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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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...

Hal Finney is dead.

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