5 ms·
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 assum
by jmyeet 7mo 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.
- johnnienaked 7mo agoCouldn't agree more. If you don't want to be famous in today's day and age, don't do infamous shit.
- adventured 7mo agoAn 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.
- jmyeet 7mo ago1.1m 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.
- zzzoom 7mo agoIf any of those addresses sold a single sat the price would crash hard.
- cylemons 7mo agoBiggest pump and dump in history
- eru 7mo agoI 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?
- bfmalky 7mo agoHype would not cause a price increase in this case. The value of bitcoin is partly due to scarcity. 1.1m previously inaccessible bitcoins suddenly becoming liquid would cause a drop in price, even if they were sold slowly. It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
- eru 7mo ago> The value of bitcoin is partly due to scarcity. Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype. As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin. The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float. > It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked. Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would: Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't. I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market. The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price. Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.
- timr 7mo ago> 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 https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy
- fauchletenerum 7mo agoThey'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
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- timr 7mo agoI don't know how you know that, but even that argument is a straw man, unless you're asserting that all of the other currencies declined in value equally against whatever theoretical good(s) you're holding out as the objective standard for value.
- Citizen_Lame 7mo agoI don't think you know what a straw man means, or purchasing power.
- timr 7mo agoOK.
- brainwad 7mo ago> 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...
- orangepanda 7mo agoIs that what they call visiting private islands these days?
- vntok 7mo agoIt's a pretty well known entity. You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation
- stinkbeetle 7mo ago> It's a pretty well known entity. You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011, a few years after Epstein was convicted for procuring a child for prostitution I see.
- vntok 7mo agoWait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
- stinkbeetle 7mo ago[flagged]
- gregw2 7mo agoWho says it started in 2011? I find that hard to believe. Gates was having interviews with John Brockman's edge.org in 1996: https://www.edge.org/conversation/bill_gates-digerati-chapter-10 https://www.edge.org/conversation/bill_gates-digerati-chapte... Gates was at The Edge dinners in 2010: https://michaelshermer.com/articles/my-dinner-with-bill-gates-that-is/ https://michaelshermer.com/articles/my-dinner-with-bill-gate... Jeffrey Epstein funded The Edge in the late 90s early 2000s, then not around 2008/9 during his first trial and prison, then again after he got out: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep... https://epsteinweb.org/john-brockman/ https://epsteinweb.org/john-brockman/
- boring-human 7mo ago> 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.
- eru 7mo agoI 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.
- flir 7mo agoMore 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.
- hdgvhicv 7mo agoIf you were to attempt to transfer money out if those wallets it would have a knock on effect on the price.
- ab5tract 7mo agoWhich 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.
- eru 7mo ago> 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.
- account42 7mo agoWhy 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.