9 ms·

Status of the first million Bitcoins

124 points by mdelias 14y ago

pyre 14y ago
While the title here[1] is better than the title of the thread[2] it's still sort of misleading. There is no consensus in that thread about the status of the first million Bitcoins. Though there are some interesting comments: > But what is true is that anybody running Bitcoin > that year with a consumer Core 2 would make about > 2000 BTC a day. > > [Bounty] 201600 BTC for a time machine, I only need > a few hours... If someone decided to go 'all out' and threw significant computing power behind Bitcoin in the early stages, how would this have affected the outcome. Would it have encouraged others to join in (i.e. "look what he's doing, there must be something to this thing")? Would it have effectively pushed everyone else out of the space (i.e. "I can't match his resources, and he seems to be mining significant amounts of Bitcoins; may as well give up on this Bitcoin thing")? > I think the likeliest scenario is that hundreds of > people downloaded and ran the client then, got a > bunch of blocks that were at the time useless because > they were valueless, then deleted their clients. It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.' [1] "Status of the first million Bitcoins ever created" as of this writing. [2] "Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD"
- seanalltogether 14y ago
  "It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.'" So I'm kinda curious, as the power of the collective network grows, how difficult would it be to turn the incredible hashing rate toward discovering the the private keys of wallets lost long ago?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    How do you know if the wallet is lost? I'm guessing most people who lost their wallets, probably lost their public address too. (Unless they were using it as a donation sink or something). Plus, if you can crack the keys, you would just target the biggest wallet and be done with it.
    - pyre 14y ago
      I imagine that cracking wallets that have been dormant for a long time carries less risk of being noticed and/or caught.
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        Cracking a wallet can be done completely offline. I guess if you mean extracting the coins, yeah. I suppose that's what you'd use a bitcoin laundry service for. (a "mixer" I believe)
    - philix001 14y ago
      There's no difference between a lost bitcoin and one that is unused.
  - teraflop 14y ago
    Hashing doesn't help you crack private keys. Bitcoin uses ECDSA to sign transactions, which means you need to be able to solve the discrete logarithm problem over an elliptic curve. In any case, even the combined computational resources of the entire planet probably aren't enough to break a 256-bit ECDSA key in a reasonable amount of time.
    - antiscam 14y ago
      True, if by "break" you mean "break by brute force" (and of course with current, non-quantum computing technologies).
    - oleganza 14y ago
      Most one-time pubkeys are wrapped in RIPEMD-160 and SHA256, so you have to crack those first before you even get to cracking ECDSA. This also offers temporary protection against sudden appearance of quantum computer. QC can break ECDSA, but cannot break hashes fast enough. So people would have time to switch to another algorithm or at least agree on the last valid blockchain state and stop all transactions.
  - kzrdude 14y ago
    The protocol could be updated to allow "mining" of addresses that didn't move for sufficiently long time. But that's never going to happen.
    - davidjohnstone 14y ago
      The interesting thing here is that Bitcoin isn't set in stone to forever exist exactly as it does today — it depends on the majority of miners not modifying the protocol. I'm talking about what's essentially a 51% attack, but rather than it being performed by a malicious party, what if a technical/political decision with very strong opinions on both sides had to be made? It would be like a democracy where those with the most computing power win.
      - Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
        Or most money, or depending when it happens, most guns. I suppose you could try and reach a consensus when possible, rather than have a majority dictatorship. I wouldn't see any real opposition to changing the protocol to allow mining of lost coins for example if some precise and correct definition of a lost coin could be specified.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  So, there's 100 coins that represent an abstract value X. Now there are only 50 coins because 50 were lost. Do they still count as that same value X? What if you can't know how many coins were lost?
  - wmf 14y ago
    In theory this is priced in already. Lost BTC is treated no differently than "hoarded" BTC; in either case it doesn't contribute to market liquidity.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Surely there is, or there would be eventually, value to knowing how much BTC is "hoarded" or even possibly just "saved" and how much is actually "lost".
    - glesica 14y ago
      Well, not exactly, right? I mean, they don't contribute to liquidity, but the difference is that hoarded bitcoins might, at some point in the future, be traded. So it has to be considered when assessing the risk of bitcoins as an investment.
      - greenmountin 14y ago
        Good point! But that's "1/f" (frequency) liquidity. If the true value of bitcoin is as an instantaneous transfer (and it is), then the chance of a shadow wallet emptying in between the time you received and when you cashed out is vanishingly small. The cost to insure against such fluctuations while it gets multiple confirmations is your "transaction fee". Bitcoins shouldn't be considered an investment -- the business about hoarding them like taxi medallions because they only go up in value is nonsense. Their value is limited by the low transaction fee for another blockchain. But you're right, you'd have to factor that in if you were actually investing.
  - philix001 14y ago
    The offer/demand will adjust the price of the remaining bitcoins. Think of lost bitcoins as a small donation to all bitcoin users.
- ZeroCoin 14y ago
  According to these calculations: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/c9cwqn2 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... The first 1.6 million bitcoins were mined by at most ~15 people.
ryandvm 14y ago
Fascinating, but I certainly don't hold it against him. 100 MM seems like a pretty modest take for a guy that invents a revolutionary currency. There are certainly easier ways to make 100 million dollars.
- joshmlewis 14y ago
  Like what?
  - jquery 14y ago
    Being a co-founder of the internet company I work for? As much as I respect my company, it's no Bitcoin.
  - rkuykendall-com 14y ago
    There are a lot of people and companies worth over 100 million dollars. I only know of one revolutionary crypto-currency.
    - antiscam 14y ago
      Or the seventeen others founded on the same technology. It's important to distinguish the Bitcoin software from the particular block chain in whose private keys naive people are now speculating.
    - rmc 14y ago
      Selection bias. You only know of one popular revolutionary cypto-currency. There are loads of companies worth $0 (or much less than $100M)
      - cheapsteak 14y ago
        Popularity is essential to 'revolutionary'-ness. It's not revolutionary if no one uses it
  - archgoon 14y ago
treelovinhippie 14y ago
Greatest pyramid scheme ever.
- efnx 14y ago
  Can you explain why?
  - antiscam 14y ago
    I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or maybe just out of greed. Their claims, which fueled the recent speculative frenzy, have always been that Bitcoin would have a continuous, exponential growth against all other currencies. "It always goes up." "Get in before it's too late." I can see how relatively small amounts of money could be invested into Bitcoins as speculation or just play. Several tens of millions of dollars have presumably been transferred to Bitcoin holders so far, in the aggregate. But many people are investing on claims that a single bitcoin will eventually be worth $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million. For that to happen, the world would have to transfer massive wealth to the early adopters, as this early adopter explains: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#msg1830933 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#ms... Why would anyone do that rather than setting up an alternative? Massive delusions are possible, but it seems far more likely that the claim that a bitcoin will be worth $10,000 will start to seem ludicrous to everyone, as it obviously is. After that, why would anyone buy a bitcoin for $100, or even $30 or $10? There's little practical use for them other than drugs or illegal gambling. And they're hardly worth speculatively buying at $100 just so that they could be sold at $120 or $150. It's got to die eventually, unless everyone decide that they don't mind depreciating the value of everything else just so that the early adopters of this scheme can have untold wealth dumped into their laps. It's a fascinating technology, but that doesn't mean the speculative delusion will last forever. Pyramid scheme? Just so. Of course, to some degree so is gold -- but gold has a much wider existing distribution (compared to Bitcoin), a much deeper history, and backers far more significant, both intellectually and financially, than the childish ideologues of bitcointalk.org.
saosebastiao 14y ago
If someone wants to go dumpster diving in Cleveland, there is a Samsung 80 gig hard drive with about 120 Bitcoins on it. I won them from a tor gambling site after betting a single bitcoin that was given to me. They were selling for less than $.20 at the time so I didn't care enough to do anything with them when I scrapped my hard drive. I obviously didn't foresee Cypress.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Yeah, that tree was pretty unpredictable.
- dfc 14y ago
  What is Cypress?
  - rbol 14y ago
    I think he means Cyprus?
  - consz 14y ago
    >Cypress is the name applied to many plants in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is a conifer of northern temperate regions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress
  - saosebastiao 14y ago
    An alternative spelling to Cyprus, Ciprus, Chipre, Cipris, etc. It is one of two anglicized versions that I know of, and I can never remember which version is more accepted. Anyway...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      What's the other anglicized version? "Cyprus" is the only correct spelling, as far as I know, and I'm Greek. Or are you referring to the transliteration, "Kypros"? That's pretty much never used (same with "Hellas" for Greece).
Permit 14y ago
If this is true and any individual holds 1M BTC, it must take an incredible amount of self restraint not to dump those coins. That means the book value of his coins would have fluctuated between approximately $250M and $100M this week. You'd also have to keep in mind that he would have been through the previous crash in which his coins varied in worth between $29 M before falling back down to $2M. It would take a special someone not to sell those coins before they hit the prices we've seen these past few weeks.
- wmf 14y ago
  Please read the whole thread; the first million BTC are definitely not held by one person. (Also, I think you'd get no more than $50M for 1M BTC but that's a minor detail.)
  - Permit 14y ago
    My point was not that he currently has them, it's that if any person were to have them, they'd have been sold a long time ago.
    - NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago
      Why would he sell real bitcoins for fake fiat? This is Satoshi we're talking about, not your average joe. To him, USD is riskier than BTC.
      - danpat 14y ago
        True, to a degree, but day-to-day living still requires normal currency. Cash out $1M USD and you'd be comfortable to do whatever you liked for quite some time, while still keeping 99% of his coins.
        jacquesm 14y ago
        I think there may have been an element of sarcasm in the GP.
ZeroCoin 14y ago
The same question/comment was posted to r/bitcoin a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... This comment on that post seems to calculate the number of people mining bitcoins for the first year: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/c9cwqn2 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... If satoshi was indeed just testing the network... why not use "testnet" or simply re-set the blockchain once you were satisfied with the results of your work and release it to individuals? Oh, wait... because you wouldn't hold 7.8% of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist then if you did that. Just because almost half of those first 1.8M bitcoins mined were "transferred", doesn't mean that they ever transferred ownership.
- shredfvz 14y ago
  Yeah, some guy recommended I mine back in the earliest of days. "If only I knew then what I know now" ... hahah. So sick to think that my old Core 2 Duo could've made me a millionaire. I was turned off by the ugliness of the bitcointalk forum, and decided it wasn't worth the time to understand the Satoshi client. I don't think it's right to get on the case of the earliest bunch though for not being more egalitarian. How could Satoshi have been more fair to you? After all, nearly everybody had the short-lived opportunity to mine 50 BTC blocks with ease. Clearly Satoshi believed in his concept more than most of us did, and deemed it worthy of putting in lots of effort into mining. He did his part to warn the world of his invention. Fair's fair.
- dustcoin 14y ago
  Bitcoin was announced on a cryptography mailing list and released to the public at most a week after the blockchain was created, as proven by the headline in the genesis block. The Bitcoin whitepaper was released months earlier. Anyone had an opportunity to mine early on.
ZeroCoin 14y ago
The "yes men"/cult mentality on bitcointalk.org is infuriating. Namely comments like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1834237#msg1834237 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1834237#ms... It's obvious what's going on. They own a lot of bitcoins, but can't be made to look stupid by admitting to this travesty of a pre-mine that they all overlooked.
- ewillbefull 14y ago
  There was no pre-mine. The genesis block contains a headline: > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks He made bitcoin public exactly after this. He even announced it on a mailing list months before. Unless he had a time machine it's impossible for there to be foul play.
incision 14y ago
Tilting at windmills. More accurately, asking the most ardent followers of bitcoin to help launch an investigation into their prime diety. This discussion and variations of it has been going on for years now. Each new attempt has/will be dismissed by the faithful with some combination of the following: A) You're wrong. B) He deserves it. C) That's just like everything else. D) You're just envious.
ixacto 14y ago
For all we know about satashi he/she/it could be working with in-q-tel or any other politically motivated entity. What really matters though is that whoever owns 7.8% of existing bitcoins has the ability to manipulate the market, due to their 'I got there first with my old gpu farm' advantage. Want to crash the market? Go for it... Of course they don't have the control that the Federal Reserve has, but they also don't have anywhere near the flak. Treat bitcoin like you treat going to the casino, except Mt. Gox doesn't give out free drinks. Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I would put my faith in currencies that are backed by strong operational second-strike nuclear capability and a developed economy. This leaves USA/FR/UK as the winners, with India/Russia/China as runners up, since they are not developed nations yet. CHF is also a good reserve, but everyone especially the Europeans have been fleeing to it, and the Swiss caved to the USA so their 'banking secrecy' is not what it is advertized to be.
jes5199 14y ago
Satoshi's motivations are interesting to me. What was he/she/they actually trying to accomplish by creating bitcoin? Were they really hoping to anonymously buy things? Or were they trying to get rich? Or were they trying to get geeks to commit to a pseudonymous-but-public cryptocurrency to prevent a zerocoin-style really-anonymous currency from being developed? Or were they trying to get a distributed computing project going to really test the strength of sha256? Or were they trying to sabotage Folding@home and distributed.net?
- Tichy 14y ago
  He invented something a lot of geeks had been dreaming about for a long time. That alone is probably incentive enough.
- brazzy 14y ago
  You're over thinking this based on current information and developments.Seems pretty clear that the primary (and originally only) motivation was to create a decentralized cryptocurrency, just to show that it is feasible and practical, and for the satisfaction to see one's work have an impact.
- jhales 14y ago
  "Nakamoto’s work appears to be politically motivated, as quoted: “Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.” – Satoshi Nakamoto “[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” – Satoshi Nakamoto In the Bitcoin network’s transaction database, the original entry has a note by Nakamoto that reads as: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” Some claim this quote implies Nakamoto had great concern or contempt for the current central banking system." http://bitcoinreport.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/ http://bitcoinreport.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/
  - 14y ago
snowwrestler 14y ago
Regardless of the cash value, I think it's interesting that so many people continue to accept that "Satoshi" was in fact a single real person, who created bitcoin out of an ideological desire. Given the famous quality of its cryptographic design, it seems at least plausible to me that bitcoin is in fact a research project out of academia or a national government, with the Satoshi mythology a brilliant marketing wrapper.
- nestlequ1k 14y ago
  I still think it's the most probable scenario. If it were a group, there would be a lot more people who have incentive to go forward and "expose" the true story. There would be huge financial rewards for doing so. It's definitely plausible it could be an institution, or a small group. But I'd bet my bitcoins that it's a single dude.
- damian2000 14y ago
  There's a comment by Hal Finney on another bitcointalk thread on this Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.[1] Remember too that at the time noone could have foreseen the popularity and success of Bitcoin. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#ms...
Tichy 14y ago
Could be a challenge to anonymously sell those first bitcoins.
- chii 14y ago
  why does it need to be anonymously sold?
  - Tichy 14y ago
    Because so far Satoshi has kept his real identity a secret.
buro9 14y ago
I can't be the only one here to have lost some. Somewhere in my house, or perhaps at my old workplace, there is a USB stick with approx 250 bitcoins on it, the gains from early mining and experimenting. I'd backed them up before I rebuilt my main machine, and then didn't restore them immediately (mining was approaching diminishing returns and I gave up). I'm pretty sure I haven't over-written them, but I also have no idea where they are. A few weeks ago I looked again, fruitlessly. I'm sure they'll turn up some day.
- bdcravens 14y ago
  A $25,000 USD USB stick. (as much as $70,000 at one point) Pretty sure I'd search a bit harder :-)
  - buro9 14y ago
    I have searched harder! I can't find any of my USB sticks. I'm assuming they're all together and I tidied them up. I don't feel like I've lost them (hence no panic), just that I don't know where they are. Though I really didn't comprehend they were worth so much. The last time I looked they were GBP 750. Am now leaving the keyboard to look again.
    - epaga 14y ago
      I love these stories. Please update if/when you find them. :)
      - buro9 14y ago
        I've found a few old SD cards, a hard drive I'd forgotten about, a Garmin for my bike I'd assumed I'd lent out, and a watch I'd mislaid years ago. But no USB sticks. They're here somewhere. May be time for a weekend of spring cleaning.

124 points by mdelias 14y ago

pyre 14y ago

While the title here[1] is better than the title of the thread[2] it's still sort of misleading. There is no consensus in that thread about the status of the first million Bitcoins. Though there are some interesting comments: > But what is true is that anybody running Bitcoin > that year with a consumer Core 2 would make about > 2000 BTC a day. > > [Bounty] 201600 BTC for a time machine, I only need > a few hours... If someone decided to go 'all out' and threw significant computing power behind Bitcoin in the early stages, how would this have affected the outcome. Would it have encouraged others to join in (i.e. "look what he's doing, there must be something to this thing")? Would it have effectively pushed everyone else out of the space (i.e. "I can't match his resources, and he seems to be mining significant amounts of Bitcoins; may as well give up on this Bitcoin thing")? > I think the likeliest scenario is that hundreds of > people downloaded and ran the client then, got a > bunch of blocks that were at the time useless because > they were valueless, then deleted their clients. It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.' [1] "Status of the first million Bitcoins ever created" as of this writing. [2] "Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD"

seanalltogether 14y ago
"It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.'" So I'm kinda curious, as the power of the collective network grows, how difficult would it be to turn the incredible hashing rate toward discovering the the private keys of wallets lost long ago?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  How do you know if the wallet is lost? I'm guessing most people who lost their wallets, probably lost their public address too. (Unless they were using it as a donation sink or something). Plus, if you can crack the keys, you would just target the biggest wallet and be done with it.
  - pyre 14y ago
    I imagine that cracking wallets that have been dormant for a long time carries less risk of being noticed and/or caught.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Cracking a wallet can be done completely offline. I guess if you mean extracting the coins, yeah. I suppose that's what you'd use a bitcoin laundry service for. (a "mixer" I believe)
  - philix001 14y ago
    There's no difference between a lost bitcoin and one that is unused.
- teraflop 14y ago
  Hashing doesn't help you crack private keys. Bitcoin uses ECDSA to sign transactions, which means you need to be able to solve the discrete logarithm problem over an elliptic curve. In any case, even the combined computational resources of the entire planet probably aren't enough to break a 256-bit ECDSA key in a reasonable amount of time.
  - antiscam 14y ago
    True, if by "break" you mean "break by brute force" (and of course with current, non-quantum computing technologies).
  - oleganza 14y ago
    Most one-time pubkeys are wrapped in RIPEMD-160 and SHA256, so you have to crack those first before you even get to cracking ECDSA. This also offers temporary protection against sudden appearance of quantum computer. QC can break ECDSA, but cannot break hashes fast enough. So people would have time to switch to another algorithm or at least agree on the last valid blockchain state and stop all transactions.
- kzrdude 14y ago
  The protocol could be updated to allow "mining" of addresses that didn't move for sufficiently long time. But that's never going to happen.
  - davidjohnstone 14y ago
    The interesting thing here is that Bitcoin isn't set in stone to forever exist exactly as it does today — it depends on the majority of miners not modifying the protocol. I'm talking about what's essentially a 51% attack, but rather than it being performed by a malicious party, what if a technical/political decision with very strong opinions on both sides had to be made? It would be like a democracy where those with the most computing power win.
    - Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
      Or most money, or depending when it happens, most guns. I suppose you could try and reach a consensus when possible, rather than have a majority dictatorship. I wouldn't see any real opposition to changing the protocol to allow mining of lost coins for example if some precise and correct definition of a lost coin could be specified.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
So, there's 100 coins that represent an abstract value X. Now there are only 50 coins because 50 were lost. Do they still count as that same value X? What if you can't know how many coins were lost?
- wmf 14y ago
  In theory this is priced in already. Lost BTC is treated no differently than "hoarded" BTC; in either case it doesn't contribute to market liquidity.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Surely there is, or there would be eventually, value to knowing how much BTC is "hoarded" or even possibly just "saved" and how much is actually "lost".
  - glesica 14y ago
    Well, not exactly, right? I mean, they don't contribute to liquidity, but the difference is that hoarded bitcoins might, at some point in the future, be traded. So it has to be considered when assessing the risk of bitcoins as an investment.
    - greenmountin 14y ago
      Good point! But that's "1/f" (frequency) liquidity. If the true value of bitcoin is as an instantaneous transfer (and it is), then the chance of a shadow wallet emptying in between the time you received and when you cashed out is vanishingly small. The cost to insure against such fluctuations while it gets multiple confirmations is your "transaction fee". Bitcoins shouldn't be considered an investment -- the business about hoarding them like taxi medallions because they only go up in value is nonsense. Their value is limited by the low transaction fee for another blockchain. But you're right, you'd have to factor that in if you were actually investing.
- philix001 14y ago
  The offer/demand will adjust the price of the remaining bitcoins. Think of lost bitcoins as a small donation to all bitcoin users.
ZeroCoin 14y ago
According to these calculations: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/c9cwqn2 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... The first 1.6 million bitcoins were mined by at most ~15 people.

ryandvm 14y ago

Fascinating, but I certainly don't hold it against him. 100 MM seems like a pretty modest take for a guy that invents a revolutionary currency. There are certainly easier ways to make 100 million dollars.

joshmlewis 14y ago
Like what?
- jquery 14y ago
  Being a co-founder of the internet company I work for? As much as I respect my company, it's no Bitcoin.
- rkuykendall-com 14y ago
  There are a lot of people and companies worth over 100 million dollars. I only know of one revolutionary crypto-currency.
  - antiscam 14y ago
    Or the seventeen others founded on the same technology. It's important to distinguish the Bitcoin software from the particular block chain in whose private keys naive people are now speculating.
  - rmc 14y ago
    Selection bias. You only know of one popular revolutionary cypto-currency. There are loads of companies worth $0 (or much less than $100M)
    - cheapsteak 14y ago
      Popularity is essential to 'revolutionary'-ness. It's not revolutionary if no one uses it
- archgoon 14y ago

treelovinhippie 14y ago

Greatest pyramid scheme ever.

efnx 14y ago
Can you explain why?
- antiscam 14y ago
  I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or maybe just out of greed. Their claims, which fueled the recent speculative frenzy, have always been that Bitcoin would have a continuous, exponential growth against all other currencies. "It always goes up." "Get in before it's too late." I can see how relatively small amounts of money could be invested into Bitcoins as speculation or just play. Several tens of millions of dollars have presumably been transferred to Bitcoin holders so far, in the aggregate. But many people are investing on claims that a single bitcoin will eventually be worth $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million. For that to happen, the world would have to transfer massive wealth to the early adopters, as this early adopter explains: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#msg1830933 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#ms... Why would anyone do that rather than setting up an alternative? Massive delusions are possible, but it seems far more likely that the claim that a bitcoin will be worth $10,000 will start to seem ludicrous to everyone, as it obviously is. After that, why would anyone buy a bitcoin for $100, or even $30 or $10? There's little practical use for them other than drugs or illegal gambling. And they're hardly worth speculatively buying at $100 just so that they could be sold at $120 or $150. It's got to die eventually, unless everyone decide that they don't mind depreciating the value of everything else just so that the early adopters of this scheme can have untold wealth dumped into their laps. It's a fascinating technology, but that doesn't mean the speculative delusion will last forever. Pyramid scheme? Just so. Of course, to some degree so is gold -- but gold has a much wider existing distribution (compared to Bitcoin), a much deeper history, and backers far more significant, both intellectually and financially, than the childish ideologues of bitcointalk.org.

saosebastiao 14y ago

If someone wants to go dumpster diving in Cleveland, there is a Samsung 80 gig hard drive with about 120 Bitcoins on it. I won them from a tor gambling site after betting a single bitcoin that was given to me. They were selling for less than $.20 at the time so I didn't care enough to do anything with them when I scrapped my hard drive. I obviously didn't foresee Cypress.

StavrosK 14y ago
Yeah, that tree was pretty unpredictable.
dfc 14y ago
What is Cypress?
- rbol 14y ago
  I think he means Cyprus?
- consz 14y ago
  >Cypress is the name applied to many plants in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is a conifer of northern temperate regions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress
- saosebastiao 14y ago
  An alternative spelling to Cyprus, Ciprus, Chipre, Cipris, etc. It is one of two anglicized versions that I know of, and I can never remember which version is more accepted. Anyway...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    What's the other anglicized version? "Cyprus" is the only correct spelling, as far as I know, and I'm Greek. Or are you referring to the transliteration, "Kypros"? That's pretty much never used (same with "Hellas" for Greece).

Permit 14y ago

If this is true and any individual holds 1M BTC, it must take an incredible amount of self restraint not to dump those coins. That means the book value of his coins would have fluctuated between approximately $250M and $100M this week. You'd also have to keep in mind that he would have been through the previous crash in which his coins varied in worth between $29 M before falling back down to $2M. It would take a special someone not to sell those coins before they hit the prices we've seen these past few weeks.

wmf 14y ago
Please read the whole thread; the first million BTC are definitely not held by one person. (Also, I think you'd get no more than $50M for 1M BTC but that's a minor detail.)
- Permit 14y ago
  My point was not that he currently has them, it's that if any person were to have them, they'd have been sold a long time ago.
  - NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago
    Why would he sell real bitcoins for fake fiat? This is Satoshi we're talking about, not your average joe. To him, USD is riskier than BTC.
    - danpat 14y ago
      True, to a degree, but day-to-day living still requires normal currency. Cash out $1M USD and you'd be comfortable to do whatever you liked for quite some time, while still keeping 99% of his coins.
      - jacquesm 14y ago
        I think there may have been an element of sarcasm in the GP.

ZeroCoin 14y ago

The same question/comment was posted to r/bitcoin a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... This comment on that post seems to calculate the number of people mining bitcoins for the first year: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitcoins_difficulty_stay_at_exactly_1_for/c9cwqn2 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc... If satoshi was indeed just testing the network... why not use "testnet" or simply re-set the blockchain once you were satisfied with the results of your work and release it to individuals? Oh, wait... because you wouldn't hold 7.8% of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist then if you did that. Just because almost half of those first 1.8M bitcoins mined were "transferred", doesn't mean that they ever transferred ownership.

shredfvz 14y ago
Yeah, some guy recommended I mine back in the earliest of days. "If only I knew then what I know now" ... hahah. So sick to think that my old Core 2 Duo could've made me a millionaire. I was turned off by the ugliness of the bitcointalk forum, and decided it wasn't worth the time to understand the Satoshi client. I don't think it's right to get on the case of the earliest bunch though for not being more egalitarian. How could Satoshi have been more fair to you? After all, nearly everybody had the short-lived opportunity to mine 50 BTC blocks with ease. Clearly Satoshi believed in his concept more than most of us did, and deemed it worthy of putting in lots of effort into mining. He did his part to warn the world of his invention. Fair's fair.
dustcoin 14y ago
Bitcoin was announced on a cryptography mailing list and released to the public at most a week after the blockchain was created, as proven by the headline in the genesis block. The Bitcoin whitepaper was released months earlier. Anyone had an opportunity to mine early on.

ZeroCoin 14y ago

The "yes men"/cult mentality on bitcointalk.org is infuriating. Namely comments like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1834237#msg1834237 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1834237#ms... It's obvious what's going on. They own a lot of bitcoins, but can't be made to look stupid by admitting to this travesty of a pre-mine that they all overlooked.

ewillbefull 14y ago
There was no pre-mine. The genesis block contains a headline: > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks He made bitcoin public exactly after this. He even announced it on a mailing list months before. Unless he had a time machine it's impossible for there to be foul play.

incision 14y ago

Tilting at windmills. More accurately, asking the most ardent followers of bitcoin to help launch an investigation into their prime diety. This discussion and variations of it has been going on for years now. Each new attempt has/will be dismissed by the faithful with some combination of the following: A) You're wrong. B) He deserves it. C) That's just like everything else. D) You're just envious.

ixacto 14y ago

For all we know about satashi he/she/it could be working with in-q-tel or any other politically motivated entity. What really matters though is that whoever owns 7.8% of existing bitcoins has the ability to manipulate the market, due to their 'I got there first with my old gpu farm' advantage. Want to crash the market? Go for it... Of course they don't have the control that the Federal Reserve has, but they also don't have anywhere near the flak. Treat bitcoin like you treat going to the casino, except Mt. Gox doesn't give out free drinks. Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I would put my faith in currencies that are backed by strong operational second-strike nuclear capability and a developed economy. This leaves USA/FR/UK as the winners, with India/Russia/China as runners up, since they are not developed nations yet. CHF is also a good reserve, but everyone especially the Europeans have been fleeing to it, and the Swiss caved to the USA so their 'banking secrecy' is not what it is advertized to be.

jes5199 14y ago

Satoshi's motivations are interesting to me. What was he/she/they actually trying to accomplish by creating bitcoin? Were they really hoping to anonymously buy things? Or were they trying to get rich? Or were they trying to get geeks to commit to a pseudonymous-but-public cryptocurrency to prevent a zerocoin-style really-anonymous currency from being developed? Or were they trying to get a distributed computing project going to really test the strength of sha256? Or were they trying to sabotage Folding@home and distributed.net?

Tichy 14y ago
He invented something a lot of geeks had been dreaming about for a long time. That alone is probably incentive enough.
brazzy 14y ago
You're over thinking this based on current information and developments.Seems pretty clear that the primary (and originally only) motivation was to create a decentralized cryptocurrency, just to show that it is feasible and practical, and for the satisfaction to see one's work have an impact.
jhales 14y ago
"Nakamoto’s work appears to be politically motivated, as quoted: “Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.” – Satoshi Nakamoto “[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” – Satoshi Nakamoto In the Bitcoin network’s transaction database, the original entry has a note by Nakamoto that reads as: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” Some claim this quote implies Nakamoto had great concern or contempt for the current central banking system." http://bitcoinreport.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/ http://bitcoinreport.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/
- 14y ago

snowwrestler 14y ago

Regardless of the cash value, I think it's interesting that so many people continue to accept that "Satoshi" was in fact a single real person, who created bitcoin out of an ideological desire. Given the famous quality of its cryptographic design, it seems at least plausible to me that bitcoin is in fact a research project out of academia or a national government, with the Satoshi mythology a brilliant marketing wrapper.

nestlequ1k 14y ago
I still think it's the most probable scenario. If it were a group, there would be a lot more people who have incentive to go forward and "expose" the true story. There would be huge financial rewards for doing so. It's definitely plausible it could be an institution, or a small group. But I'd bet my bitcoins that it's a single dude.
damian2000 14y ago
There's a comment by Hal Finney on another bitcointalk thread on this Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.[1] Remember too that at the time noone could have foreseen the popularity and success of Bitcoin. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#ms...

Tichy 14y ago

Could be a challenge to anonymously sell those first bitcoins.

chii 14y ago
why does it need to be anonymously sold?
- Tichy 14y ago
  Because so far Satoshi has kept his real identity a secret.

buro9 14y ago

I can't be the only one here to have lost some. Somewhere in my house, or perhaps at my old workplace, there is a USB stick with approx 250 bitcoins on it, the gains from early mining and experimenting. I'd backed them up before I rebuilt my main machine, and then didn't restore them immediately (mining was approaching diminishing returns and I gave up). I'm pretty sure I haven't over-written them, but I also have no idea where they are. A few weeks ago I looked again, fruitlessly. I'm sure they'll turn up some day.

bdcravens 14y ago
A $25,000 USD USB stick. (as much as $70,000 at one point) Pretty sure I'd search a bit harder :-)
- buro9 14y ago
  I have searched harder! I can't find any of my USB sticks. I'm assuming they're all together and I tidied them up. I don't feel like I've lost them (hence no panic), just that I don't know where they are. Though I really didn't comprehend they were worth so much. The last time I looked they were GBP 750. Am now leaving the keyboard to look again.
  - epaga 14y ago
    I love these stories. Please update if/when you find them. :)
    - buro9 14y ago
      I've found a few old SD cards, a hard drive I'd forgotten about, a Garmin for my bike I'd assumed I'd lent out, and a watch I'd mislaid years ago. But no USB sticks. They're here somewhere. May be time for a weekend of spring cleaning.