Comment by leroy_masochist

8 days ago

Regardless of whether Carreyrou is right, Mr. Back's life has now changed massively. The article points out that the market value of Satoshi's wallet is north of $100bn. Time to invest in some personal security.

He was already the CEO of a billion dollar company and the article describes him traveling with security.

  • Yet another example of how the article failed to do basic research.

    • Blockstream is mentioned multiple times, as is Back's wealth;

      > It was the beginning of an era in which Mr. Back quickly amassed influence and became a ring leader in the still small Bitcoin community. To staff Blockstream, he poached the top Bitcoin Core developers from their day jobs at companies like Google and Mozilla, giving him tremendous sway over the digital currency. He also became very wealthy: Over the next dozen years, Blockstream and its affiliates would raise $1 billion in funding and Blockstream would reach a valuation of $3.2 billion.

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I haven't seen this question answered anywhere.

Why would anyone use bitcoin if the world's factory ie China wants gold as payments?

Even pro Bitcoin people like Balaji and Lyn Alden haven't answered this structural question. There exists market for what counts as money. If that market (led by China) says we don't accept Bitcoin, then these are just some random numbers.

  • China probably doesn’t accept Dominican pesos, either, and yet you’d be hard pressed to say that somebody with 100 billion Dominican pesos just has some random numbers. If you can exchange something for another form of value, then it has value. I think the trouble here is that there’s just nobody out there who would actually give you $100 billion worth of value for this particular asset. At least not as a lump sum.