Satoshi has how many Bitcoins?

[ThePanCakeKid95]

wait are you sure there were multiple people out there mining at the very beginning?

[Eri]

Yes. Either way, bitcoin needed the people there at each step of the way for it to grow into what it is today. if there wernt people before other people, bitcoin wouldnt have ever grown. The closer people are to the start, the more deserving they are of what they have. Everyone at each and every step of bitcoins life has had a chance to buy in at its current price before the price went higher.

[Cryddit]

Satoshi didn't premine a darn thing.  He had way too much class for that.

That said, he did sic something like sixty computers on mining for the first two years of Bitcoin's life, starting when there were only about fifty people who had ever heard of his cryptocurrency protocol, only about thirty became miners in the first year, and most of them (remember, everyone is CPU mining at this point) were only using single computer.  

So, yah, he's got a lot of coin. About a million by my estimate, making him the first Bitcoin Billionaire as of a few weeks ago when we poked our noses over a thousand bucks a coin.  A bit less than a billionaire now that we're under the thousand again, but let's face it; he's filthy rich if he ever wants to start using his Bitcoin.

[bryant.coleman]

wait are you sure there were multiple people out there mining at the very beginning?

I agree that the first block was mined by Satoshi on 3rd January 2009. But a few days later, people were posting in blogs and forums about mining BTCs. So in the first month, there were probably dozens of miners.

[KonstantinosM]

Satoshi was an idealist, it is very doubtful that he mined a hoard of BTC greater than or even equal to a minute fraction of the Winklevoss brothers or that chinese millionaire.

[ThePanCakeKid95]

it's still just crazy that bitcoin is almost 5 years old soon :0
Any way I still hold my belief that he will never spend those coins

[Cryddit]

It isn't at all doubtful that he mined that much.  He wanted to prove the concept and he felt it absolutely necessary to secure the blockchain so nobody could come along with a really good computer and force a chain reorg. It's all about trust; he wanted Bitcoin to be trusted and therefore it had to have mondo hash power.  Until other people were providing enough hashing power for him to be confident of security, he mined like crazy.

That said, he's an idealist and it isn't very likely he will actually start spending the coins.

[ThePanCakeKid95]

that's actually really interesting, I always thought he had so many computers because he was so passionate, I guess that makes a lot of sence

[pokerman]

I think it is foolish to assume that satoshi was an idealist, we know very little about him/them. No one man should control that much power, this is one of bitcoins fatal shortcomings.

[zhinkk]

Thanks for making the video, nice video!

[bryant.coleman]

that's actually really interesting, I always thought he had so many computers because he was so passionate, I guess that makes a lot of sence

Nope.. atleast in the beginning the hash rate was extremely low. No more than 10 computers were used for mining at any given point of time during the first month. Mining picked up only in mid-2010.   

[ThePanCakeKid95]

yea, but bitcoin was the first coin so the idea and concept of a premine had not yet developed and I don't believe that satoshi has any evil intentions, I believe he started it for moral and idealistic reasons

[Cryddit]

He did in fact announce it.  As widely as he could anyway.  He published the paper, he discussed his paper on the cryptography list, he did everything but jump up and down and wave his arms.  Hardly anybody from the crypto list mined it mostly because hardly anybody thought it would succeed. 

Remember bitcointalk didn't exist, and if it had existed there'd be nobody on it. So announcing it here would have been pretty meaningless.

[ThePanCakeKid95]

lol yea bitcoin is far different than alcoins, I mean basically bitcoin was the original idea

[BitcoinFX]

wait are you sure there were multiple people out there mining at the very beginning?

I was one of the early Bitcoin miners. My port forwarded node had around 15 to 20-ish stable connections for around the first few months. On occasions it would drop to around 10 connections. At around 6 months to a year the total number of connections increased quite quickly.

You had to mine with the Bitcoin client wallet back then using the CPU - it was the only way to mine. I dedicated an older Asus Terminator A7VT as my mining rig running 24/7 to support the Bitcoin project. Its single core Sempron CPU and VIA chipset had some limited crypto accelerator functions and it therefore got a much higher overall hash rate than some of my dual core PC's and other laptops I used at that time.

Most of the early network connections were via proxies / VPNs or through the Tor network. Aside from the IRC node I was one of the few individuals that published a port forwarded static IP. I also ran a Bitcoin node through Tor.

I knew deep down that bitcoin might get very big some day, although sold and traded almost all of my bitcoins within the first 2 years and well before any major price increase. Due to personal cirumstances I had to stop mining for quite sometime and it sadly wasn't 'worth' mining with my limited resources when things started taking off.

If you look at some of my early posts you will see that I predicted a price increase similar to gold/usd. My predictions were correct, although my timing was off - it just seemed to be taking way to long against my calculations for the project to be gaining momentum.

I'm proud to be an early Bitcoin supporter - I helped to advertise Bitcoin and did one of the most important things to help the project i.e. I traded, spent and donated my Bitcoins.

[allthingsluxury]

Thanks for sharing.

[PenAndPaper]

Does anybody here knows how many coins were premined?

There was not a reason for the coin to be premined because even after satoshi announced it he was mining almost by himself 

[ThePanCakeKid95]

that was a very interesting story, thank you so much for sharing. I must also say thank you, it's early adopters like yourself that really made bitcoin and I can't thank you enough for it.

[mateo]

One wallet with 980.000 BTC might just be a time bomb.

There is no BTC wallet with 980K coins. The richest wallet contains 144,341 BTCs and is tagged as DPR Seized Coins.

In my opinion, Satoshi is not possessing a large number of coins. He created the BTC for ideological reasons. Stashing up a large number of coins will be against his morals.

Sure, but there are people who are in possession of such or maybe slightly smaller number of coins. And any one of those people could cause a massive price crash to below a 100 USD/BTC. US government has that power too now.

[ThePanCakeKid95]

Well also you have to realize that the FBI has the seized silkroad coins, that could do a number to the price if they try to sell them off