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Comment by fenalphthalein | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like this person was really smart to begin with. High-level societal awareness caused them to choose the private route, and focus on releasing something for the greater good.

I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes. That would create another avenue for people to come after them if it became public that they hoarded some of the Bitcoin for themselves.

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This. Maybe, Satoshi saw where it was going, knew it had wings, didn’t want to be the elephant’s plaything in some senate hearing, and bowed out. Sometimes people make things because it’s the right thing to do. Other times people make things because they are experimenting and seeing what sticks. This was a case of both. The right idea, at the right time, without hubris, and without someone to blame or throw in court if the experiment fails.

Satoshi could have chosen a 0 BTC subsidy in the blocks he mined. Or he could have burned all the BTC he mined. But he chose to do neither, leaving himself as the biggest BTC owner ever.

Other coins have been designed in a way where the founders can only obtain coins by mining them in very small quantities or buying them on the open market (mostly by fixing the block subsidy forever).

Or he deleted the keys.

Also can you choose a smaller subsidy? Wouldn’t that be an invalid block?

Yes, the coinbase can be any value from 0 to the maximum, which is subsidy + fees. It has been below the maximum several times in fact.

I mean that “other coins design” part is looking at this aspect from the 2024 perspective of many blockchains many designs existing.

In 2009, calling Bitcoin the only blockchain in town doesn’t even do service to its extreme novelty at the time.

There were no other ideas on how to design, let alone any ideas on what would work long term, and there were no “open markets” for crypto haha.

> I wouldn't be surprised if this person never even took a single bitcoin for themselves, other than the ones used for code testing purposes.

Unlikely - https://coincodex.com/article/28459/satoshi-nakamoto-wallet-...

The value of his publicly-known wallets are well into the tens of billions. Yet Nakamoto has not cashed out.

Maybe he will cash out in the future if his cryosleep awakening will be successful

Allegedly this guy is nakamoto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scienti...

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