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If Satoshi spent it on mining equipment, they would have to pay for electricity. And the profits of mining are never again going to be above 6.25 Bitcoins every

If Satoshi spent it on mining equipment, they would have to pay for electricity. And the profits of mining are never again going to be above 6.25 Bitcoins every 10 minutes (and that's assuming ownership of 100% of all ASIC miners in existence); it wouldn't make any financial sense for Satoshi to spend all their Bitcoins on ASIC miners because they'd end up increasing the mining difficulty and drive up their own operational costs. Controlling more than 50% of miners doesn't make any financial sense. And no, it's not possible to change the rules at any point because there is a large network of exchanges and hundreds of thousands of machines running software which are integrated with and depend on Bitcoin's code not changing. If a small group tried to change Bitcoin's code on their nodes without more than 50% community consensus (and giving them time to update all the hundreds of thousands of machines running the old software), they would fork from the main network and their tokens on that fork would be worthless.

shadowgovt 5y ago
... but if, say, someone with a million BTC spent it on mining rigs and gathered enough power to control 50% of the network, they could institute changes overnight and their rigs' interpretation of the rules would dominate the network. There's nothing in the design of BTC to stop that scenario other than "It costs a lot of resources to pull off," but that means control of the currency is by a de facto oligarchy (of enough rig-owning power to call the shots technologically).