Huge fortunes have been built this way, notably Gould and Kennedy.
So I keep having this thought that if Satoshi really is worth his salt, he would transfer his existing funds (of about 50 billion USD) to an assortment of charities because such an action would be quite the statement in declaring that the crypto experiment has been an abject failure and it's time to stop wasting our time and move on. Better he make this impactful statement, better him the person who started it all be behind the action to finish it, than to have to continue in this painful and agonizing path we are on.
I am really curious why Le Roux has been ruled out even by the author of the book about him "The Mastermind" by Evan Ratliff - quite a good read.
Le Roux seemed like a good candidate to be Satoshi - a Windows C++ programmer with serious crypto knowledge(most other crypto oldschoolers were on Linux/BSD), as the book states he liked adopt other persona on forums, he obviously had a strong anti-government bent,
so far that is not much but more importantly he was dealing with his real life crime empire and had baskets of money laying around the house.
it is hard to imagine Satoshi not spending some money once BTC got over $1 - unless he was really really not worried about money. Of course he could have just lost the keys...
There has to be some crucial detail which book does not mention why Le Roux is ruled out so conclusively.
I'd be curious if any code similarity analysis has been done on old LeRoux codebases and original Bitcoin code.
When the Dorian saga happened, Satoshi posted on p2pfoundation to clear up that Dorian wasn't him with his original account, I think Le Roux was in prison at that time. He's still in prison, he's been cooperating with the US government. US is definitely not letting him go anywhere for the shit he's done, everything from drug cartel work, helping Iranian and North Korean governments acquire weapons, etc.
One more delicious detail: Le Roux in a letter to SDNY judge wrote that he wants to invent ways to mine BTC efficiently. Really it comes down to the fact that Le Roux was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and when you have this much surface area to scan you'd think you could come upon with just one strong piece of evidence... but there is nil, he's just another criminal warlord, luckily now in the custody of the US government: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pd...
how have you quantified that, and how would you go about doing so? It isn't obvious to me. It also seems like your standard is quite flexible, like even if you quantified that use and didn't find the results you wanted, you would say that the subset of transactions that did fit your results were "enabled" and "made efficient".
- Number of scams/crimes enabled by crypto in the last decade: a ton - Number of constructive, noncriminal use-cases observed in the last decade: zero
By "constructive", I mean a use-case for which it is the best solution, which rules out every single blockchain use that is not a cryptocurrency. And the cryptocurrencies are the ones enabling the crime and scams.
Consider his unease when Wikileaks started soliciting funds in BTC. If he were all about uncontrollable money he would not have sounded unhappiness about his ballgame being used by Wikileaks.
He obviously copied the freedom dollar concept and even said they have a couple years until the government catches up.
He knew what happened to the previous own currency people so he stayed anonymous.
When the international organization can point directly to you as now holding $100M+ worth of crypto tokens and you're in a "jurisdiction like Russia," then the international organization isn't who you should be worried about.