Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

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Not true at all. Satoshi released his paper publicly in Oct. 31st 2008 and the first Bitcoin block was mined Jan. 3rd 2009. The first Bitcoin related submission that I could find on HN was Feb. 2009. [0]

I actually remember seeing a post about it here in 2009 and initially dismissing it because I didn't think it would gain enough traction and didn't take the time to understand how it was different than previous digital cash schemes.

Bitcoin price didn't even hit $1 USD until the spring of 2011. It's true that Satoshi has a lot of Bitcoin but so does anyone who was there in Jan 2009 and had the vision to realize that Bitcoin was something fundamentally different and put effort into mining it.

Compared to the way a lot of these other blockchains are being launch Bitcoin was by far the most egalitarian in the way coins were/are distributed. Most other coins retain a huge share of coins for the founding organizations through pre-mining schemes and other shenanigans.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793

I'm going to have to solidly disagree. Satoshi owns an estimated 1 million coins, 5% of the entire currency. If bitcoin were to become the global reserve currency, Satoshi would be the richest man in history by orders of magnitude.

There's nothing egalitarian about that. Even if he told the world and tried to be fair, that's more money than any person should ever own.

Only because he was an early adopter of his own product. He released it to the world and kept on mining to keep the project going. He didn't pre-mine and then release it. There is a big difference there.

It just happened that it took time for people to catch on and join his mining efforts.

He could have cashed out a long time ago for a large profit but those early coins attributed to him have never moved.

Hal Finney is dead.

> Satoshi would be the richest man in history by orders of magnitude

If he still have the keys. I don't think he does, but who knows. I would have at least spend some of the btc by now if I was in control of 1 million coins with a current value of more than $700 million...

Compare that to Etherum which is probably the second place competitor to BTC right now. The founders of that project took 12.5% for themselves and assigned another amount to the project organization. They didn't even go through the pre-tense of mining they just said we get 12.5% and wrote it into the code. In Bitcoin on the other hand anyone who wanted to could have started mining on day one with Satoshi. 5% isn't a huge sum for inventing the most revolutionary thing in currency and economics since physical money replaced barter. He didn't just give it to himself either he worked for it the same as anyone else had to.

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