The "Satoshi Risk"

[coinmore_org]

Firstly, this is not an attack on Bitcoin. I am a huge Bitcoin advocate but i can't seem to get the thought of Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.
Now, we all know Satoshi has this huge stash of Bitcoins and we also know Bitcoin's overall valuation reacts to anything and everything. So im asking...What on Earth would happen if the "great one" was to suddenly move these coins ?  Or what if he/she/they came out of the woodworks and came back to Bitcoin? From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community. Are we immune from (what i like to call) the "Satoshi risk".


P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

P.S.S. Satoshi, if you are reading this, please come back and express your views on how this scaling issue should be addressed (although i don't think your input alone should be the deciding factor considering we have to protect the decentralized/consensus aspects of your great invention)

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[Red-Apple]

Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.

it is not 1 million it is below that, the 1 mil is speculation. the fact is we don't know how many people were mining at the same time as Satoshi.

also i say think about it this way:
Satoshi created a system and keeps calling it a peer to peer digital cash if you have ever read the paper. now do you think someone with the vision of creating a currency is going to "sell" the coins.
i don't think so. if they ever move they will move as a currency. lets say someday staoshi came back and wanted to buy a smart phone with his stash from a local shop, he will go there and pay 1000 satoshi and buy the latest iphone for example

there is nothing to worry in that case! it is just money entering back into circulation.

From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community.

LOL

P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

no it had nothing to do with it.
their reasons were pretty crystal clear.
1. not regulated.
2. end of discussion.

[minime]

Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.

it is not 1 million it is below that, the 1 mil is speculation. the fact is we don't know how many people were mining at the same time as Satoshi.

also i say think about it this way:
Satoshi created a system and keeps calling it a peer to peer digital cash if you have ever read the paper. now do you think someone with the vision of creating a currency is going to "sell" the coins.
i don't think so. if they ever move they will move as a currency. lets say someday staoshi came back and wanted to buy a smart phone with his stash from a local shop, he will go there and pay 1000 satoshi and buy the latest iphone for example

there is nothing to worry in that case! it is just money entering back into circulation.

From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community.

LOL

P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

no it had nothing to do with it.
their reasons were pretty crystal clear.
1. not regulated.
2. end of discussion.

its more than 1.1 million btc...

[amacar2]

Firstly, this is not an attack on Bitcoin. I am a huge Bitcoin advocate but i can't seem to get the thought of Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.

This is just a speculation, nobody knows how many bitcoin addresses actually belongs to satoshi and how much bitcoin those addresses contains.

Now, we all know Satoshi has this huge stash of Bitcoins and we also know Bitcoin's overall valuation reacts to anything and everything. So im asking...What on Earth would happen if the "great one" was to suddenly move these coins ?  Or what if he/she/they came out of the woodworks and came back to Bitcoin? From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community. Are we immune from (what i like to call) the "Satoshi risk".


P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

P.S.S. Satoshi, if you are reading this, please come back and express your views on how this scaling issue should be addressed (although i don't think your input alone should be the deciding factor considering we have to protect the decentralized/consensus aspects of your great invention)

If satoshi even moves 1 bitcoin from one of his known address, there will be huge panic on market which can easily dump the price but this is quite unlikely to happen anytime soon. I don't think satoshi is still alive and watching all this drama and speculation in bitcoin community.

[minime]

Firstly, this is not an attack on Bitcoin. I am a huge Bitcoin advocate but i can't seem to get the thought of Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.

This is just a speculation, nobody knows how many bitcoin addresses actually belongs to satoshi and how much bitcoin those addresses contains.

Now, we all know Satoshi has this huge stash of Bitcoins and we also know Bitcoin's overall valuation reacts to anything and everything. So im asking...What on Earth would happen if the "great one" was to suddenly move these coins ?  Or what if he/she/they came out of the woodworks and came back to Bitcoin? From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community. Are we immune from (what i like to call) the "Satoshi risk".


P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

P.S.S. Satoshi, if you are reading this, please come back and express your views on how this scaling issue should be addressed (although i don't think your input alone should be the deciding factor considering we have to protect the decentralized/consensus aspects of your great invention)

If satoshi even moves 1 bitcoin from one of his known address, there will be huge panic on market which can easily dump the price but this is quite unlikely to happen anytime soon. I don't think satoshi is still alive and watching all this drama and speculation in bitcoin community.

you can find posts here on the forum stating he has some 1.133 million btc
if he would sell just one coin there would be a financial crises in the btc community....
just my 2 cents

[Prodigan786]

Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b) out of my head.

it is not 1 million it is below that, the 1 mil is speculation. the fact is we don't know how many people were mining at the same time as Satoshi.

also i say think about it this way:
Satoshi created a system and keeps calling it a peer to peer digital cash if you have ever read the paper. now do you think someone with the vision of creating a currency is going to "sell" the coins.
i don't think so. if they ever move they will move as a currency. lets say someday staoshi came back and wanted to buy a smart phone with his stash from a local shop, he will go there and pay 1000 satoshi and buy the latest iphone for example

there is nothing to worry in that case! it is just money entering back into circulation.

From what i have researched, Satoshi is a revered entity and almost "God like" in the Bitcoin community.

LOL

P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

no it had nothing to do with it.
their reasons were pretty crystal clear.
1. not regulated.
2. end of discussion.

its more than 1.1 million btc...

How do you say its more than 1.1 million do you have any researched data. I don't think sathoshi will move to sell bitcoin if he really want to do he could have done it long before .Even if he want to sell it may change bit and again it recovers bitcoin grown that much.

[Iranus]

The coins in satoshi's known addresses have been left there and not moved.  It's possible that satoshi is afraid of doing so due to fear of his identity being tracked, or that he no longer has access to those addresses. 

It could also be that he simply doesn't intend to sell, and would rather spend the coins when he can (after all, he did create a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" - why he would sell his real money for fiat I have no idea).

Also, the 1 million figure is quite unlikely to be true, and the couple of hundred thousand that he most likely has in reality would not crash the market as severely as you think, especially since it's extremely unlikely for him to offload all the coins at once and that even if he did, it wouldn't be the end considering trading volume of >1 billion dollars these days.

P.S. I also think the "Satoshi risk" is one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin ETF was rejected.

The SEC were extremely open about their reasons for rejecting the ETF, and are a traditionally conservative institution.  I think this is childish reasoning from you.

P.S.S. Satoshi, if you are reading this, please come back and express your views on how this scaling issue should be addressed

As if no one's asked that before...

[AGD]

Amazing that nobody asked this question before... 

[Brangdon]

Satoshi created a system and keeps calling it a peer to peer digital cash if you have ever read the paper. now do you think someone with the vision of creating a currency is going to "sell" the coins.

He might die, and his heirs might care more about having a couple of billion dollars than they care about Bitcoin.

Imagine if some relative you didn't know you had, died and left you all his stuff, and going through it you found pages of printed out private keys, 50 BTC in each address. Or if you found the printed sheets in a thrift store from when they cleared out his house. I wonder how many people reading this would be able to resist temptation.

[brokedummy]

For all we know he could be the one pumping and dumping the market this whole time. He doesn't ever have to touch the coins people know about, he just knows he has them but he is probably holding many other wallets with coins nobody realizes are his and extracting fiat and precious metals by the truckload. At least that's what I'd do.

[brokedummy]

Satoshi created a system and keeps calling it a peer to peer digital cash if you have ever read the paper. now do you think someone with the vision of creating a currency is going to "sell" the coins.

He might die, and his heirs might care more about having a couple of billion dollars than they care about Bitcoin.

Imagine if some relative you didn't know you had, died and left you all his stuff, and going through it you found pages of printed out private keys, 50 BTC in each address. Or if you found the printed sheets in a thrift store from when they cleared out his house. I wonder how many people reading this would be able to resist temptation.

Do you see a couple billion dollars in orders waiting to buy btc at this price? If they sold more than ten million the slippage would probably be significant.

[|Bitkoin|]

At this stage it isn't something we even need to consider, because there isn't nearly enough volume to be able to sell $2,500,000,000 worth of Bitcoins without everyone noticing and also getting out, which would likely lead to the end of crypto as we know it... at least for a while.

[mudiko]

If he would like to spend his bitcoins in future, it doesn't seem like that he would dump them fast. It would not be logical to dump them fast. Small moves would not be such a huge panic situation. Pricing of bitcoin would decline, but it would not be a crash.

[gentlemand]

1 - He can only sell once.

2 - There's no evidence for this 1 million figure anywhere. There were early miners. Not millions of them, but more than just him.

[BitcoinSupremo]

We cannot know the real amount of bitcoins Satoshi himself holds. Of course he is a very smart, a genius person so he keeps his fortune distributed in many different bitcoin addresses. This way he ensures privacy, he knows very well that if he keep all his bitcoins in a single address, then he can say goodbye to his privacy. At first he did mine a lot of blocks of 50 BTC each which has still coins on them, but soon after a few months Hal Finney joined and he did mine a lot of blocks too. I think it is complicated to check how many coins Satoshi hold. I think we should leave him alone as long as he has decided to stay hidden.

I don't see any "Satoshi Risk". It would only be beneficial to bitcoin if he comes back to the scene(personal opinion).

[Last of the V8s]

So I can tell you with confidence that you mined very few blocks (e.g. 10 blocks)  during that time and you're not millonaire, or you are part of the Satoshi group, period.

Do I get to be Satoshi too? I was off by only a few days... https://i.imgur.com/w57rtbs.png

I know first-hand that there were several different people who mined before January 2010. It's kind of funny that history I've lived through is being questioned...

This 1 million figure was thoroughly debunked long ago by many an old hand. Sergio was wrong about it, and so many things.

[lucasjkr]

I think the most sensible answer is, having created the currency, and presumably, having watched its actions over the years, he'd probably be smart enough not to attempt to dump/swap/exchange all of his coins at once. If the goal was to have a billion dollars, then selling a million coins at market price at the same time would be the surest way NOT to reach that goal.

I assume s/he's still among us, and has plenty more coins aside from the fabled "satoshi" coins to do whatever they want with. But if those original coins did move, I don't get why there would be a freak out. Everyone came into the system knowing, or has since learned, that the mythological satoshi owns what he owns. If the day comes that they want to see some of the fruits of their labor, and that involves moving coins from the earlier blocks, why freak out any more than if they moved coins from later blocks?

[chixka000]

For what bitcoin is being labeled. A peer to peer system. So obviously you can handle your own funds. I think that it is almost imposible for him to move them now(i think the best thing he could do is to create another set of bitcoin that would surely makes him rich).

[HeRetiK]

I hope Satoshi's identity will remain a mystery. His disappearance was one of the smartest moves he ever made - can't discredit a person no one knows, can't influence the price if something happens to him

Should his coins ever move though, it would be akin to Cthulhu's awakening

[Thatstinks]

It's possible his retaining of 1M or more BTC is his form of a kill switch.

His dying and leaving them to others is a huge risk, even if he didn't how are we to know and have peace?

Bottom line, his coins are a distraction, risk and will stop bitcoin from going main stream for fear of collapse.

Satoshi MUST reveal himself, distribute coins to a charity or research and move on.

At this moment he is like a drug king pin sitting on tons of fiat and no where or way to spend it, his coins are virtually worthless to him so why not do a selfless act.

[Andre_Goldman]

We cannot know the real amount of bitcoins Satoshi himself holds. Of course he is a very smart, a genius person so he keeps his fortune distributed in many different bitcoin addresses. This way he ensures privacy, he knows very well that if he keep all his bitcoins in a single address, then he can say goodbye to his privacy. At first he did mine a lot of blocks of 50 BTC each which has still coins on them, but soon after a few months Hal Finney joined and he did mine a lot of blocks too. I think it is complicated to check how many coins Satoshi hold. I think we should leave him alone as long as he has decided to stay hidden.

I don't see any "Satoshi Risk". It would only be beneficial to bitcoin if he comes back to the scene(personal opinion).

Good times ...  Finney was (is?) funny guy ..

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.

lol 

[investinator]

If Satoshi were still alive and cared about bitcoin he would have revealed himself already and said whether he even still has his private keys or what he was planning to do with it. It might cause some initial turbulence but unless he said he was going to dump all of it then such turbulence would be short lived.

Obviously he would have a cult following and people would give a positively biased view to anything he said or suggested but the community is mature enough they could take his advice based on their technical merits rather than anything else.

[Andre_Goldman]

just to put things in perspective ..

Satoshi holds 6.4% of all bitcoin in currently in circulation

source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/satoshi-nakamoto-owns-one-million-bitcoin-700-price-2016-6

even less than Bill Gates Microsoft shares exit plan.

Gates, who owned 49 percent of Microsoft before it went public in 1986, sells about 80 million Microsoft shares a year under a pre-set plan, which if continued would leave him with no financial stake in the company by 2018.... giving up his day-to-day work there in 2008 to focus on the $38 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...Gates owns about 4.5 percent of the $277 billion company and is its largest individual shareholder.

sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-gates-idUSBREA410YS20140503
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/microsoft-gates-resignation-investors_n_4026506.html

so .. I guess if Satoshi adopt a similar exit plan .. bitcoin will survive  ...

ps->
regards Finney and the "fan noise" ... some how reminds me the book "Datacenter as Computer" ... 

A datacenter is a building (or buildings) designed to house computing and storage infrastructure
in a variety of networked formats. Its main function is to deliver the utilities needed by housed
equipment and personnel: power, cooling, shelter, and security. By classic defnitions, there is little
“work” produced by the datacenter. Other than some departing photons, the remainder of the
energy is exclusively converted into heat. Te delivery of input energy and subsequent removal of
waste heat are at the heart of the datacenter’s design and drive the vast majority of costs. Tese costs
are proportional to the amount of power delivered and typically run in the $10–20/Watt range (see
Section 6.1) but can vary considerably depending on size, location, and design.

[x2666]

Yes, people mistakenly believe that because Satoshi has not yet moved his premine that he will never move his premine. There is no guarantee! It may be easy for you as an individual to move into BTC and disregard this risk but for a major financial institution or government to place billions into Bitcoin they must consider this reality.

Satoshi likely has much more than his initial premine as well. I suspect that Satoshi is still lurking the Bitcoin scene and has likely made off like a bandit on every one of these major altcoins.

I think Satoshi is a realist, I don't think he would pass up the opportunity to line his pockets because that inevitably translates to an increased capacity to enact change whatever his agenda may be.

People like to make an idol out of Satoshi but he is a human or group of humans. Satoshi is a rationally self interested actor. Regardless of what people want to think: his ideology is not necessarily the ideology of the average Bitcoin user.

[shamzblueworld]

Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b)
Now, we all know Satoshi has this huge stash of Bitcoins

I did not.
Is it a fact? Who told this? Where is it stated?
And if suppose its true, I don't think that will be the only million bitcoin stash present currently, I bet there will be others with similar(may be a little smaller in quantity) stash of bitcoin just up their sleeve, and not circulating in the blockchain.

[pooya87]

what you see as risk i only see as an opportunity, a golden one actually.
if Satoshi some day decided to do what you said and sell those coins that just means a whale is getting rid of his stash while contributing to a better distribution of bitcoin.
i have said it multiple times before, whenever a whale dumps it is an opportunity for the rest of us to force that whale to decrease his stash or be forced to buy at higher price instead and pay a larger sum of money. the same will be true in case of Satoshi.

[Happydd]

Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins (worth $2.5b)
Now, we all know Satoshi has this huge stash of Bitcoins

I did not.
Is it a fact? Who told this? Where is it stated?
And if suppose its true, I don't think that will be the only million bitcoin stash present currently, I bet there will be others with similar(may be a little smaller in quantity) stash of bitcoin just up their sleeve, and not circulating in the blockchain.

I think it is not raised anywhere, it is only predicted. All of us are always thinking and predicting what is going to happen, through a series of events, they always have a bitcoin instability, and I hope it can pass soon....

[x2666]

what you see as risk i only see as an opportunity, a golden one actually.
if Satoshi some day decided to do what you said and sell those coins that just means a whale is getting rid of his stash while contributing to a better distribution of bitcoin.
i have said it multiple times before, whenever a whale dumps it is an opportunity for the rest of us to force that whale to decrease his stash or be forced to buy at higher price instead and pay a larger sum of money. the same will be true in case of Satoshi.

That is an opinion. I understand where you are coming from but the Satoshi stash is a technicality. Technically, no matter which way you look at it, he has the ability to crash the market in a way which it will not recover from, at least for a long time. Although I do not believe Satoshi will try to destroy his own creation it is entirely possible that he may. This is the unavoidable truth.

[slackcryptoz]

As the op thinking if he's holding a big sum of bitcoin and suddenly release to the market there will be a sudden price increase and nothing big happens. Now he holds a big stash of some other big whales holding a big sum of bitcoin making price manipulation in between.

[SplinterZalinsk]

I'm not Dorian Nakamoto!

[Welshmaiden]

Personally I doubt very much that satoshi would crash the market by cashing out. He is probably already a very rich man. A genius like satoshi would not have created such an amazing innovation and hand it over to mankind to set them free. Just so that he can pull the plug. This is his contribution to a better world. He more than likely is quite satisfied already with his accomplishments. He has also probably already taken his share of riches at some point. Some things are worth much much more than money. He will know exactly how much responsibility he has.

[BitcoinSupremo]

We cannot know the real amount of bitcoins Satoshi himself holds. Of course he is a very smart, a genius person so he keeps his fortune distributed in many different bitcoin addresses. This way he ensures privacy, he knows very well that if he keep all his bitcoins in a single address, then he can say goodbye to his privacy. At first he did mine a lot of blocks of 50 BTC each which has still coins on them, but soon after a few months Hal Finney joined and he did mine a lot of blocks too. I think it is complicated to check how many coins Satoshi hold. I think we should leave him alone as long as he has decided to stay hidden.

I don't see any "Satoshi Risk". It would only be beneficial to bitcoin if he comes back to the scene(personal opinion).

Good times ...  Finney was (is?) funny guy ..

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.

lol 

Unfortunately Finney died of a Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis which he announced on 2009 in his essay blog and died on 28 August 2014 (sad times for bitcoin enthusiasts). Good thing is he left guide and skills regarding his bitcoins to his daughter, or at least so he claimed.

[hatshepsut93]

Well, bitcoin addresses are public, so it should b easy to trace how much of Bitcoins were not moved since 2009-2010. Also, Satoshi might be scared to move his Bitcoins because it will deanonymize, since many people strongly suspect that those early addresses belong to him. And even if Satoshi does dump his coins, it will crash Bitcoin only for short term, it will recover and keep growing later for sure.

[shayshaylaboogie]

Personally I doubt very much that satoshi would crash the market by cashing out. He is probably already a very rich man. A genius like satoshi would not have created such an amazing innovation and hand it over to mankind to set them free. Just so that he can pull the plug. This is his contribution to a better world. He more than likely is quite satisfied already with his accomplishments. He has also probably already taken his share of riches at some point. Some things are worth much much more than money. He will know exactly how much responsibility he has.

This. If those coins move, even to another wallet, the market will crash in anticipation if them going to an exchange and hitting an order book. So basically, I think that he can never touch those coins again without creating a panic. If that's obvious to me, I'm pretty sure it has occurred to him as the creator of bitcoin.

Moving those coins would be a killswitch for bitcoin. I don't think the creator would want to do that to his creation, especially if it started to take off as it is now.

[squatz1]

The thing with this is that I feel if Satoshi was still around / still had access to his coins, he probably would've sold by now and done it slowly. As sad as it sounds to practically be saying stuff like that about our GOD, you have to think about it from his perspective. The guy has pretty much been out of Bitcoin for years at this point, and what would be better for him personally, to just leave all of his bitcoins sitting in his wallet or just going ahead and selling off his portion of the coins and living a nice life because of it.

There is a risk if someone was to ever find saotshis coins and sell them, but that risk is going to be present in any commodity. What if someone discovers a fuck ton of gold, silver, etc and so on and so forth.

[SplinterZalinsk]

Personally I doubt very much that satoshi would crash the market by cashing out. He is probably already a very rich man. A genius like satoshi would not have created such an amazing innovation and hand it over to mankind to set them free. Just so that he can pull the plug. This is his contribution to a better world. He more than likely is quite satisfied already with his accomplishments. He has also probably already taken his share of riches at some point. Some things are worth much much more than money. He will know exactly how much responsibility he has.

Thanks for understand me I appreciate that

[UCHCHILD]

I guess it is not impossible that satoshi got a one million of bitcoin or more but then for sure satoshi is rich man now and also for sure he is generous he will not let people suffer for his own greediness but then he help though from the very first place he created thia coin to create money for his own but then I think he gets what he wants already also he will not make his name bad just because he withdraw this money for sure he wil make some solution not to let the coin down. This makes him popular and will not let his name be stained by himself.