Someone bought 26.9 BTC on Binance and sent it to Satoshi's dead wallet
blockchain.com
blockchain.com
Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload.
EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)
You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.
For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.
Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.
https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-fro...
Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.
If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not unusual for pump-and-dump schemes to involve burning a lot of value to trigger the pump they're trying to profit off of. You need to treat the bit they're planning on dumping as separate from whatever capital they're prepared to invest to make the pump happen.
The P&Ds are common with thinly traded premined coins.
The altcoins have done a fair job of sweeping people with zero scruples away from Bitcoin. I'd be quite surprised if this were someone trying to drive up the price of Bitcoin.
Now I'm not saying that the OPs theory about this being a pump and dump is likely correct. But I don't think it is any more speculative than the other ideas offered here (jilted ex / copy&paste error / testing code that mistakenly shipped / etc)
And they're also talking about parties controlling 1000 BTC levels... which, while an astounding amount of money, are still small compared to the markets.
I can't say it's impossible, but I'd rate most of the other speculation above it.
Then again, nothing stops someone from trying something that won't work...
I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho
If the media takes notice and talks about bitcoin, couldn’t that make more people buy and thus drive up the price?
I’m willing to admit that it is a bit 6 dimensional chess explanation.
This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.
There must be something going on behind the scenes.
Not sure how the binance source address plays into this theory though.
Now let's imagine the victim tells the hacker they are not willing to negotiate and hope that law enforcement will catch the hackers like they did in the Bitfinex case. The hacker could destroy some coins every X days to make it clear to the victim that this is not a good idea.
This is just a wild scenario. But had I been the Bitfinex hacker I would have done crazy things such as sending blacklisted coins in small amounts to many random addresses, those of exchanges, developers, non-profits, Satoshi Nakamoto etc.. Just to create chaos as it would have caused those people a lot of trouble and would have forced some kind of resolution.
Back in the early days of Bitcoin... Zhou-tong, after robbing his own business (Bitcoinica) blind, did something kind of like what you were suggesting -- raining down coins on random people and creating general chaos. I think it was more mania and panic rather than a well considered strategy.
I think in general you don't see stuff like that through a mix of (1) it's less easy than you think, and (2) thoughtful people don't become serious thieves in the first place, it's not worth it.
Since we can track bitcoin perfectly, it's hard to argue people who have the exact stolen item shouldn't be required to return it.
Fungibility is just a social convention. Anything we can tell apart we can decide to treat non-fungibly, and we can tell bitcoin apart.
If it's things we can't tell apart (say, liters of oil in the same tank), we are pretty much forced to treat them fungibly. I say pretty much, because there are such things as LIFO and FIFO accounting conventions - sometimes we do our damndest to tell apart things that can't really be told apart.
But if we can tell them apart, it's up to us. We have decided to treat money (incl. physical bills) as fungible in most contexts. With laws.
Even with laws there are limits: If someone wants to pay a debt to me, and offer to settle with a 200 NOK bill, it would be illegal for me to refuse, even if I knew this bill had been stolen from me earlier that night.
But if it was a $10 bill, or a bitcoin, it would be perfectly legal for me to refuse. With crypto tokens in general, there's to my knowledge no government on earth stopping me from declaring that I will take payment in bitcoin minted only on Thursdays.
No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent. Specifically the case of Crawfurd v The Royal Bank (1749).
> On 30 July 1748, an Edinburgh lawyer named Hew Crawfurd mailed two £20 notes to the merchant William Lang in Glasgow, but the letter was lost. Prior to sending them, Crawfurd had meticulously signed his name on the banknotes and recorded their serial numbers, so he notified the Bank of Scotland and advertised his predicament in several newspapers. One of the notes was never found, but the other note turned up at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Crawfurd requested the Royal Bank to open a multiplepoinding action with respect to the note, but the Bank refused. Thus he brought suit in the Court of Sessions against the Royal Bank.
> Both banks were alarmed by his action, as an adverse finding would subject banknotes to infirmities of title like any other property, which would threaten the idea of paper money as a common circulating currency. Despite their generally poor relations with each other at the time, they agreed to cooperate and jointly defend the case.
Laws ARE a kind of social convention. And to the degree that the fungibility of "money" is law, law also decides what counts as "money", and there's no reason why they (yes, they, not it - law is actually people) should let your crypto-token of choice count as money for legal fungibility purposes.
I doubt this is just some hackers.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884
https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id
If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to
- crowdfund the development of multiple technologies
- harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities)
- mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity
The "bottom up" psyop
But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard.
I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time.
nothing but conspiracy mongering bunkum here
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies...
Many reason to believe the NSA would be behind the digital crypto currency fad, they need the tech, and it needs to be as secure as possible
To me this sounds more plausible than the "a random dude from SF" theory
I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).
Now using it further from there might indeed be problematic... but also a champaign problem.
The risk to them comes when they try to spend the funds later. They'd always have the option of dumping them on something unconnected to them for bragging rights with relatively low marginal risk.
Also if you can send BTC to some wallet, why couldn't you send it to another wallet where you indeed have access?
Why the expenditure? Someone above basically said marketing -- marketing Bitcoin so headlines hit the masses and maybe get some sort of ball rolling again. I think it's safe to assume there is a larger plan in the works and whomever responsible has played their hand and now hopes the cards fall as they projected, for whatever ends.
If those were to be dumped on the open market, it would eat a lot of USD.
(I said it was a new theory, I didn't say it was a good theory.)
Block 824513 was mined on Jan 5, 2024 7:00 PM UTC [1]
Block 0 was mined on Jan 3, 2009 6:15 PM UTC [2]
Delta is almost exactly 15 years.
Someone who is grateful for Bitcoin celebrates by provably and forever shrinking the overall supply by BTC 26.9 (coinbase of block 0, the addie the coins were sent to, is unspendable by design) thereby making every other Bitcoins out there a tiny bit more valuable.
[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/824513
[2] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0
[EDIT]: as nullc correctly pointed out somewhere else in this thread, these BTC 26.9 actually can be spent if you happen to have the private key to block 0 (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive, would).
Only the coinbase (the block reward) of block 0 can't be spent by design.
So this now looks like a "thank you Satoshi on Bitcoin's 15th" and not a provable way to shrink the supply.
There is an speculation that Satoshi himself is "just" dead.
[2] https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-time...
[3] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
BTW2: adding a little bit of serendipity to this Sunday I came up with this repository [1] which seems very dangerous and fishy. It says that "34 000 Satoshi Nakamoto wallets with pubkeys (50 BTC each other)" but the download points to a .zip with an .exe. In GitHub you can denounce people but do you suggest to investigate the .exe before right? Seems like a good, and probably simple, reversing play.
On the context of Satoshi's public keys, you cannot (like some other blockchains) get his/her/their public keys from the address.
[1] [potential malware]
It would be great if you add to your comment the best way to act in this case? I could research the potential malware but I assume that GitHub has some tooling/resources to quickly research it? It is like the automatic scanning in Gmail. If it is an obvious malware it could be detected with existing tools. You can also run it in a very isolated VM and/or computer and see what happens behind the scene in a black box manner.
BTW3: I played with our AI friends to do an image of this conversation [1].
[1] https://nitter.net/coinfabrik/status/1743992974067867868#m
Particularly anything that looks like wallet crackers is frequently full of malware-- as I assume people feel less worry of arrest and less moral concern with robbing other (wanna-be) thieves.
From my experience on bitcointalk ... It's often hard to prove it's malware, as a popular technique is to make the software phone home for some quasi legitimate looking purpose and then have an RCE vulnerability in the phone home interface.
It may even be the same guy that keeps making new trojans that work this way over and over again.
Wait! It is not clear that Virustotal analyzes ZIPs [2]. When I upload the EXE within, it gives different results but no virus alert [3]. The weird thing is that [1] result in "clean" status over the antiviruses tested while [3] results on "Undetected".
[1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/3815d095d5031535475478b04...
[2] https://superuser.com/questions/1651122/why-isnt-virustotal-...
[3] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/93fe6b75fada79b5fa6d0aff...
My money is on Len [1]. The sheer number of coincidences, crossing of rare skill sets and interests, time, place, penchant of pseudo anonymously publishing things and happened to take his own life <2 months after Satoshi's final gloom-filled message, "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future".
[1] https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...
There is a HN thread about this [1].
Although in all seriousness, what is going on in your life?
[edit] Now, I think I should focus on other things. Average politicians can earn (/s) 50x more money in 5 years than what average programer earns in 190+ years.
Some also clean up by taking huge speaking fees for giving speeches, but only those at the top with heavy celebrity power. Can you usually pull this one off.
What makes you think that?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
The 10th best position was 63% better than the s&p. That’s just a touch better than keeping your money in qqq.
There might be evidence of congressional insider trading but the bare numbers aren’t it. In a population of 540 people you’d probably find similar outliers to what that article outlines.
The key thing is that of 100 trading members of Congress -of which not one (I believe) is a professional, full-time stock trader — 33% beat the SPY, and that this has been consistently true… the average professional, full-time trader can’t consistently do that.
You might not see evidence of fire, but I definitely see evidence of smoke.
But more importantly your understanding of how trading is judged is flawed. It is trivial to find a population of traders that includes 33% of them that beat the market last year. In fact you can do so going back every year through time.
What is hard (but not impossible) is to find a single trader who has done that consistently for many years. That’s because beating the market isn’t interesting, it’s beating it on a risk adjusted basis which is.
In fact your linked article hints at this. The most active traders in Congress _under_ performed the markets.
There simply isn’t evidence in aggregate that Congress people get market advantage through information only they have.
Yes, you can cherry-pick a population that doesn’t have insider information where 33% beat the market in any given year, but you wouldn’t expect that same population to consistently beat the market, year over year. In fact the whole argument for index funds is that, in aggregate, no one, including professional traders or anyone else without unfair market advantage, consistently and reliably beats the market itself over the long run. But it seems here’s a population that both inarguably has insider information and where 33% does consistently beat the market over and over, year after year.
Lack of evidence also simply isn’t particularly relevant, as the point isn’t to convict the legislator — who has the power to ensure such evidence isn’t available, and even if it were that it wouldn’t represent a crime, and even if it did that they wouldn’t be punished, etc — but instead to convince the voter to consider whether or not their vote should go to someone who disagrees with the notion that Caesar must be beyond reproach.
Every other congress person would have been better off in an index fund as expected. Its easy to write dramatic headlines about Congress people trading, and there are very good reasons that they shouldn't (it influencing their votes is top of that) but there is very little evidence of any significant information advantage in the trading positions or returns of congress people.
they get rich the old way, literal bags of money. you cannot win a big construction job without bags of money that go from the engineer to the govt inspector, then the inspector to the mayor, then to the governor. if you did up anything paid by tax, you will find that foundations are always missing several meters of concrete that are in the plan and paid for.
If celebrity speakers aren't worth anywhere near that, what are banks and multinationals and industry events bribing ex-sports coaches and actors for?
And of course even the politicians get paid by a lot of entities that aren't obvious beneficiaries. Boris Johnson might be as sleazy as former PMs get, but I'm really struggling to understand any quid pro quo with the Indian newspaper or Portuguese TV channel that both paid him north of $250k for a single keynote, and I don't think he ever had much influence on insurance brokers in Colorado either
Sheesh. Not even worth debating.
Sheesh.... almost like you don't have any arguments for what Colorado brokers have to thank a former British PM for, never mind what favours Goldman Sachs got from David Beckham or LL Cool J other than a clearly very expensive speech
You're not thinking like a hacker at all if you can't concoct theoretical ways that rich and powerful people might find themselves unexpectedly interconnected, and able to non-obviously do each other favors - perhaps even in round-robin fashion at times.
Regardless, on those examples you gave, I don't think it was a Portuguese TV channel, I think it was a global CNN summit which happened in Lisbon (but please correct me if I'm wrong).
Also, The Hindustan Times (which is the Indian newspaper I think you're referring to) is also not exactly a small media outlet with a circulation more than double that of the Times of London (based on the most recent numbers for The Times in 2020).
Additionally, a significant number of British citizens have family ties with India, and are likely to continue to follow English language news in India, so it's not simply 'some foreign newspaper'.
Some random backbencher isn't getting Johnson or Clinton sized speaking fees.
Johnson himself started his career as a journalist.
I'm well aware of Boris' journalistic career; I've even read some of his waffle. You share his flair for insinuation and missing the point so I wish you good luck with your own campaign to be PM ;-)
I really doubt there is a quid pro quo here — “I’ll help you out now in exchange for paying me off after I’m done with the presidency”
The value is like the value of any high-end brand — it makes one look powerful.
Why does some generic reality TV celebrity or "influencer" make money from showing up at a party or turning on some Xmas lights? Surely no one really cares, there are 1000s of reality TV stars. But, it turns out some people do care, so cookie-cutter reality TV celebrity gets paid to turn up.
In "high net worth" (for want of a better term) social circles ex-Presidents are the reality TV celebrities, and the people who want them to turn up are rich, so they get paid a lot for the equivalent of turning on the Xmas lights.
I suspect its not really about the speech, it's about having them in the same room and giving your guests the chance at a face-to-face meeting.
Of course Obama may be more discerning with which events he attends, but the demand for people like him to turn up is certainly real.
> How can't you see for what it truly is??
Essentially implies it isn't.
Look, there's some amount of money that's you're willing to spend on hearing someone you want to listen to speak/perform. Assuming you've ever gone to a concert or a show, that's true, so the rest is down to details. Would you pay $1 to watch former President Obama speak? $2? What's the cost of a dollar to you? If you're willing to spend $2 to see former President Obama speak, why wouldn't your rich friend spend $2, or their friend $4? If someone's got enough money that they're willing to pay a million dollars to hear someone speak, it's more a reflection on how much money they have and how little it means to them than anything else.
If I had a million dollars I'd spend it on other things but if I had a hundred million dollars, I'd totally spend a million to hear a former president speak, or have Taylor Swift play my birthday party.
Rich people spend their money differently than poor people, or are you too poor to see that?
Let's say a pillow cost $2, a contractor will charge $600. 10 politicians will get $550 dollars and the contractor will keep $50.
Of course, this is an unpopular idea.
You’re welcome, I’m not saying you don’t need money to participate in the experience of being a human. But there is more power in our belief in their unit (as this particular experience exposes about one store of value…. It certainly says about another.
The joker is real. ;)
Party A explains how to send bitcoin to them but used a well known wallet address in their documentation/guide (Satoshi's).
Party B didn't use Party A's address and committed a bad case of copy-pasta.
May even just be a low-information buyer.
A very similar thing used to happen with people accidentally using a QR code linking to a popular blog post or something explaining QR codes ("PLEASE INSERT QR CODE HERE --ed.").
Somewhat hilariously, even Google's (discontinued) Titan security key had this type of blunder in its Bluetooth software: It was using the example key from the Bluetooth specifications for all keys, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks [1].
[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...
Shared security parameters work just fine for some applications; we use them all the time in ECC, for example. Obviously avoiding them is preferable, but isn't always possible. But importantly, using shared parameters is required by some protocols.
On the other hand, using somebody else's URL, email address etc. or symmetric encryption key by mistake and assuming it'll work for you as well is just that: A mistake.
It's also not particularly remarkable to send small amounts to that address-- its been done many times-- and it's not unheard of for people to make errors in the amounts they pay.
Elsewhere I've advanced a couple more complex theories which probably fail occam's razor relative to simple error. You may find them fun to contemplate: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5480574.msg63449574#...
> This could possibly have some connection to my involuntary hobby-horse.
> Recent leaked emails[1] show that Calvin Ayre-- the billionaire rube that has been funding Craig Wright's litigation-- believes that Wright actually controls early addresses in the blockchain, consistent with Wright's initial claims but contradicting Wright's more recent claims in court (that he "stomped the hard drives"). Calvin believes Wright can only win the lawsuit against Bitcoin devs by using these early keys and has been pressuring Wright to do so. I'd agree that at this point it would be his only path to even have a chance of winning, and even that would be far from certian given the extraordinary level of obvious forgeries.
> On December 20th the UK courts increased the security Wright owes the Bitcoin devs for trial from £100k to £900k. The remaining amount not already paid was due today. (We won't know for a few days if the payment to the court cleared). At the time of the transfer 26.91679286 was worth about £920k.
> Up thread it's noted that the source of the funds has heavy BRC-20 activity and I've been told that Ayre has been significantly funding BRC-20 activity.
> I wouldn't expect Wright to make the payment out of funds newly received from Ayre, but rather to make them out of float used to pay his legal representation going forward, and then get a top-up payment from Ayre. Wouldn't it be funny if Ayre paid Satoshi's address as part of an effort to force Wright to use it? It would be clever on his part: If he believes Wright will lose unless he uses the address then funding him via an address he can't use won't make things worse and it might save Ayre money if Wright's inability to pay terminates the case early. It would be a genuinely good idea, given Ayre's beliefs. (a better idea would be to wake up and stop being ripped off, but that would have happened long ago if it were going to happen)
> Another related explanation is that someone may have set this address as their primary address on a service, either as a joke or because they were LARPing as Satoshi-- and then they either accidentally withdrew to it or got kicked off the platform and automatically had their funds sent there. Who do we know LARPs as Satoshi and may have needed to access another 26.9-ish Bitcoin today?? Tongue
> History may not repeat but it does rhyme. During the large ATO investigation into Wright, Wright sent some amount of bitcoin equal to his tax-ID to some high value address he was (falsely) claiming to own-- so he could then point to his tax ID on the blockexplorer page as evidence that he owned the address. The tax office didn't fall for it, but I could easily see some people falling for it. 26.9 BTC is a lot of money but relative to the amount Wright is spending on litigation it's not that substantial, it wouldn't be impossible for that manic to think he could get some benefit in court by throwing coins away at Satoshi's address.
> All in all it's probably more likely that someone had the genesis address in their clipboard for some reason, but I wouldn't find any of the above too shocking and they are fun to consider.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*DmM...
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*eQQS...
Edit: yeah I know this is just a meme but that's the only reaction I have to wasting so much money.
edit: reason for the downvotes? What am i missing here? What else could it be marketing for?
it will be ruled next week. not launch.
I watched somebody loose a fortune when the covid supply chain shock was first predictable. He got killed on the timing. The rationality of markets is highly overrated. And this is far from rational.
I'm only aware Satoshi created Bitcoin and remained anonymous.
Block zero was in all likelihood "mined" by Satoshi. As a matter of fact, that specific block might even have been created by hand.
There's also the myth and legend of The Satoshi Wallet. People have software checking it automatically and _any_ transfers out would be stuff of legends immediately. Any major transfers would cause panic - the founder is leaving, what's happening?!
edit: I'm wrong, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
But any other payment made to that address/pubkey are perfectly spendable by whomever has the matching private key.
Though that misunderstanding is somewhat common, so it's not impossible that the payee believed that they were sending the coins to an unspendable address.
Yep, fingers are fat for sure, but the sense is different, it's a kind of fat greasy meat fingers.
My far out speculation post notes that the amount is close to the amount of additional security he was required to put up in one of his lawsuits against me on the same date as the transaction.
Let’s say somebody had Satoshi’s wallet address on their clipboard, tried to copy their own, failed, Satoshi’s was still on the clipboard, then they proceeded with the transaction.
Wouldn’t they at least look at the first few and last few chars of the address before hitting submit?
Also this transaction seems to have been sent out at 9am GMT.
Institutional sender during business hours?
The addresses 'look' like line noise, and usually one looks a lot like another. Should they have compared carefully, especially considering the value? Sure. But errors happen.
A good workflow for high value transactions lets you preform the transaction and pass it around for validation before signing it (or after signing it but before sending it)-- but virtually no wallets enable such a workflow. So, sadly, many high value transactions are handled without meaningful review.
Other ways it could happen due to error:
Perhaps someone intended to send 26.9 BTC to "Genesis Trading" and they tasked the most unfortunate of interns to carry it out. They googled "Genesis wallet address", and the google blurb for that query gives _this address_ (I checked).
Or...
A party intended to send a test transaction to that address with a tiny amount (there are many such payments). But they are using some awful tool that makes them manually manage the payment, change, and fees amounts and they manage to pay the amount that should have been change to the destination and send the amount they intended to pay as fees. (The transaction has no change)
Or,
Imagine a backend system is pulling addresses out of a database which has them in the same order they're in the blockchain. Unlike a bitcoin node, this system indexes the genesis block so the very first address in it is this address. In that environment multiple failure modes could result in selecting this address. I don't think this one is that credible because indexing addresses by observation in the chain doesn't make a lot of sense for sending.
Hehe, reminds me of the Fat finger trade when a stock trader wanted to buy 100,000 units, but there was a built in multiplier (factor 1000) in his trading tool that resulted in a 100,000,000 units order worth a whopping $10.8bn. But that error only created a damage of $300,000 for the bank.
https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/the-fat-finger-points-to-t...
That's why in all sane money systems we can always just reverse the tr... oh... right.
All charities do if you open a Fidelity Charitable account and fund it with Bitcoin. :)
In the US it is tax adventitious to donate appreciated assets, including Bitcoin. (or even especially bitcoin as few other assets have appreciated as much)
It's often not highly promoted-- usually posed on an 'other ways to give' catch-all as it appears to have a slightly negative effect on conversion rates (I've heard there is some evidence that accepting bitcoin sends prospective donors off on a rabbit hole of learning about Bitcoin).
Regardless what your views on Bitcoin are, accepting donations of appreciated assets just makes a lot of sense from a tax optimization perspective: The donor gets a write-off of the current market value, while the (nonprofit) charity can sell the appreciated assets without incurring capital gains or income tax.
At least that’s the case for stock donations in the US.
There are a lot of "charities" that IMHO do mostly "bad". Also charity itself is problematic: should those with money get to decide how and what problems are focused on?
Or as more commonly put: you can't eat money.
This question can be asked about anything. Like my new car! Or that I ate a steak instead of chicken.
It's like giving up quota in a shared storage system for all others (in proportion to their quotas). And not like e.g. throwing away food or destructing buildings.
Rather than effectively sending it to the "average" Bitcoin user, which is definitely not in the lowest economic position -- and whatever the average Bitcoin holder spends on charity, it's only a small percent.
This is why Bill Gates spends his money on the Gates Foundation where it's designed to help those who need it most, rather than lighting all his money on fire so that the deflationary impact will help everyone in proportion to their savings.
I don't think it's clear whether the world would have been better or worse off if Gates would have just burned (or preferably /dev/null'ed) all his money.
No, because burning money is simply deflation, and existing money will continue to follow the same patterns of consumer spending.
The idea that consumer spending is worse than burning money doesn't make any sense -- they're the same.
That's the whole point of why targeted giving to charity is better. That's why the Gates Foundation is a million times better than burning money. The Gates Foudation isn't going to "consumer spending" -- it's helping those most in need, like people who would die from malaria otherwise.
Gates (Foundation) allocates labor and material resources with its money. If it didn't, that labor and material resources would be allocated differently. E.g. central banks could print equivalent amount of money and it could be spent through governments to let's say malaria aid.
Money isn't a resource. Spending money dictates how resources are allocated. Assuming Gates Foundation is million times better than burning money assumes that Gates is million times better allocating resources than "non-Gates" would be.
I'm sure Gates isn't a million times better at this. I'm not sure at all he's even better than "non-Gates".
I am sure that no democratically unaccountable person should have that much power over how resources are allocated.
> Assuming Gates Foundation is million times better than burning money assumes that Gates is million times better allocating resources than "non-Gates" would be. I'm sure Gates isn't a million times better at this. I'm not sure at all he's even better than "non-Gates".
But I think it's actually pretty clear that it is a million times better. I think it's extremely clear that saving somebody's life, who would otherwise have been killed by malaria, is a million times better than somebody eating a nicer meal at a restaurant, or buying a nicer chair, or whatever.
Yes, governments could be funding more malaria aid but they haven't been. The point is that the Gates foundation identifies areas where there hasn't been enough help and goes and provides that.
I honestly am pretty blown away by your assertion that you're not even sure whether the Gates Foundation does any good at all. Your logic seems to question whether charities do anything at all and whether they should even exist, and I don't think you're going to find a lot of people on your side there.
I agree that society and resource allocation should be structured towards such that so much of it doesn't go to this kind of pointless crap. Heavily progressive taxation for all income and international redistribution would be a good start. But people seem to care more about their chairs than poor people suffering.
> I honestly am pretty blown away by your assertion that you're not even sure whether the Gates Foundation does any good at all. Your logic seems to question whether charities do anything at all and whether they should even exist, and I don't think you're going to find a lot of people on your side there.
Gates Foundation probably does some good. But so do e.g. UNICEF, WHO, public universities etc.
In general I find that, at least large scale, charity is a clear sign of a failed economic system. And promoting more charity tends to make the systemic problems worse.
I may be in the minority, but I'm definitely not alone in this. Philantrophy is oligarchy.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...
https://jacobin.com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effective-a...
edit: Wiling to bet on advertisement for Bitcoin ETF launch
And yes, one could argue why not give away this incredible amount of money to charity. But then I ask myself why do I go out to a restaurant and order ribeye steak and an IPA on Saturday, instead of having spaghetti at home and give the 50$ to the next homeless person.
My money is on a "thank you Satoshi for Bitcoin's 15th".
See my post elsewhere in the thread.
Idealists will have an easier time understanding what motivates such actions.
If that were the sender's goal it perhaps could have better been accomplished by provably burning the coins instead. So I'm dubious of that. I think it's either an accident or a publicity stunt or a very bizarre sideeffect of some deep bitcoin inside baseball.
So essentially this can be seen as sacrificing power over other people and resources. Which IMHO should happen a lot more.
### remember to replace with your own before sending coins!
As for supply limitation, the current market cap of BTC is USD 860B, so this is 0.0001%.
But any other payment made to that address/pubkey are perfectly spendable by whomever has the matching private key.
Though that misunderstanding is somewhat common, so it's not impossible that the payee believed that they were sending the coins to an unspendable address.
There are a number of addies with Bitcoins stored on them that are extremely unlikely (probability so tiny it's just zero for all intents and purposes) to be accessible:
This one for example (with a current balance of around $1.2k):
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressD...
Here's a list from our friends at r/Buttcoin:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3kqdjv/a_list_of_...
didn't work.
because anybody can send money to any address, doesn't prove a thing
[1]
https://x.com/attorneyjeremy1/status/1743842422285562336?s=2...
think a general (perhaps mythos) belief is that hal finney is satoshi so
in essence, there are definitely blockchain detectives
Bitcoin and crypto stocks came under pressure early Wednesday as the market continues to wait for spot bitcoin ETF approvals by federal regulators, which are expected to come around Jan. 10.