Satoshi's canary

[Bennmann]

It is well known that Satoshi mined the earliest bitcoins, and that they sit untouched to this day, growing in value. I have not seen this theory before, but what if Satoshi (whether he be a group or individual) made this largest account of the currency and threw away the private key? He would do this so that it would incentivize the most malicious attackers to attack that account first as the biggest, most well known large account if they found a SHA2 vulnerability, and in this way he has a miner's canary in place to warn him or the devs to switch to a new hash the moment that account moves in any way?

The best security code is written not in programming language, but in predicting the intent of your enemies...

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[codesuela]

interesting theory. however I doubt it is true because if one address/private key can be feasibly compromised the whole network is in danger and switching to a new hash would be too late. Bitcoin would loose all it's value overnight.

[zoinky]

It is well known that Satoshi mined the earliest bitcoins, and that they sit untouched to this day, growing in value

Is this well known?

to attack that account first as the biggest, most well known large account

From what I know the early "satoshi mined blocks" are individually mined into their own addresses.  So the holding is spread out among many different addresses, meaning there is no one "big account".  There are much bigger addresses that an attacker would target.

...threw away the private key

I doubt he threw away his private keys.

[Jozzaboy]

Threw away the keys to a fortune? I doubt it. I bet he just has the keys inside a snappable piece of plastic. Like nuclear launch codes

[Hawkix]

Satoshi private holdings are protected using ECDSA crypto, not SHA256, which is used just for proof of work.

[chriswilmer]

It is well known that Satoshi mined the earliest bitcoins, and that they sit untouched to this day, growing in value. I have not seen this theory before, but what if Satoshi (whether he be a group or individual) made this largest account of the currency and threw away the private key? He would do this so that it would incentivize the most malicious attackers to attack that account first as the biggest, most well known large account if they found a SHA2 vulnerability, and in this way he has a miner's canary in place to warn him or the devs to switch to a new hash the moment that account moves in any way?

The best security code is written not in programming language, but in predicting the intent of your enemies...

They aren't in one bitcoin address, they are in hundreds of bitcoin addresses each holding exactly 50 bitcoins (they never moved after mining).

Personally, I think they will never get spent.

[DannyHamilton]

Satoshi private holdings are protected using ECDSA crypto, not SHA256, which is used just for proof of work.

Were the early blocks paid to a public key instead of a bitcoin address?

If they were paid to a bitcoin address, then they should be protected using 3 algorithms: ECDSA, SHA256, and RIPEMD160.  All three algorithms would have to be completely broken simultaneously to generate a private key from a bitcoin address.  If any one (or 2) algorithms were broken, the unbroken algorithm(s) would keep the bitcoins secure until the broken one(s) were replaced.

[gmaxwell]

Were the early blocks paid to a public key instead of a bitcoin address?

They were, not just the very early ones— thats just the behavior of the internal miner.  And yes, arguably these are a bit of a canary against ecdsa breaks.