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I think eventually we will find out who he/she is. Satoshi's wallet is holding 1M BTC right now, so close to a BILLION US $ worth of value. Would be interesting

I think eventually we will find out who he/she is. Satoshi's wallet is holding 1M BTC right now, so close to a BILLION US $ worth of value. Would be interesting to see if it keeps rising, and goes up 30-40x from now over time if satoshi could end up being the wealthiest individual in the world.

judk 13y ago
Not gonna happen, the depth isn't there. Even today's $1k BTC is speculation at the edge of the market, 1million BTC as a batch only fetch about $50m worth of interested buyers. Here is one ting I don't understand, though: suppose I am a billionaire black hat VC, and I wanted to steal Satoshi's coins. Could I invest a half billion dollars and brute force a majority-coup attack on the blockchain? Of not now what about when those $ figures are 10x? Even if bitcoin gets 100x more popular, it won't be 100x more network miners, it will be people buying BTC and trusting the block chain published by coinbase and whoever.
- gibybo 13y ago
  The computational power to attack the network grows significantly faster than the price of Bitcoin (and this is pretty much guaranteed to continue, by design). Attacking Satoshi's coins would be among the hardest, because you would have to attack the very earliest parts of the Blockchain which have tens of thousands of blocks protecting them. Half a billion dollars wouldn't come close at the current difficulty level. Further, performing this attack would invalidate all Bitcoins created after that point (which is the vast majority of them), so the Bitcoins you stole would be worthless.
  - javert 13y ago
    To add to this: The "official blockchain" is the one with the most computational work expended to create it. A 50+% attack operates by rewriting history back to a certain depth in the blockchain by providing a new chain of blocks with more computational work, back to a certain point. I think the bitcoin devs also put in certain "checkpoints" just to be even more certain... i.e. blocks that are "officially permanent" (which also makes all prior blocks in that chain "offiically permanent"). Maybe someone could tell us about that.
    - gibybo 13y ago
      Ah yes, I forgot about checkpointing. The reference client has certain blocks hardcoded in it to signal the official chain. Only transactions in blocks made after the latest checkpoint can be overridden in a way that the reference client would accept. So to steal Satoshi's coins, you would also have to get people to switch to your own client with different checkpoints. At this point, it really wouldn't even be Bitcoin anymore.
- kachnuv_ocasek 13y ago
  You can't "steal" anyone's coins, you may "take back" the coins you have sent someone with enough power, though.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  This of course assumes that you'd use an exchange to sell the coins. There are other methods of selling coins. Larger transactions tend to happen off-exchange.
- fchollet 13y ago
  Wouldn't BTC lose all value if there was a majority attack? Because surely such an attack would be quickly detected.
- edwardy20 13y ago
  If you had half a billion dollars, it would be much more profitable for you to mine bitcoins.
  - jonknee 13y ago
    Or invest it in something with tangible value...
- feral 13y ago
  > I wanted to steal Satoshi's coins. Could I invest a half billion dollars and brute force a majority-coup attack on the blockchain? No - controlling a majority of the compute doesn't allow you to steal some unrelated users bitcoins. You'd have to brute force their private key to do that, which is an infeasible computational challenge. Controlling a majority of the compute would allow you to 'double spend' coins you have, but that's a different problem.
crntaylor 13y ago
A commodity is only worth what someone will pay for it. It would be impossible to offload 1M BTC at the market mid (currently $962) so it seems ridiculous to value Satoshi's bitcoin wallet at $1B. The market isn't sufficiently well developed and doesn't have sufficient depth to support transactions of that size. Combine a lack of liquidity with the fact that BTC have no intrinsic value, and that the market has shown itself to be vulnerable to price shocks in the past, and I would value 1M BTC at significantly less than $1B (probably not even 10% of that).
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > A commodity is only worth what someone will pay for it. It would be impossible to offload 1M BTC at the market mid (currently $962) so it seems ridiculous to value Satoshi's bitcoin wallet at $1B. Conversely, it seems unlikely that e.g. Google's shares would be worth the current market cap if they were all sold at the same time. But we still accept the current share price as a basis of e.g. Page and Brin's net worth, so we should also accept Satoshi's wallet's current value (even if it fluctuates more than typical stock prices).
  - army 13y ago
    There's a far stronger floor though on the price for Google shares, given that they're a very profitable company with good future prospects. The share price doesn't have to drop too much before it starts looking like a bargain to the many deep-pocketed stock market investors out there. With Bitcoin the value is so speculative at the moment that I think, if anything, a sell-off that large would trigger a self-sustaining run on Bitcoin.
  - fragsworth 13y ago
    > Conversely, it seems unlikely that e.g. Google's shares would be worth the current market cap if they were all sold at the same time. Not really true. Google's shares have a value that is based mostly on analysis of expected value. If they offloaded a bunch of their shares at once, the analyzed value wouldn't change, so the market would only crash for a very short time while everyone else realizes Google is a better deal than their other stocks. There is no revenue from Bitcoin, on the other hand. Much like gold, its value is almost entirely based on speculation, but with some added value on account of people needing to buy a little bit to do certain things. The market cap of Bitcoin is not based on anything tangible.
xentronium 13y ago
Interesting. So this money is cursed right now? Satoshi either de-anonymizes himself or doesn't have a chance to use it?
- geoka9 13y ago
  He could donate it without de-anonymizing himself.

judk 13y ago

Not gonna happen, the depth isn't there. Even today's $1k BTC is speculation at the edge of the market, 1million BTC as a batch only fetch about $50m worth of interested buyers. Here is one ting I don't understand, though: suppose I am a billionaire black hat VC, and I wanted to steal Satoshi's coins. Could I invest a half billion dollars and brute force a majority-coup attack on the blockchain? Of not now what about when those $ figures are 10x? Even if bitcoin gets 100x more popular, it won't be 100x more network miners, it will be people buying BTC and trusting the block chain published by coinbase and whoever.

gibybo 13y ago
The computational power to attack the network grows significantly faster than the price of Bitcoin (and this is pretty much guaranteed to continue, by design). Attacking Satoshi's coins would be among the hardest, because you would have to attack the very earliest parts of the Blockchain which have tens of thousands of blocks protecting them. Half a billion dollars wouldn't come close at the current difficulty level. Further, performing this attack would invalidate all Bitcoins created after that point (which is the vast majority of them), so the Bitcoins you stole would be worthless.
- javert 13y ago
  To add to this: The "official blockchain" is the one with the most computational work expended to create it. A 50+% attack operates by rewriting history back to a certain depth in the blockchain by providing a new chain of blocks with more computational work, back to a certain point. I think the bitcoin devs also put in certain "checkpoints" just to be even more certain... i.e. blocks that are "officially permanent" (which also makes all prior blocks in that chain "offiically permanent"). Maybe someone could tell us about that.
  - gibybo 13y ago
    Ah yes, I forgot about checkpointing. The reference client has certain blocks hardcoded in it to signal the official chain. Only transactions in blocks made after the latest checkpoint can be overridden in a way that the reference client would accept. So to steal Satoshi's coins, you would also have to get people to switch to your own client with different checkpoints. At this point, it really wouldn't even be Bitcoin anymore.
kachnuv_ocasek 13y ago
You can't "steal" anyone's coins, you may "take back" the coins you have sent someone with enough power, though.
waterlesscloud 13y ago
This of course assumes that you'd use an exchange to sell the coins. There are other methods of selling coins. Larger transactions tend to happen off-exchange.
fchollet 13y ago
Wouldn't BTC lose all value if there was a majority attack? Because surely such an attack would be quickly detected.
edwardy20 13y ago
If you had half a billion dollars, it would be much more profitable for you to mine bitcoins.
- jonknee 13y ago
  Or invest it in something with tangible value...
feral 13y ago
> I wanted to steal Satoshi's coins. Could I invest a half billion dollars and brute force a majority-coup attack on the blockchain? No - controlling a majority of the compute doesn't allow you to steal some unrelated users bitcoins. You'd have to brute force their private key to do that, which is an infeasible computational challenge. Controlling a majority of the compute would allow you to 'double spend' coins you have, but that's a different problem.

crntaylor 13y ago

A commodity is only worth what someone will pay for it. It would be impossible to offload 1M BTC at the market mid (currently $962) so it seems ridiculous to value Satoshi's bitcoin wallet at $1B. The market isn't sufficiently well developed and doesn't have sufficient depth to support transactions of that size. Combine a lack of liquidity with the fact that BTC have no intrinsic value, and that the market has shown itself to be vulnerable to price shocks in the past, and I would value 1M BTC at significantly less than $1B (probably not even 10% of that).

lazyjones 13y ago
> A commodity is only worth what someone will pay for it. It would be impossible to offload 1M BTC at the market mid (currently $962) so it seems ridiculous to value Satoshi's bitcoin wallet at $1B. Conversely, it seems unlikely that e.g. Google's shares would be worth the current market cap if they were all sold at the same time. But we still accept the current share price as a basis of e.g. Page and Brin's net worth, so we should also accept Satoshi's wallet's current value (even if it fluctuates more than typical stock prices).
- army 13y ago
  There's a far stronger floor though on the price for Google shares, given that they're a very profitable company with good future prospects. The share price doesn't have to drop too much before it starts looking like a bargain to the many deep-pocketed stock market investors out there. With Bitcoin the value is so speculative at the moment that I think, if anything, a sell-off that large would trigger a self-sustaining run on Bitcoin.
- fragsworth 13y ago
  > Conversely, it seems unlikely that e.g. Google's shares would be worth the current market cap if they were all sold at the same time. Not really true. Google's shares have a value that is based mostly on analysis of expected value. If they offloaded a bunch of their shares at once, the analyzed value wouldn't change, so the market would only crash for a very short time while everyone else realizes Google is a better deal than their other stocks. There is no revenue from Bitcoin, on the other hand. Much like gold, its value is almost entirely based on speculation, but with some added value on account of people needing to buy a little bit to do certain things. The market cap of Bitcoin is not based on anything tangible.

xentronium 13y ago

Interesting. So this money is cursed right now? Satoshi either de-anonymizes himself or doesn't have a chance to use it?

geoka9 13y ago
He could donate it without de-anonymizing himself.