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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.
by olalonde 7mo 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.
- Thorrez 7mo agoWhat's the much more plausible reason?
- FinnKuhn 7mo agoThat the person is dead would be a pretty convincing one. Or they just lost access.
- olalonde 7mo agoYep. Dead, lost access or in prison. I'm leaning towards dead.
- Thorrez 7mo agoWhy 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?
- IMTDb 7mo agoHe 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.
- Thorrez 7mo agoI replied to those options here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711594
- ap99 7mo agoWho 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 7mo ago4. Someone who wants to keep all their fingers, and not meet some kind of horrifying death.
- vidarh 7mo agoIt 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.
- olalonde 7mo agoYou find it likely that someone would give up their ~$70B fortune just in case it may reveal they are the creator of Bitcoin?
- vidarh 7mo agoI 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.
- olalonde 7mo agoFrom a financial standpoint, this makes no sense. First, they could just liquidate all their other BTC before moving the Satoshi coins. Second, even with a significant price impact, the net worth of an additional 1M BTC would surely outweigh any realistic price slippage. Third, the price probably wouldn't even crash that much. We're talking about a 5% increase in supply... which rationally, should result in a ~5% dip in price. I know the market would overreact, but I doubt it would be by much more than say 20%.
- Jean-Papoulos 7mo agoThis 5% increase is actually huge, because the amount of bitcoins in actual free float is very small. The same coins get traded over and over while the vast majority sits in cold storage. A 5% supply sell off would eat up all of the order books, and that's before everyone else starts selling off. Do note that the selloff would be automatic, huge wallets are monitored 24/7. If I was Satoshi, I would go a to big bank and sell the private key directly for huge discount. Still a billionaire, no trace.