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Comment by Thorrez

8 days ago

>why would you do that if you were rich?

Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.

19 comments

Thorrez

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mike_hearn  8 days ago

Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".

But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.

  • Thorrez  8 days ago

    This [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny.

    >The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea

    Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569346

    • mike_hearn  8 days ago

      There's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.

olalonde  8 days ago

He could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.

  • ap99  8 days ago

    Who would realistically not want to cash out?

    1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth 2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot 3. Someone who's dead

    • imron  8 days ago

      4. Someone who wants to keep all their fingers, and not meet some kind of horrifying death.

  • vidarh  8 days ago

    It would also seem likely that if he at any point was alive and realised he wouldn't be able to touch his original wallets, he'd still get in early enough to be rich from subsequently crested wallets nobody would suspect.