Not quite possible with the auditing capabilities Bitcoin provides. The moment any amount from those accounts is moved, Bitcoin would probably tank.
He may also have taken out a loan from a traditional financial institution and used them as collateral.
There is a very real possibility that they are in fact owned by someone else now, who has made the same exact calculation you have - they are a valuable asset that has exactly zero liquidity.
Are you trying to claim that someone would buy Satoshi's coins without moving them to a wallet they control?
In this scenario, the person would have 'purchased' the coins with precisely zero assurance that Satoshi wouldn't just move them to a new address at any point, as he/she/they still have the private keys.
As I said, it is impossible to verify that that isn't the case. He could have taken a loan with the whole wallet as collateral. That isn't the same as claiming that Satoshi did that, but it's not like the audibility of the blockchain spreads all the way to the real world. There's really no saying what Satoshi has done, and the anonymity means there's no way to find out.
It's like trying to sell an account by selling the password to it. The first thing you do is change it so the previous owner can not get in anymore. Before you did that you can not be sure that you are the only one with access. On Bitcoin the only way to change the password is to move the funds to a new address.
Example: I own one coin. I sell my private key to you for $5k fiat. You take my private key and sit on it thinking it’s yours. After a use a copy of the private key to transfer the coin to a new wallet I own. I’ve now stollen the coin I supposedly “sold” to you.
What am I missing?
Indirectly it could jump-start a recursive reaction, but then anything could.
Dumping most of it all at once could tank the price, but to do that Satoshi would have to be an idiot.
Everything from just a ton of media attention and some adoption, to maybe something really positive like coins getting deposited to charity wallets (pineapple foundation seemed to get a lot of attention/vitality for donating their bitcoin).
And it would be pretty ironic if it the coins moved and price of bitcoin crashed and actually became a peer to peer electronic currency for the masses.
The price of Bitcoin isn't what is preventing it from becoming a bonafide peer to peer electronic currency. Scalability and UX issues are.
Bitcoin also needs fungibility:
"Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy. I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions." -Charlie Lee
Not without an increase in the block size, which has been a contentious issue. At 7 transactions per second, it would take 31 years of full blocks for every person on Earth to just open a Lightning channel each, in uninterrupted succession.
Break the private key, do a 30x leverage short and move the coins!
If you tank the market and create systemic insolvency then you might hold $1B of short contracts at an exchange where the operators have packed up and fled to anonymous sandy beaches, and for all your cleverness those contracts and $10 might buy you lunch tomorrow.
I understand we're doing thought experiments here, but I'd say the really tricky part is breaking the private key.
That's the interesting thing, you can try to brute force keys in general by just throwing enough money at the problem. Technology always advances and makes cryptography less secure.
It's gotta be doable with the amount of exchanges that we've seen that are short both!