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[organofcorti]

I agree with znort987 - Satoshi Natakmoto was most likely a Nicolas Bourbaki. At a guess, a good proportion of of those 2e06 btc is in their hands.

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[commonancestor]

I think this : http://ecdsa.org/stats.html is fairly close to what you're describing.

Nice charts.
2009 - mining and hoarding
2010 - mining, and some half of the 2010 coins transacted
2011 - some more of the 2010 coins transacted, during the bubble of Jun 2011 also maybe 20% of the 2009 coins

It suggests the miners of 2009 are big hoarders. They only transacted something during the bubble, probably to cash-in carefully.

[molecular]

I think this : http://ecdsa.org/stats.html is fairly close to what you're describing.

Nice charts.
2009 - mining and hoarding
2010 - mining, and some half of the 2010 coins transacted
2011 - some more of the 2010 coins transacted, during the bubble of Jun 2011 also maybe 20% of the 2009 coins

It suggests the miners of 2009 are big hoarders. They only transacted something during the bubble, probably to cash-in carefully.

that's the way I see it, too. Still, the theory that at least some of the 2009-coins are lost cannot be discarded.

[Joe200]

It it was really a team of people, someone from the team would have said, "Hi, it was me" by now.

Yes, smart and patient people do exist. Let's not prematurely take the credit from Satoshi.

[cbeast]

Interesting that someone mentioned pooled mining, since I didn't think of that. Wonder if you can tell how many blocks have been spent exactly one times and then haven't moved after that?

Not sure how pool operators do it - with payout thresholds and all. I suspect it's more than a single move from the block reward to the miner's payout.

eligius pays out using the generating TX in mined blocks. Dont' know wether these show up in znorts analysis?

Good question.

[evoorhees]

These never been spent coins are often on my mind and I wonder when if ever will they get spent. The potential to cause serious damages is huge if someone decided to foolishly dump all of them but I can't see someone doing that. I sometimes also speculate what the chance might be that the owners of these coins, mainly Satoshi, have deleted their private keys and actually on purpose lost the coins.

I think the "potential to cause serious damage" is vastly overblown. An individual or group who held lots of coins could, at worst, cause a very sudden drop in price. However, doing so is A) very costly and highly disincentivized and B) can only be done once.  The second point is the most important. Say someone drops a million coins on the market, it would crash the price, everyone would freak out. Then, the price would find a new equilibrium, rebuild, and we'd go on about our business... and the attacker wouldn't be able to attack ever again.

For anyone who understands the true value of Bitcoins, a huge dump on the market is a blessing, and anyone doing that nefariously becomes impotent afterward.

[DeathAndTaxes]

evoorhees nailed it.   There are only 2 mil coins which have never moved and arguably at least some of them are lost.   The remaining coins are held by multiple people.  Even if they are all spent recklessly at most we are talking about 20 or so 100K BTC plunges.   While bad it is hardly fatal.  As time goes on it becomes less of a danger.  The market depth for BTC is continually increasing. An x BTC reckless sale today will have less price movement than a year ago and hopefully in 1 year, 5 year, 10 years it will be increasingly less.

[Rygon]

I think it is highly unlikely that there are many people (if anyone) out there just sitting on stashes of 100,000K+ coins. At the current market value, that's over $1M USD. Unless they are already a millionaire several times over, it doesn't make a lot of financial sense to have a savings account that large in something as volatile as BTC and not gradually draw down on it to buy food, homes, entertainment, whatever.

Someone would have to be extremely confident in Bitcoin's long term value not to use some of that today to improve their lifestyle. Bitcoin is still an experiment, so I think when anyone approaches the threshold of having the majority of their wealth in Bitcoin, it's too risky. Ask yourself, if you had 10-20 years worth of income (assuming 50-100K yearly income) stored in BTC (even if you earned it cheaply through mining), would you still risk it all on Bitcoin's success? Or would you at least enjoy some of that now?

[molecular]

I think it is highly unlikely that there are many people (if anyone) out there just sitting on stashes of 100,000K+ coins.

That would be awesome, but I think it's not the case. However, I don't think it's going to backfire badly, as evorhees and deathandtaxes have argued.

[niko]

I think it is highly unlikely that there are many people (if anyone) out there just sitting on stashes of 100,000K+ coins.

That would be awesome, but I think it's not the case. However, I don't think it's going to backfire badly, as evorhees and deathandtaxes have argued.

To me then the interesting remaining question is if fraction of hoarded coins really dropped, or this finding is merely an artifact of pooled mining. Even if latter is the case, ~30% of mined coins are still being hoarded, and ~70% are actively traded for goods, services, and fiat.

How does this compare to gold? Is it even a fair comparison - with bitcoin mining being so deterministic, unlike gold where (especially in the early days) you had to rely on luck?

[smoothie]

"pristine coins" as if one coin is better than another. I guess numismatics can happen in bitcoin but I rather think that's retarded. If it floats your boat to pay a premium to have 1 bitcoin from the genesis block...have at it.

[myrkul]

"pristine coins" as if one coin is better than another. I guess numismatics can happen in bitcoin but I rather think that's retarded. If it floats your boat to pay a premium to have 1 bitcoin from the genesis block...have at it.

That would require Satoshi to spend that coin, and even assuming we can find him to do so, that would ruin the "numismatic" value of it. The "pristine" nature isn't in that it's any different from any other coin, it's that the address it's sitting in is not linked to known transactions, and thus, is significantly more anonymous than a previously spent coin.

[dooglus]

That would require Satoshi to spend that coin

It's not possible to spend coins from the genesis block.  To make it possible would require everyone to upgrade their client to a version which makes it possible.  If a group of people didn't upgrade, they would be on a fork of the blockchain as soon as the genesis block's coins were spent.

[organofcorti]

That would require Satoshi to spend that coin

It's not possible to spend coins from the genesis block.  To make it possible would require everyone to upgrade their client to a version which makes it possible.  If a group of people didn't upgrade, they would be on a fork of the blockchain as soon as the genesis block's coins were spent.

Is that the case just for the genesis block, or other very early blocks too?

[rjk]

That would require Satoshi to spend that coin

It's not possible to spend coins from the genesis block.  To make it possible would require everyone to upgrade their client to a version which makes it possible.  If a group of people didn't upgrade, they would be on a fork of the blockchain as soon as the genesis block's coins were spent.

Is that the case just for the genesis block, or other very early blocks too?

From what I understand, this limitation only applies to the generation transaction of the genesis block. Transactions sent to the "wishing well" could be spent.

[dooglus]

Is that the case just for the genesis block, or other very early blocks too?

From what I understand, this limitation only applies to the generation transaction of the genesis block. Transactions sent to the "wishing well" could be spent.

Just the genesis block.

What's this about a wishing well?  Went over my head, that.

[hazek]

What's this about a wishing well?  Went over my head, that.

Some people pretend the genesis block 50BTC address is a wishing well..  

[Etlase2]

Now, as to the design, the reason why I strongly believe it was not the
work of a single person is because there are just damn too many very
good and novel ideas in there, and those actually span multiple disciplines:

    - distributed proof of work (idea originated in the spam fighting community)
     - the elegant solution the byzantine general problem, (problem from the distributed computing community)
     - fairly smart use of crypto in general (double sha based adjustable difficulty, ECDSA with "just the right number of bits")

This is all from the cryptography discipline though. If you were a real crypto geek you'd probably be aware of these things at least in passing. There was a thread questioning the thought behind using the double SHA hash, with I think the best guess being "it made it initially slightly harder" but the difficulty would have taken care of that anyway. However, I believe it is Applied Cryptography that mentions the potential length extension attack on SHA2 and it is eliminated by double hashing. Though the attack doesn't apply to bitcoin, it's possible he did it just in case. As far as ECDSA, it has inherently reduced the problems of large RSA keys; nothing in particular that Satoshi did there.

    - scriptable transaction outputs to allow complex contracts in the future (economic insight)
     - the economics "just work" : the system has many self-balancing properties in the form of negative feedback loops (economics, chaos theory, etc ...)

Cryptography's use as a digital fingerprint is something that has been combined with the idea of contracts since the first digital signature algorithm. As far as the economics just working, that absolutely remains to be seen and is not proven by a bunch of vague phrases. Especially given the evident pyramidal nature of coin distribution.

With that all said, I would not be surprised that several people did work closely on the project.

I think the "potential to cause serious damage" is vastly overblown. An individual or group who held lots of coins could, at worst, cause a very sudden drop in price.

But an individual or group who was a bank that lent lots of money could, at worst, stop loaning money and cause a very sharp increase in price, buy up lots of stuff, and then start the process all over again.

[rjk]

Is that the case just for the genesis block, or other very early blocks too?

From what I understand, this limitation only applies to the generation transaction of the genesis block. Transactions sent to the "wishing well" could be spent.

Just the genesis block.

What's this about a wishing well?  Went over my head, that.

Check it out: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa <-- address of the genesis block's generation transaction.
While the 50 BTC can't be spent, it should be possible to spend the additional 6.57403164 BTC.

[ErebusBat]

According to bitcoincharts...yes, 2 million coins could be sold:

Sell 2000000 BTC for 1987718.05 USD...or about a buck a piece.

Interesting.... didn't pirate say something about taking the price down to $1?