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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we'll ever figure out who Satoshi is/was. I'd love to know.

On the other hand, I do want to respect their wish to stay anonymous.

Whomever that person is, it must feel very weird. They either still have access to the private keys and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world. Or they no longer have access to the keys and must feel some form of "loss".

Or it was never a person and always an organisation. So many unknowns :-)

There must have been countless investigations into this. Journalists, governments, shady organisations. It's hard to imagine no-one has uncovered Satoshi yet.

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It's an interesting dilemma. Satoshi has billions in Bitcoin, but moving any of it would shock its value. They either haven't cashed out because they truly believe in Bitcoins principles, or they cannot.

My belief is that they've sadly passed and were either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist... or another relatively quiet engineer.

It's Schrödinger's Investment. Theoretically worth billions, but interacting with it would cause its value to collapse.

Why collapse? It could be bad news, but not necessarily...

> and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world.

That kind of wealth in Bitcoin is a strange case. After a certain point, money doesn't mean anything material and comes closer to a proxy for measuring power.

Typically, people who are worth tens of billions have a lot of power. A big voting stake in a huge tech company is, these days, probably more power than a senior US senator.

What does $50B in bitcoin mean (regardless of whether it'd be possible to liquidate)? It's an interesting question.

SAmsung TOSHIba NAKAmichi MOTOrola

No no, we're looking for a man named Thomas A Toonikas

I think it was most likely Hal Finney. He's cryogenically frozen himself, so most likely dead, hence it is unlikely his coins will ever be recovered. Unless perhaps he's stored the key somewhere in the physical world (or a mnemonic), so that he could retrieve in the case of successfully being "revived". If that's the case, someone might find it, perhaps.

I've always thought that he had a brain wallet, and his bitcoin are the bounty for reviving him.

Back in the Correct Horse Battery Staple days and earlier, when password managers were still nonexistent or frowned upon, I used to recommend that if you had an executive that has trouble remembering passwords, they should use a phrase from a book in their office (make sure they have more than a couple of books in their office).

For all we know somewhere there's a wallet whose password is the first sentence from Moby Dick, or one of Hamlet's speeches.

This has been proven already:

https://github.com/ryancdotorg/brainflayer

It was never unusual for cypherpunks to use nyms. Amongst the many ideological and practical reasons, for example worries about if authorities would treat a creation and its creator hostilely — it separates the creator from the creation and lets you judge the creation purely on its own merits (whatever those may, or may not, be).

I do appreciate your curiosity, but thank you for understanding. To date, to my knowledge, no-one ever guessed correctly, and maybe that's for the best. If they'd have wanted anyone to know who they were: they'd have said. They never have, and likely never will. I don't think you'll ever see anything from the genesis block or those keys. It's got to feel incredibly strange, yes, but remember: they _wanted_ to walk away from the whole thing, and I feel strongly that deserves respect.

If anyone knows, it's US intelligence.

They're so good at fingerprinting it's crazy. I highly doubt that they wouldn't be able to identify the person / people behind Satoshi.

I don't think it's that had to figure if you look into it but people don't like to say as the guy obviously wants a bit of anonymity. It's not that no one's uncovered Satoshi so much as they have uncovered about a dozen possible ones.

It could be anyone,and it need not be a single person, it could be a consortium. I've speculated that it could be the US govt that invented bitcoin for all we know.

While that could be possible, I find it improbable that no one that was involved or in the know has leaked or said anything in over 10 years.

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