There was no premine. It was open to anyone from minute one. Hardly anyone but him cared.
That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin is so unique. A launch with that level of purity can never happen again.
Bitcoin is unique among all cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is the true revolution, everything else is derivative. Even Bitcoin has precursors in much of the technology, but Satoshi uniquely put the pieces together and distributed the first versions of Bitcoin and launched the blockchain, mining when Bitcoin was worthless and encouraging others to join and really to experiment, test, build, explore what we now know as a new paradigm. Satoshi saw what could be and
created it. And when no one else saw his vision, he mined it and continued, because he
believed in it.
Then following Satoshi were some of the other cypherpunks, some of which you see as people with low user ids on this forum. They believed in the power of Bitcoin, and I have to admit that when I first looked at the technology in late 2011/early 2012 I thought it was pretty impressive and a great idea. However, I didn't realize just how revolutionary it was, probably because of my own experience in seeing how innovative ideas that are
dangerous to the status quo are too often stifled. I believed the power of "the powers that be" would kill Bitcoin were it ever to come close to threatening their businesses. Banking, after all, is the biggest of the big, the most deeply entrenched of all of the structures of control that have shaped civilization. You think governments are bad? Ok, bad example, they are. But
banks are so much worse. The control wielded by those that control the money is immense, even governments are subservient to those powers. But the power of the many is greater than the power of the few, and the ability to exchange information of all types (including Bitcoin blocks, but also including tweets, YouTube videos, and this very post) with all people, means that the many will defeat the few.
Bitcoin is a great example of what can emerge when people work toward a shared goal and strongly believe in something.
Bitcoin has value because we value it. I know that sounds cliche, but I believe that to be the case for anything of value. If nobody wanted to buy the Hope Diamond, it would be worth nothing. In May of 2010 was the first known Bitcoin purchase of a real-world item, the infamous Bitcoin pizza (actually the wiki is telling me two pizzas) for 10,000 BTC. At that time, these pizzas had more value to laszlo than the BTC, or at least he wanted pizza more and felt that 10,000 BTC was a fair trade (based on the price of the pizza, each BTC was worth $0.0041 at that time). From that point forward, Bitcoin proved that it can be used as a form of money. As more people got involved in mining it, and more people studied the economic model around Bitcoin (~21M BTC, 50 BTC block reward, halving, etc.), it began to establish value through the same supply and demand dynamics, as well as through the store of value properties that underlie a currency.
No one (at least known to the public) knows how many BTC Satoshi mined, though I do believe some of the estimates are based on sound reasoning. I hope he is happy with his creation and his great contribution to humanity. In the years and decades ahead, the creation of Bitcoin and its blockchain will be recognized as a turning point in human history. I also hope that he has earned enough money from addresses that maybe we don't know about to live comfortably.
I believe that as long as Bitcoin remains true to its purpose and the people involved with it believe in its power, that it will never cease to be relevant. It will live in monetary history in perpetuity, like gold. The dedicated people who maintain Bitcoin are really contributing to something far greater, the reshaping of society around principles of decentralization and the removal of power from the few, giving it to the many. If Bitcoin were to "fail", it could cast doubt on this overarching aim. But so long as the people that maintain Bitcoin continue to do so with integrity, and that the software and the blockchain and protocols it implements are maintained to keep up with the pace of change, Bitcoin will remain the true gold standard. I believe that they will.
Best regards,
Ben
