.

Gavin picking up the torch is actually just as bold a move. The fact that he is one of the early core developers, though not the inventor, makes little difference if there ever is crackdown on Bitcoin itself.

I'm convinced that Satoshi never intended to personally get stinking rich or had a vision of Bitcoin as a vehicle for speculation on the scale it's happening now. The block 0 embedded message suggests that this was an attempt to create the ultimate barter currency that could be used internationally and still be in the control of the many.

In that respect Bitcoin has failed big time and human nature as well!

As a Bitcoin user you have the choice of either saving or using them for the intended purpose! If people just stick to their coins, we are proving the Keynesians right. If Bitcoin is used as a store of value, centralization will be the result, that's why banks were invented in the first place.

Bitcoins core value is in it's use as a small payment system cheaper and faster than other methods and for making internet payments possible for people without a credit card. If you want to move millions around the world, go to your bank or use your gold Master Card and pay your fees!

Being a currency of limited supply, higher real life use for small transactions can not avoid driving the price of each Bitcoin to a higher level. All the 8 decimal places in the current system are there so we never run out of coins, not for you to become stinking rich.

So If Satoshi had the intent of gaining personally from Bitcoin big time, the whole motivation for creating Bitcoin in the first place, was a lie and he is nothing more than a con artist. If he ever spends them, history will question his original motives. His only option is to give them away as a gift!

[BitDreams]

We are all Satoshi.

[Lethos]

I've known exceptionally gifted programmers in one industry which I've dabbled in quiet a bit over the years (Games), who were not immune to also doing some exceptionally stupid stuff outside of their work life, which sometimes meant they went "missing". Also some of them just don't like to stick around after a project is finished, they prefer to work on something new. After a while maybe Satoshi felt he didn't need to risk sticking around if keeping his identity secret was that important to him.

Example:
When I say exceptionally gifted, I mean, programmed an entire game engine by himself in a matter of months, potentially rivalling some of the best in the industry, but got himself locked up in prison for 6-12 months on DUI but with no means to contact us (he was always abit of a hermit so didn't keep much on him) and with us not knowing how or what happened to him, we were left with code we barely understood without him or his completed documentation. He apparently accepted his sentence and left it at that.

By the time he got out, the project had moved on, taking 6+ months to figure out a small portion of his code of course, it essentially crashed the project without him. We moved on to other projects while every so often taking a poke to understand what little we could get to work.
For him he was a different person, took a very long time before he even got back into coding, prison was not kind to him.
A few years Later he actually did get the engine fully working, in just a few days, but it was abit out dated by then, he barely changed anything but he knew what he was doing with it to finish the final stages. It was still pretty impressive for by nearly 3 years old by then.

Just because he was clearly a gifted individual, doesn't mean he didn't also have his problems just like everyone else. Or maybe he just felt like their was nothing more for him to add here and is off doing something else under another alias.

[Anon136]

Isn't it possible that he is working on something more important than bitcoin now?