I love bitcoin but there are some concerns (zero difficulty in the early days)

[HarmonLi]

Well, of course you're right that his could have been planned in advance or something, but I really think the danger this could potentially have for Bitcoin to be miniscule. The biggest 'true' danger would be if Satoshi decided to unload all the coins he mined in the early days - if he (still) controls them. But also that would be something Bitcoin would eventually cope with!

[thejaytiesto]

Well, of course you're right that his could have been planned in advance or something, but I really think the danger this could potentially have for Bitcoin to be miniscule. The biggest 'true' danger would be if Satoshi decided to unload all the coins he mined in the early days - if he (still) controls them. But also that would be something Bitcoin would eventually cope with!

That could crush the price real hard, but if there is enough demand people would enjoy the cheap ass coins. Right now it wouldn't be a good idea tho. I think satoshi is holding for life anyway.

[jaberwock]

I don't think it would be possible to store coins "off-chain" and then add them in later. Each new block contains the hash of the previous block so all coins can be traced back to their generation.

Those "off-chain" coins would not appear anywhere on the current blockchain so any transactions referencing them would not be accepted by the network.

maybe Satoshi used all his coins to buy all the supercomputers in the world and is waiting the correct time to overrun the current blockchain and spend all his off chain coins at once, therefore crushing the prices and everything else?

[oblivi]

I don't think it would be possible to store coins "off-chain" and then add them in later. Each new block contains the hash of the previous block so all coins can be traced back to their generation.

Those "off-chain" coins would not appear anywhere on the current blockchain so any transactions referencing them would not be accepted by the network.

maybe Satoshi used all his coins to buy all the supercomputers in the world and is waiting the correct time to overrun the current blockchain and spend all his off chain coins at once, therefore crushing the prices and everything else?

I dont see satoshi being that kind of guy. He's probably on a small nice house in the country enjoying the free time coding interesting stuff.

[Q7]

You see there were 5 days where Satoshi turned off his mining machine.
What could have been the reason for that?
Was he waiting for others to join the mining first so that he did not end up with way too many coins?
Was the genesis block created (days, weeks, months) earlier and did he do something in between? (Fork the chain, hide some coins, I don't know)

Are these things a real concern? I mean, what if there are some coins hidden on a side chain. Couldn't we agree to fork the bitcoin code into declaring january 9th the day of genesis?

I've been reading about bitcoin on a daily basis for the last two years and these things are the only concerns for me to not put the remaining of my life savings into bitcoin.

Why fret over these issues after so many years. There could be other reasons unexplained but I don't think there's any problem because bitcoin was practically worth nothing at that early stage. Overall, I don't see it being a threat towards bitcoin network or its integrity in any way.

[zebedee]

When Satatoshi started mining the genesis block, he put some code into it to prove that the genesis block was not created earlier than that date:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

But why did he not take a natural event like an earthquake, storm, flood or some other random event not caused by humans?
The financial crisis could have been planned/forseen. And also the newspaper item could have been planned in advance because it was done by people.
So to me it is no proof that the genesis block was not created earlier than 03/jan/2009. There could have been a lot of people knowing this in advance.

There is also another concern, the difficulty:
These are the first days of bitcoin mining

03/01/2009 18:15:05,0.00004971026962962963
04/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
05/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
06/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
07/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
08/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
09/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0006959437748148148
10/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0015410183585185184
11/01/2009 18:15:05,0.005269288580740741
12/01/2009 18:15:05,0.004424213997037036
13/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0057166810074074075
14/01/2009 18:15:05,0.006263493973333333

You see there were 5 days where Satoshi turned off his mining machine.
What could have been the reason for that?

The genesis block has extremely high difficulty (in that it would pass a much higher difficulty threshold than 1).  No other block until something in the 30,000s, 9 months later, had a lower hash.  He was probably doing last minute stuff and whilst doing that had his machines trying to find the lowest hash before kicking the whole thing off.

[Lauda]

If you really believe that a single man is able to fool all those people working on the code.. sure.

You must read what I wrote.
I do not believe it is/was a single man.

Thus there can't be any evidence to support any theory.

So we end up having a broken chain which everybody is fine with

There is no evidence of a broken chain?
I highly doubt that you're a developer, or good with technical details as some of the members around here are.

[Fernandez]

The low difficulty early is hardly an issue. Barely anyone was mining so it had to stay that way.

The issue which should worry you is the control by the Cartel for a supposedly decentralized system.

[findftp]

My apologies for naming trolls, but you seem so convinced of conspiracy that you are willing to make allegations without understanding. Dozens if not hundreds of coders have made contributions to Bitcoin and understand how it works, nothing that you postulate here could have gone unnoticed.

I just don't trust anything I don't fully understand. I know it fuels conspiracy thoughts, but I take that for granted.

Here's one of the screenshots from early bitcoin that Satoshi used in documentation. It has addresses and transactions that are not seen in the release blockchain, but notably the dates are the same as the genesis block. The blockchain height is 213 blocks at that time though, so this may even be a chain using a genesis block before the Times headline. It is certainly expected that Bitcoin was tested privately in many iterations before it was released, with much discarded private mining.

Thanks! I appreciate your effort to look up the picture and post it.

Don't put more money into any investment than you can lose. Bitcoin will keep working, but there's no guarantees of what others will pay you for one.

I know I know,  thanks for the reminder anyway.

[findftp]

If you really believe that a single man is able to fool all those people working on the code.. sure.

You must read what I wrote.
I do not believe it is/was a single man.

Thus there can't be any evidence to support any theory.

So we end up having a broken chain which everybody is fine with

There is no evidence of a broken chain?

When there is only 1 computer mining and it gets turned off, the chain is broken in my opinion.

I highly doubt that you're a developer.

I never said I was.

[runpaint]

When there is only 1 computer mining and it gets turned off, the chain is broken in my opinion.

It's not a matter of opinion, if you know what a blockchain is.
 
The chain is unbroken between blocks, which can be proven and can't be changed or falsified without changing all the blocks that came after it.  Each block comes from the block before it, that's what makes the chain. 

[waaat?]

When Satatoshi started mining the genesis block, he put some code into it to prove that the genesis block was not created earlier than that date:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

But why did he not take a natural event like an earthquake, storm, flood or some other random event not caused by humans?
The financial crisis could have been planned/forseen. And also the newspaper item could have been planned in advance because it was done by people.
So to me it is no proof that the genesis block was not created earlier than 03/jan/2009. There could have been a lot of people knowing this in advance.

There is also another concern, the difficulty:
These are the first days of bitcoin mining

03/01/2009 18:15:05,0.00004971026962962963
04/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
05/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
06/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
07/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
08/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
09/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0006959437748148148
10/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0015410183585185184
11/01/2009 18:15:05,0.005269288580740741
12/01/2009 18:15:05,0.004424213997037036
13/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0057166810074074075
14/01/2009 18:15:05,0.006263493973333333

You see there were 5 days where Satoshi turned off his mining machine.
What could have been the reason for that?
Was he waiting for others to join the mining first so that he did not end up with way too many coins?
Was the genesis block created (days, weeks, months) earlier and did he do something in between? (Fork the chain, hide some coins, I don't know)

Are these things a real concern? I mean, what if there are some coins hidden on a side chain. Couldn't we agree to fork the bitcoin code into declaring january 9th the day of genesis?

I've been reading about bitcoin on a daily basis for the last two years and these things are the only concerns for me to not put the remaining of my life savings into bitcoin.

Don't put your lifesavings in it, dammit! The distribution of the coins is sheit! How many people know before 2013 about it? Almost nobody! A lot coins been mined in the early days. So Bitcoin has the worst distribution of all the coins! It is what we call these days a 'ninjalaunch'. Go for a fair launch altcoin which launched later to diversify your funds. Don't put all on one horse. Bitcoin has many problems. The ninjalaunch and huge holdings of satoshi is just one of them.

[findftp]

Don't put your lifesavings in it, dammit! The distribution of the coins is sheit! How many people know before 2013 about it? Almost nobody! A lot coins been mined in the early days. So Bitcoin has the worst distribution of all the coins! Go for a fair launch altcoin which launched later to diversify your funds. Don't put all on one horse.   Bitcoin has many problems.

Lol nice try. All other coins have a much worse distribution.
You actually encourage me to do it because your comment reads totally sarcastic

I already did convert some extra this morning and I already regret I did not do more

[waaat?]

All other coins have a much worse distribution.

Distribution of total value? Sure not!

If you mean 'less people are holding individual alts, maybe' because everyone holds bitcoin by default, sadly. But if you ask for weight of the users in marketcap bitcoin is pretty poor. Every fair launch alt that meets standard requirements of 'fair' has a better wealth distribution than that (and you can still buy large shares in them for small money).
In Bitcoin a small group of people holds most, and a very large group of people holds less than 10BTC each.
But it's your lifesavings, sure dump them into BTC and get 0.0000000001% share in return, not my business.

[runpaint]

How many people know before 2013 about it? Almost nobody!

That is true.  Satoshi didn't even make an ANN in the altcoin forum at bitcointalk, which is a sure sign of a scam launch. 

On the other hand, these forums at bitcointalk were a lot more boring before Bitcoin was invented.  Mainly we would just start topics like "Why is this site called bitcointalk when there is no such thing as bitcoin?"