Satoshi Nakamoto - 1,5 million Bitcoins - We need answers

[molecular]

But I think that until the person(s) behind Bitcoin doesn't come forward I think that the best I can do is to reconsider if I should invest time and money into this project.

Same here. So I've decided not to invest until I know who are people that labeled themselves 'Satoshi'.

I don't understand. What would it change if he/they came forward? You don't need to trust Satoshi, you need to trust math, mainly.

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[ttk2]

But I think that until the person(s) behind Bitcoin doesn't come forward I think that the best I can do is to reconsider if I should invest time and money into this project.

Same here. So I've decided not to invest until I know who are people that labeled themselves 'Satoshi'.

We know exactly what Bitcoin is, line for line you can see exactly what it is and what is does, we know its secure and we know there are no backdoors or methods of control available to anyone. Thats all that matters, could Santoishi have another purpose for Bitcoin, other than the obvious experiment in digital money? Hell yes, but that does not mean we can not use it in the mean time.  

[becoin]

But I think that until the person(s) behind Bitcoin doesn't come forward I think that the best I can do is to reconsider if I should invest time and money into this project.

Same here. So I've decided not to invest until I know who are people that labeled themselves 'Satoshi'.

We know exactly what Bitcoin is, line for line you can see exactly what it is and what is does, we know its secure and we know there are no backdoors or methods of control available to anyone. Thats all that matters, could Santoishi have another purpose for Bitcoin, other than the obvious experiment in digital money? Hell yes, but that does not mean we can not use it in the mean time.  

I want to know who are those people that I'm going to make rich? Very rich.

[Zibbo]

I want to know who are those people that I'm going to make rich? Very rich.

Why?

[the joint]

I want to know who are those people that I'm going to make rich? Very rich.

Why?

Smack.

[becoin]

I want to know who are those people that I'm going to make rich? Very rich.

Why?

Because I need to be sure the world will be a better place for my children to live in.

[Gabi]

You can still go back using dollars...

[GriphZero]

Just a quick look at Pident:
http://pident.artefact2.com/factoids

Made it easy to find one large stash of 424,242 BTC sitting right here:
http://pident.artefact2.com/tx/7a2a6f66e87ed4e72d85ba7a82eda1572605c3330c461e171f58d7ff2763ac63

[elggawf]

Made it easy to find one large stash of 424,242 BTC sitting right here:
http://pident.artefact2.com/tx/7a2a6f66e87ed4e72d85ba7a82eda1572605c3330c461e171f58d7ff2763ac63

That's not Satoshi, that's MtGox.

[ThomasV]

My questions:
How many Bitcoins in total does "Nakamoto" have?

If this is a sincere question, I would like to know why you chose a title that suggests that Satoshi holds 1.5 million BTC.
Trying to spread FUD ?

[kokojie]

The largest "confirmed" holding by one person was 320k BTC a few months ago (the guy manages tens of thousands of company servers, and used CPU miner to mine when server is idle, he did this at an early stage of btc mining), and he already said he was liquidating his coins weekly. So I doubt any one person has more than 300k btc at this point.

[Cryptoman]

I want to know who are those people that I'm going to make rich? Very rich.

Why?

Because I need to be sure the world will be a better place for my children to live in.

You can always stick with the existing monetary system and continue to enrich politicians and bankers at the expense of ordinary people.

[molecular]

EDIT: this puts a lower bound to the answer of question 1: "How many Bitcoins in total does "Nakamoto" have?" (assuming "Nakamoto" means "Satoshi and friends"). Answer: at least 1.2 Million.

No it doesn't, because the fact that the coins haven't moved is not proof positive that someone is still in possession of them.

True. I am wrong.

We'll probably never have proof-positive they're not, because a) no one's going to admit to burning what's now worth a few million bucks and b) there's no way to prove you're not in control of them anyway.

You're assuming he lost the keys.

Given how long Bitcoins went being almost completely worthless, I would hazard a guess that a not insignificant portion of those BTC will never move, ever.

I don't think he lost keys. He's just not that careless and he was fully aware bitcoin could work well.

Now let me ask another question: How many miners where there in 2009?

[memvola]

Yet we haven't witnessed an intense development effort for such novel systems before or since Bitcoin. There were many different plans for a distributed currency (e.g. a distributed anonymous version of ripple), but only by a handful of people. In my experience, you just can't and don't work on such stuff if you intend to get rich. He must have imagined gaining wealth as a consequence of his success, but the reason the structure is built this way is definitely about success of the currency. As a consequence, people who believed in it got to have more coins. Even so, there are many early adopters who (at least claim to) have very little coins left.

To me, this is a a weak argument.  Obviously, we haven't witnessed  an "intense development effort for such novel systems" since Bitcoin because that would be a period of what...2 years?  And, the Internet has only been around for a couple decades before Bitcoin.  The age of digital global information exchange is still in its infancy.  And, I would argue there have been novel attempts on a smaller systemic scale.  Linden dollars, for one.  Did Linden dollars make the 2nd life owners wealthy?   You betcha.  Now you got Facebook Credits.  Perhaps you could even go before digital communication and look at things like Baseball Cards, the popularity of which exploded in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  This could be thought of as a currency for kids (after all, there were price guides that pegged the value of a baseball card to a fiat currency).  Who got rich?  Baseball card manufacturers (the Satoshis)  and card shops (the exchanges).

Edit:  With the baseball card analogy, although they were also very popular back in the days when kids put them in the spokes of their bicycle wheels and milk men delivered them at your door, the explosion of popularity in the late 80's and early 90's was aided through digital communication.  Online price guides, auctions, etc.  helped to 'stabilize' the value of cards.

None of those are novel, technology-wise. It's like comparing building a coal plant and inventing a new type of plant that can generate electricity in your home for free. You don't just go and invent the latter, by yourself, to get rich quick with the free electricity. If there were such a possibility, you would see your investor types throwing immense amounts of manpower at it. Satoshi is a single guy who rowed against the current to prove something and won.

Baseball card manufacturers and Satoshi? Come On! Maybe it's more appropriate to compare the ixcoin guy with baseball card people. It's not about the similarities between the card economy and Bitcoin economy, really.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Looking back, it's hard to imagine the risk a guy like that is taking by investing his time and mind towards such a project. It seems obvious now. On the other hand, you have to know that a lot of brilliant people take the same risk but can't attain their goal. I don't see a lot of people competing with or queuing behind those people. We did come here because Bitcoin was already successful.

[Rodyland]

Go all, mine xicoin, or whatever the scam of the day is called, we all know that it will explode in 2013!

this

[nrd525]

If the founder(s) had most of their assets in bitcoins (which seems likely unless they were millionaires due to other ventures), it makes sense that they would have sold at least enough of them to still be rich if the price totally collapsed). 

Most people don't put all their money into a single asset - unless that asset has a historical record for stability.

An interesting parallel question: Would you invest in gold or silver if you knew a couple people, who refused to reveal their names, had cornered 20% of the market?

[the joint]

Yet we haven't witnessed an intense development effort for such novel systems before or since Bitcoin. There were many different plans for a distributed currency (e.g. a distributed anonymous version of ripple), but only by a handful of people. In my experience, you just can't and don't work on such stuff if you intend to get rich. He must have imagined gaining wealth as a consequence of his success, but the reason the structure is built this way is definitely about success of the currency. As a consequence, people who believed in it got to have more coins. Even so, there are many early adopters who (at least claim to) have very little coins left.

To me, this is a a weak argument.  Obviously, we haven't witnessed  an "intense development effort for such novel systems" since Bitcoin because that would be a period of what...2 years?  And, the Internet has only been around for a couple decades before Bitcoin.  The age of digital global information exchange is still in its infancy.  And, I would argue there have been novel attempts on a smaller systemic scale.  Linden dollars, for one.  Did Linden dollars make the 2nd life owners wealthy?   You betcha.  Now you got Facebook Credits.  Perhaps you could even go before digital communication and look at things like Baseball Cards, the popularity of which exploded in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  This could be thought of as a currency for kids (after all, there were price guides that pegged the value of a baseball card to a fiat currency).  Who got rich?  Baseball card manufacturers (the Satoshis)  and card shops (the exchanges).

Edit:  With the baseball card analogy, although they were also very popular back in the days when kids put them in the spokes of their bicycle wheels and milk men delivered them at your door, the explosion of popularity in the late 80's and early 90's was aided through digital communication.  Online price guides, auctions, etc.  helped to 'stabilize' the value of cards.

None of those are novel, technology-wise. It's like comparing building a coal plant and inventing a new type of plant that can generate electricity in your home for free. You don't just go and invent the latter, by yourself, to get rich quick with the free electricity. If there were such a possibility, you would see your investor types throwing immense amounts of manpower at it. Satoshi is a single guy who rowed against the current to prove something and won.

Baseball card manufacturers and Satoshi? Come On! Maybe it's more appropriate to compare the ixcoin guy with baseball card people. It's not about the similarities between the card economy and Bitcoin economy, really.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Looking back, it's hard to imagine the risk a guy like that is taking by investing his time and mind towards such a project. It seems obvious now. On the other hand, you have to know that a lot of brilliant people take the same risk but can't attain their goal. I don't see a lot of people competing with or queuing behind those people. We did come here because Bitcoin was already successful.

Being novel technology-wise has nothing to do with the plausibility of him wanting to get rich fast.  If you're a programmer, and you're that good at it, chances are you're not also a major league baseball player, or a CEO, or a stock broker, etc.  He utilized his talents to make money, and it's not hard to understand.  That's like saying a musician signed with a major record label but didn't want to be rich; he simply wanted to spread his music around for people to be happy.  How does the fact that it's technologically novel suggest that he didn't want to get rich?  If I had the programming skills, I'd do it.  By the way, the risk of developing the code (if he is that good) would be maybe a couple weeks/months time, if that.  The only hard part was the math (even the theoretical concept isn't that difficult -- just think about what you would want in a currency -- but the math is).  It would have taken the most time to simply find the right algorithmic balance.  Being 'novel' has something to do with it...'technologically' novel is irrelevant.

[elggawf]

You're assuming he lost the keys.

To clarify, no I'm not. I'm not saying that all the original miners lost their keys at all, I'm just saying that the potential for lost keys obliterates the "lower bounds" you guys' logic came up with earlier, and that the fact there's no way to prove the keys are lost or to compel someone to prove they still own any coins, there's no way to know for certain.

Now let me ask another question: How many miners where there in 2009?

I have absolutely no idea - I would imagine it's not a huge number of people, but still. I don't think any of this is a show-stopper for the project.

[memvola]

An interesting parallel question: Would you invest in gold or silver if you knew a couple people, who refused to reveal their names, had cornered 20% of the market?

Yes, it's an interesting question. But I don't get what would change if they revealed their names. You only get political when you are in the public eye, it doesn't help the validity of information flow. You can find cleaner information about what kind of people early adopters are from this forum's archives than you can ever find about publicly known wealthy people. Is it enough? Well of course it wouldn't be enough if I wanted to invest in them directly (MyBitcoin anyone?), but the currency has enough use value for me to not have to ponder about it. Investing in Bitcoin has lots of risks in it, and early adopters coming and crushing it down is a minuscule one. Do I care what they will do with the money otherwise? No, not really...

If I had the programming skills, I'd do it.

I have programming skills, arguably better than his, and I didn't do it. Neither did millions of other programmers. It's absurd to say that inventing an arbitrary thing successfully can be considered an ordinary purposeful undertaking. Let's invent fusion energy, shall we then? I know a few good physicists.

Being 'novel' has something to do with it...'technologically' novel is irrelevant.

Yes it is. I used that phrase to compare Bitcoin with Linden dollars. (EDIT: i.e. Linden dollars are novel as well, but there is not much innovation behind it technology-wise.)

[nighteyes]

Satoshi is really the devil...or some government's tool, take your pick Unless he is a space alien...ut oh....is he a space alien?

But seriously, I dont think its important. Bitcoin's market is pretty much capped and if he does have that many coins, that's fair payment for the innovation. The OP kinda assumes this bitcoin value is going to go through the roof...maybe, but I doubt it. My 2 cents would be to use the bitcoin for what it can provide now, instead of dreaming of it being worth $1 billion each.