Comment by 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.
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.
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
4. Someone who wants to keep all their fingers, and not meet some kind of horrifying death.
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.
You find it likely that someone would give up their ~$70B fortune just in case it may reveal they are the creator of Bitcoin?
I find it likely that someone who realised that if they were to touch that paper fortune the Bitcoin price will totally crater would have made additional billions they could actually access by mining more bitcoin at a point where the difficulty was still ridiculously low.
The value of the bitcoins in those early wallets isn't real, because they are the most watched bitcoin wallets in existence, and any movement there would send shockwaves through the crypto space.
4 replies →
What's the much more plausible reason?
That the person is dead would be a pretty convincing one.
Or they just lost access.
Why is being dead a convincing idea? How old do you think he is/was, and why would it be likely that he would die? When do you think he died? The idea that he died doesn't explain how he came out of hiding twice.
Losing access by intentionally deleting the keys? That agrees with my point that he knows it would cause problems to spend them, and decided not to spend them.
Losing access by accidentally deleting the keys? Would Satoshi really be that careless?
Yep. Dead, lost access or in prison. I'm leaning towards dead.
He lost access to the wallet either by mistake (never even saved the key) or because he willingly destroyed the key for philosophical reasons. Or he is just dead.
I replied to those options here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711594