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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

> just because those bitcoin have never moved

Satoshi might not have the keys to those earliest wallets. Perhaps they have decided that those coins should never be moved and erased the keys.

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There are literally billions in those wallets. Unless "Satoshi" is independently wealthy, a nation state, or dead, you would expect that they would have at least taken out some money. I can't imagine that "Satoshi" would have lost all the keys to all of those wallets.

But it wasn't billions in the early days. They could have discarded the keys before it was billions.

And Satoshi was able to mine/buy plenty of newer bitcoins back in the early days.

The decision to erase the keys from those known wallets and make sure they never make a transaction would boost the value of their remaining coins.

There are many, many ways to lose a cryptographic key. There are none to restore one.

There's also the idea that Satoshi thought he was doing something altruistic and purposely destroyed the keys so he wouldn't be tempted later on... which, if true, he might be regretting now.

Bletchley Park would like a word.

They could have just mined very early on and made more then enough to be independently wealthy with that.

It's entirely feasible that the modern Nicolas Bourbaki that was Satoshi have lost a member, or can no longer reach a pooled key quorum.

The argument can be made that not releasing early blocks contributed greatly to the perception that lifted bitcoin and there was never the intent to release them, to which sufficient early members still hold fast.

Or not.

Many things are possible.

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