The others are that he is not human, or that it's a committee defying Hanlon's razor: i.e. not governed by stupidity like most human affairs, but malice. Both are equally improbable.
That's plenty money for one person without the liability and the publicity. You can live a life in pure luxury and fulfill all your material wishes.
Maybe he lost the keys or threw away the machine after a year or two. There's nothing to be gained from going public in this case but a massive threat to your life.
He could have sent his BTC to zero address.
Still worth a lot, obviously.
Like, get a loan for $20b in a stablecoin with the payback being $21b in btc in a year?
While you could sign a message with your key, you would still need something that accepts the proof but isn’t public, which might be possible with a properly structured/constructed smart contract, maybe?
It would be a great deal for Satoshi, but no other party would accept.
He might be dead but someone has control of his keys & logins as they used his accounts to defend Dorian Nakamoto.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/03/06/bitcoin-...
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour...
https://blockchain.info/address/1Dorian4RoXcnBv9hnQ4Y2C1an6N...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ztjmg/andreas_im_...
Adam is/was not a good programmer like Satoshi was. Satoshi was in favor of alt coins in Adam is notoriously against them. "Adam put enough effort into proclaiming that Bitcoin was based on the concept of HashCash that, if he was Satoshi, Satoshi would have given HashCash more credit." - Another HN User. Satoshi had a positive attitude and Adam is notoriously unpleasant.
Hal is a great programmer, worked for Phil Zimmerman on PGP. Hal is the first person Satoshi contacted, first person to mine outside Satoshi (op sec). Hal was aware of all the prior works that failed, b-money, bit gold, hashcash, etc. Linguistic analysis of the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi's forum posts most closely match Hal's writings. Hal lived in the same town for 10 years as did Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal died of ALS shortly after Satoshi disappeared (he knew it was coming and that he couldn't continue).
It may seem like a dumb opsec mistake to pick a name from your town, but lets remember, at that point we're talking about launching a cool experiment about digital money worth $0, not about picking a pseudonym as the figurehead of a project worth a trillion dollars.
After reading an article about it, I do wonder about Len Sassaman, who apparently fits Satoshi's timezone and "accent" better. It could even have been both of them collaborating...
However, there are some valid counter arguments in this thread, such as Satoshi coming out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi.
Yet I do not think any human would resist a moment in the spotlight, if not to renounce its child and its current direction.
It wouldn't surprise me if he destroyed his private keys to prevent himself from ever succumbing to the temptation.
Those coins are of little value when using any of them would kick off a race to track you down and kidnap you with the intention of rubber-hosing the key out of you before going short on bitcoin. Having a secret in your head that can be converted into billions of dollars is not a good position to be in if you are not already a highly powerful individual with tons of people looking out for you.
Vitalik Buterin is widely known, travels all the time to many countries, and although he might not be as rich as satoshi, still owns like a billion in crypto.
Yet he hasn't been kidnapped.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
They probably also had other keys that they mined early coins on that they did keep, this would be consistent with Satoshi being Hal Finney or Nick Szabo
> I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
1. They probably made enough off BTC to retire rich already, why go through any trouble to make even more money (not everyone has the drive to accumulate billions when they already have millions)
2. If they've destroyed/lost the original keys there is no way to prove they are Satoshi and nobody would believe them, like Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi and started a BTC fork which picked up very little traction
Occam's razor says it's easier to assume he's dead than trying to imagine him as the most patient Buddhist monk, with deep economic and cryptographic knowledge, the world has ever seen.
But we could go on with this discussion for years, so let's just agree to disagree and wait and see if his name surfaces again or not. There's bound to be more and more hucksters trying to claim they're Satoshi the longer this legend lives.
You wouldn't know about them, holy hell haha
Though in this case Satoshi could have just kept a smaller number of coins not tied to him.
But seriously, wouldn't you grab the most off the shelf stuff for your throwaway persona to use?
As a side note the Nakamoto Institute website archived all of Satoshi’s emails and ‘his’ IP is Californian. Make of that what you will. For all we know it could’ve been one of Musk’s side projects that caught on and went viral.
Satoshi released working software without prior announcements and did hardly anything to promote it.
I don’t know how anyone really thinks Elon could be Satoshi.
If the genesis block did contain the image of a trollface (or any other 2008-era meme) instead of "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks", I could entertain this theory.
Not so much on the price but the principles that underpin Bitcoin
I, for the record, remain a believer.
And last I checked, the company’s name was SpaceX, not “Elon Musk’s Rocket Company”