Do you think Satoshi got rid of his private keys?

[m2017]

I want to draw attention to another point. Initially, Satoshi planned 21 million bitcoins. If he has obtained ~1 million, which lies unmovable in his wallet, then this figure of 1 million bitcoin undoubtedly falls out of the general circulation (those same 21 million bitcoin). This is a clear contradiction to the original idea. He chose the figure of 21 million, not 20, right. . If Satoshi could and wanted to make a donation to the BTC-community, he would have sold it cheaply in the early stages or distributed it to the rest of the bitcoin-network participants, rather than deliberately reducing, note, the number of coins by ~5 % (more precisely 4.76%).

If he had planned to release them back then it would have made no sense mining for so long and hoarding them in the first place, right?
Besides he viewed things differently and saw no need for redistribution:

The reason why he mined and saved almost ~1mln.BTC is because at that moment almost no one knew about the existence of bitcoin and Satoshi was the only one who mined btc for a long time (at that period). It so happened that there were no loud announcements about the launch of bitcoin either in the media or anywhere else. Nobody knew about this. Only a few found out after a while. Bitcoin Satoshi obtained is a kind of side effect. He didn't think to deliberately reduce the circulating amount of bitcoin, right.

It’s great that he is not a supporter of redistribution and this can only mean one thing: the ~1mln.BTC that Satoshi mined remains irretrievably lost forever.

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

Well, certainly can’t argue with such ironclad arguments as the link to satoshi’s post. This means that this issue has been removed from the agenda.

[BigBos]

I have spent a lot of time just to get rid of my curiosity about Satoshi, who, where, what is his private key, his real name and so on, I have looked for various reading sources, especially local and international articles. But in the end all the wild theories and speculation brought me to the starting point of "not knowing anything about it". That clever person is either still alive by keeping his private key somewhere while surfing the internet, or he has indeed died because he was imprisoned. Our speculation will lead to curiosity that will not be cured. Most importantly he has left a valuable legacy that not everyone can do today.

[Apocollapse]

Anything is possible, but to be honest I don't want to see Satoshi's addresses went active because this has a possibility chaos could occur in the market. Not many people are trust in Bitcoin in terms of real use cases, most of people already think the coins are lost forever too.

I find it hard to believe that someone as careful as he was would lose the keys and not have multiple backups.

There's a possibility, we shouldn't forget one of Bitcoin developer's hardware wallet got hacked few months ago.

[Ale88]

This is one thing I have said in comments in other threads but I think it deserves a thread in itself to comment on, even if we can only speculate. I have searched and I see that it is usually claimed him to have lost them as most likely. In a quora thread the voted as best answer is:

Statistically speaking, Satoshi Nakamoto is (in order of likelihood) either dead, in prison, incognito or not able to find the keys to his wallet.

My personal opinion is that he is incognito; I see him clearly as someone who lives alone with a dog, doesn't like doing housework, grows zucchinis in the summer, hates shoveling snow, has arthritis in his knees, doesn't own a smartphone, his neighbors think him odd, he loves buying discount books at the flea market on Sundays, he's active on the internet under a plethora of pseudonyms and will likely release some of his coins when bitcoin reaches $1,000,000.

There are three possibilities:

1. He still has the private keys.
2. He does not have them or cannot access them (this includes his death without leaving them in inheritance).
3. He got rid of them on purpose, as a donation to the rest of Bitcoin holders. Recall his "lost Bitcoin is a donation."

Obviously I am referring to the million Bitcoins or so attributed to him for having mined them at the beginning. If Satoshi is still alive (or if they are still alive) I am sure he has a good amount of Bitcoin but that nobody links with Satoshi's name.

I think the most likely is option 3. Just as he started up Bitcoin for humanity and stepped away from the project I think at some point he purposely disposed of the keys to those Bitcoins, either for privacy, as a donation, or both. I find it hard to believe that someone as careful as he was would lose the keys and not have multiple backups.

Option 3 would be the the case scenario for all of us, especially for him (them?) because it means he's still alive, and I really wish he can see where bitcoin is today and how much it has grown over the years, nowadays almost everybody knows what bitcoin is, 6-7 years ago the situation was way different!
Anyway we must hope those bitcoins will never move otherwise it could really be a big problem...

[philipma1957]

As for his private keys being lost, the chances of that being true is also very slim unless perhaps, he intentionally decided to donate those Bitcoin to the community.

He already did. He's not dumping his coins onto the Coinbases and Binances of the world for whales to collect, which would've almost certainly doom the project had he collected his due in its early days, and even today it is enough to put us in an "ice age" bear market for several years, if not decades (and make Bitcoin like other altcoin projects in the process).

Or they all get dumped after the 2032 ½ ing crashing and burning btc bigly. This could happen if this is a black ops and not a mad genius creation.

[Sophokles]

Statistically speaking, Satoshi Nakamoto is (in order of likelihood) either dead, in prison, incognito or not able to find the keys to his wallet.

My personal opinion is that he is incognito; I see him clearly as someone who lives alone with a dog, doesn't like doing housework, grows zucchinis in the summer, hates shoveling snow, has arthritis in his knees, doesn't own a smartphone, his neighbors think him odd, he loves buying discount books at the flea market on Sundays, he's active on the internet under a plethora of pseudonyms and will likely release some of his coins when bitcoin reaches $1,000,000.

There are three possibilities:

1. He still has the private keys.
2. He does not have them or cannot access them (this includes his death without leaving them in inheritance).
3. He got rid of them on purpose, as a donation to the rest of Bitcoin holders. Recall his "lost Bitcoin is a donation."

Obviously I am referring to the million Bitcoins or so attributed to him for having mined them at the beginning. If Satoshi is still alive (or if they are still alive) I am sure he has a good amount of Bitcoin but that nobody links with Satoshi's name.

I think the most likely is option 3. Just as he started up Bitcoin for humanity and stepped away from the project I think at some point he purposely disposed of the keys to those Bitcoins, either for privacy, as a donation, or both. I find it hard to believe that someone as careful as he was would lose the keys and not have multiple backups.

After reading your post another question popped into my mind. What if satoshi still has access to that wallet and is waiting for the bitcoin to reach a certain milestone before moving it around. How will the overall market react if suddenly bitcoin starts moving from Satoshi's wallet? We can only imagine a hypocritical scenario in this case. It's for sure that the market will take a negative turn due to the size of the total bitcoin that wallet holds.

To be honest it is hard to predict what will happen as investors have mixed sentiments about satoshi. Some believe he is dead so suddenly raising up a ghost and dumping his BTC on the market will lower their confidence level. But those who believe satoshi is still alive can take it positively and think that Satoshi is still working on the development of the bitcoin network.

[Findingnemo]

3. He got rid of them on purpose,

This is what I have in my mind as to why he didn't try to use the money he created and it kind of makes sense too because if he actually moved the funds then there may a speculation be ignited all over the world that Bitcoin is just another kind of rug pull or something but what if he never touches even though the value of those assets are astonishingly high at current market value.

But after all these years no one knows what happened to Satoshi, or if he is even a real single person and nothing and he Just wanted to be another case like D.B. Copper and remain an unsolved mystery forever.

[Bananington]

The name Satoshi as I have come to understand is just a false name that gets the recognition for the genius behind Bitcoin or cryptocurrency idea.
I won't think also that the creator of BTC would have an issue accessing his crypto even if he loses or forgets his private keys.

[Poker Player]

And everyone thinks he stopped mining bitcoin since 2010?

I for one what I said in the OP is that I am sure he has quite a few bitcoins as of today, assuming he is still alive, but that no one can link to the name Satoshi, and that they are different Bitcoins from those mined those first two years.

His last posts didn't look like someone who was planning to leave.

Well, although we are speculating, this does not mean anything either, since it could be that he saw the need to leave suddenly or that he had planned to do so but was hiding it. Also, what you say doesn't square with this:

In mid-2010, Satoshi transferred bitcoin.org to Gavin Andresen. Andresen explained, “I started to submit code to Satoshi to improve the core system. Over time he trusted my judgment on the code I wrote. And eventually, he pulled a fast one on me because he asked me if it’d be OK if he put my email address on the bitcoin homepage, and I said yes, not realizing that when he put my email address there, he’d take his away. I was the person everyone would email when they wanted to know about bitcoin. Satoshi started stepping back as leader of [the] project and pushing me forward”.

Lucius' analysis does not seem to support that version either.

Personally he never existed and is a pseudo name for the inventors of the Blockchain.

What you mean is that it did not exist as a single person, but as a group, I understand. But I would apply the same argument here: I think most likely that group of people got rid of their private keys of the Bitcoins mined the first two years.

I find it hard to believe that someone as careful as he was would lose the keys and not have multiple backups.

There's a possibility, we shouldn't forget one of Bitcoin developer's hardware wallet got hacked few months ago.

Good point but I think the likelihood is small.

[NotATether]

Or they all get dumped after the 2032 ½ ing crashing and burning btc bigly. This could happen if this is a black ops and not a mad genius creation.

If this was a black ops, that would've been done in 2021 when the fever pitch was high and Satoshi's holdings would've made a billionaire out of him.

To do something like that on a later date would have pretty much the same effect as doing it back then, because that is too much money which is going to overwhelm the market.

[icalical]

To be honest I really think that those Quora's answer on OP's quote is a joke, lol. Either that or he watch too many post apocalyptic show. He describe Satoshi like someone from one of those show. For me, I never think Satoshi as an Individual, I think they are a group of people, and the name Satoshi Nakamoto is used as embodiment of an idea. More than that, I think they are just a regular people with great vision and engineering skills.

And there is no reason to just get rid of the private keys, why would they get rid of the private keys? If they want to donate the Bitcoin, wouldn't be better to keep the private key, and send their Bitcoin to charity when the price is right?

[Lucius]

In mid-2010, Satoshi transferred bitcoin.org to Gavin Andresen. Andresen explained, “I started to submit code to Satoshi to improve the core system. Over time he trusted my judgment on the code I wrote. And eventually, he pulled a fast one on me because he asked me if it’d be OK if he put my email address on the bitcoin homepage, and I said yes, not realizing that when he put my email address there, he’d take his away. I was the person everyone would email when they wanted to know about bitcoin. Satoshi started stepping back as leader of [the] project and pushing me forward”.

Those people who are no longer active today (at least not on the forum) know very well why Satoshi decided to leave Bitcoin to them, because it was they who asked for it, which is quite evident from their communication. I already wrote that Satoshi must have felt all that negative energy, in addition to the fact that his main collaborator started to turn to the dark side (I'm referring to Gavin and his visits to places he shouldn't have gone), which he later described as a possible reason why Satoshi got scared, along with of course Wiki which started accepting BTC as donations and the famous comment "we touched the hornet's nest".

However, I wonder if it would have been different if Satoshi had left in 2012 or 2014 and not in 2010 - I think it's better if he left earlier, not only for "peace in the house", but also for his own safety.

What is the fact that in the early days Satoshi was nowhere near as popular as it is today - back then some were very openly calling for his "removal of authority", while today Satoshi is a true legend, and some like Gavin are not only no longer around Bitcoin, but they became hated figures because they were so "intelligent" that they started calling cheaters by his name.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

Statistically speaking, Satoshi Nakamoto is (in order of likelihood) either dead, in prison, incognito or not able to find the keys to his wallet.

My personal opinion is that he is incognito; I see him clearly as someone who lives alone with a dog, doesn't like doing housework, grows zucchinis in the summer, hates shoveling snow, has arthritis in his knees, doesn't own a smartphone, his neighbors think him odd, he loves buying discount books at the flea market on Sundays, he's active on the internet under a plethora of pseudonyms and will likely release some of his coins when bitcoin reaches $1,000,000.

This is a fact, I kind of agreed too.

3. He got rid of them on purpose, as a donation to the rest of Bitcoin holders. Recall his "lost Bitcoin is a donation."

Those three points are very valid, but based on what Satoshi said about lost Bitcoin, I would preferably go with the last point. It could be that Satoshi disposed of the private key to some wallets that hold millions of bitcoins for him; if at all he is still alive and has access to some bitcoin, then it would not be a whole lot of bitcoin like those wallets that hold millions of bitcoins. I doubt if there is anyone who would create a technology like Bitcoin and would not hold a large sum of what they have created. Despite any sacrifices made for the success of that project, they (the developer) would still want to take share of the success. If at all Satoshi is alive, then there is no way he would not have some bitcoin in his custody.

[tbct_mt2]

And there is no reason to just get rid of the private keys, why would they get rid of the private keys? If they want to donate the Bitcoin, wouldn't be better to keep the private key, and send their Bitcoin to charity when the price is right?

It is different than idea for donation in this question as well as in a post of Satoshi Nakamoto. It is about lost bitcoins as donation  everyone else who have bitcoins because it helps to reduce total circulataing supply of Bitcoin.

It is different than sending it to an address of a charity entity and they will sell those bitcoins to have cash or exchange it to buy goods. At the end those donated bitcoin will be sold and it will affect market price and can not help to reduce circulating supply of Bitcoin.

[Latviand]

Another possibility would be that Satoshi isn't a he but a they, meaning that there's probably a group of people behind bitcoin and the Satoshi that's talking to us in the forum is just a person that's on the PR side of things or like the head of the project. I don't think that he got rid of his keys though, I am pretty sure that when Satoshi talked about the future of bitcoin having an increase in price although Satoshi talks more about larger fees, Satoshi knows what's up and Satoshi knows that it's not yet time. Or Satoshi really is just one person and that he's dead a long time ago.

[stompix]

The reason why he mined and saved almost ~1mln.BTC is because at that moment almost no one knew about the existence of bitcoin and Satoshi was the only one who mined btc for a long time (at that period).

Complete misconception!
Hal mined block 78 for sure and a lot of others on top of that, there are other known cases as block 3654 which was used as a way to troll Craig Wright and many others from earlier days.

Satoshi wasn't the only miner and he kept mining way too long for just security reasons
https://news.bitcoin.com/strong-evidence-suggests-a-single-entity-mined-more-than-1-million-bitcoin/

[ImThour]

Before getting that answer, you need to understand who Satoshi is for real. I personally believe that he's Hal Finney. Hal Finney is actually dead however her wife is using all his accounts.
I surely think Hal gave access to her and she does have access to the wallet which you are personally thinking is owned by Satoshi. If the coins are moved anytime now, that will be the confirmation of Hal being satoshi as all others who claimed to be satoshi could have done it as of now.

[Agbe]

Satoshi Nakamoto still have his private keys and I strongly believe he is still alive. And I also believe that a trusted close friend or a family member knows the private keys of Satoshi. I will take the incognito of him even in the forum because there is no way Satoshi Nakamoto create bitcoin and a website for it and leave the site and relax, things are not working in that way. He is not dead and not in prison. If he is in prison we would have heard. As op said, this issue has been discussed in somewhere else in the forum.

[Cricktor]

I don't buy the theory that Satoshi Nakamoto is a group of people. A group would have much more trouble to stay silently hidden and make no mistakes which could compromise their anonymity.

Sure, they could've decided early to not keep the private keys of their mined stash. Problem with that is, you can't prove that you don't have the keys. The amount of mined coins by Satoshi Nakamoto is enough to put everybody in a lot of danger should their identity become compromised. No one of such a group would be safe anymore, regardless whether they have the keys or if they truely don't have them. Who would believe them that they don't have them anymore?

The coins haven't moved, likely won't ever move. People keep throwing some of their coins to the coinbases of mined blocks that are attributed to Satoshi and thus piling up the "donation" to Bitcoin hodlers and bloating the UTXO set. Thank you, Satoshi!

[carlfebz2]

This is one thing I have said in comments in other threads but I think it deserves a thread in itself to comment on, even if we can only speculate. I have searched and I see that it is usually claimed him to have lost them as most likely. In a quora thread the voted as best answer is:

Statistically speaking, Satoshi Nakamoto is (in order of likelihood) either dead, in prison, incognito or not able to find the keys to his wallet.

My personal opinion is that he is incognito; I see him clearly as someone who lives alone with a dog, doesn't like doing housework, grows zucchinis in the summer, hates shoveling snow, has arthritis in his knees, doesn't own a smartphone, his neighbors think him odd, he loves buying discount books at the flea market on Sundays, he's active on the internet under a plethora of pseudonyms and will likely release some of his coins when bitcoin reaches $1,000,000.

There are three possibilities:

1. He still has the private keys.
2. He does not have them or cannot access them (this includes his death without leaving them in inheritance).
3. He got rid of them on purpose, as a donation to the rest of Bitcoin holders. Recall his "lost Bitcoin is a donation."

Obviously I am referring to the million Bitcoins or so attributed to him for having mined them at the beginning. If Satoshi is still alive (or if they are still alive) I am sure he has a good amount of Bitcoin but that nobody links with Satoshi's name.

I think the most likely is option 3. Just as he started up Bitcoin for humanity and stepped away from the project I think at some point he purposely disposed of the keys to those Bitcoins, either for privacy, as a donation, or both. I find it hard to believe that someone as careful as he was would lose the keys and not have multiple backups.

Based up on my own opinion and speculations then he might be still that possess those keys and it is really just that he didnt tend to make any movement out of it.Why? So here's the possible reasons.

1. Once a single movement made by one of known Satoshi wallets then it would really be neither be creating that kind of boost up or fear within the market.
2. He wont really be tending to make a movement and exposing himself or identity specially on touching up those centralized platforms.
3. He do just simply observing and been happy on how far his invention do able to hit or reach about.

Even myself to be Satoshi then there's no way that people could stop or whatever considerations would be in speaking about taking up some
profits on something that you do created. lol