Comment by jmyeet
7 days ago
I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
That hasn't been his goal. For the last two decades he's been running a huge charitable foundation...
Is that what they call visiting private islands these days?
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Was that in between his visits on Epstine island?
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1.1m Bitcoin is currently $77B not $7B.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
Lmao, it's $70B+ brother. Zeros aren't for everyone. :")
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> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy
They're talking about the decline in the purchasing price of a dollar over the past decade, not its value relative to other currencies at the moment
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> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
I broadly agree with you, however: during the classic gold standard years, gold did have a pretty stable purchasing power (as eg measured by your favourite inflation index) in the long run.
However, since the world largely went off the gold standard, the purchasing power of gold has been a lot more volatile.
If any of those addresses sold a single sat the price would crash hard.
I would bet heavily against that.
Someone selling single Satoshis from Satoshi's stash would herald the second coming of Satoshi. Can you imagine the hype?
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Biggest pump and dump in history
If you were to attempt to transfer money out if those wallets it would have a knock on effect on the price.
Which is why fining the owners of the wallets should be a huge deal: they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.
If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.
Why do you assume the original creator(s) still have the keys to those wallets? Wouldn't it be extremely unlikely that they didn't make use of them by now if that was the case? This is well beyond sell your soul money for most people.
> they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
I'm not so sure about this. Bitcoin thrives on vibes. The second coming of Satoshi (as evidence by control over his wallets), would surely drive a lot of Bitcoin hype.
Couldn't agree more. If you don't want to be famous in today's day and age, don't do infamous shit.