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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

It seems very unlikely to me. I've had personal correspondence with Satoshi, and met Adam Back in person, and I can't see it.

Actually I don't see how anyone involved with Blockstream could be identified as Satoshi. They never believed in what Satoshi was doing and built their whole company around the claim that Satoshi had screwed up the core of the system's design, despite that nothing about the design or its assumptions had changed. They spent years raising investor capital (why would you do that if you were rich?) specifically to build a system designed to replace Bitcoin for end users.

The last time I met Adam he was trying to convince me to not continue working on Satoshi's original design, and none of his arguments were technical. Satoshi had a totally different approach.

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>why would you do that if you were rich?

Satoshi can't spend any of his bitcoins without tanking bitcoin's price. So Satoshi needs to find some other way to support himself. Creating bitcoin related companies is one way.

He could tank the price to $1000 and still be a billionaire. There's a much more plausible reason for why Satoshi's coins haven't moved.

What's the much more plausible reason?

That the person is dead would be a pretty convincing one.

Or they just lost access.

Yep. Dead, lost access or in prison. I'm leaning towards dead.

Why is being dead a convincing idea? How old do you think he is/was, and why would it be likely that he would die? When do you think he died? The idea that he died doesn't explain how he came out of hiding twice.

Losing access by intentionally deleting the keys? That agrees with my point that he knows it would cause problems to spend them, and decided not to spend them.

Losing access by accidentally deleting the keys? Would Satoshi really be that careless?

He lost access to the wallet either by mistake (never even saved the key) or because he willingly destroyed the key for philosophical reasons. Or he is just dead.

I replied to those options here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711594

Who would realistically not want to cash out?

1. Someone so purely interested in the tech and not money they'd give up the wealth 2. Governments, specifically the ones that don't consider a few billion to be a lot 3. Someone who's dead

4. Someone who wants to keep all their fingers, and not meet some kind of horrifying death.

It would also seem likely that if he at any point was alive and realised he wouldn't be able to touch his original wallets, he'd still get in early enough to be rich from subsequently crested wallets nobody would suspect.

You find it likely that someone would give up their ~$70B fortune just in case it may reveal they are the creator of Bitcoin?

I find it likely that someone who realised that if they were to touch that paper fortune the Bitcoin price will totally crater would have made additional billions they could actually access by mining more bitcoin at a point where the difficulty was still ridiculously low.

The value of the bitcoins in those early wallets isn't real, because they are the most watched bitcoin wallets in existence, and any movement there would send shockwaves through the crypto space.

From a financial standpoint, this makes no sense.

First, they could just liquidate all their other BTC before moving the Satoshi coins.

Second, even with a significant price impact, the net worth of an additional 1M BTC would surely outweigh any realistic price slippage.

Third, the price probably wouldn't even crash that much. We're talking about a 5% increase in supply... which rationally, should result in a ~5% dip in price. I know the market would overreact, but I doubt it would be by much more than say 20%.

This 5% increase is actually huge, because the amount of bitcoins in actual free float is very small. The same coins get traded over and over while the vast majority sits in cold storage. A 5% supply sell off would eat up all of the order books, and that's before everyone else starts selling off.

Do note that the selloff would be automatic, huge wallets are monitored 24/7.

If I was Satoshi, I would go a to big bank and sell the private key directly for huge discount. Still a billionaire, no trace.

The volume would involve a crazy increase in the actual float, but the bigger issue is that everyone watching knows this is Satoshi, and any sudden move to sell would be a massive shock to the market because the current presumption is that those coins are off the market for the long term. If they are not, it changes a lot of calculations.

And assuming they have lots of other bitcoin to liquidate first, the reasons to liquidate the early coins are basically gone. If they believe the price will continue to rise, and have enough wealth from later coins, they'd have little reason to rock the boat.

Nobody knows which coins Satoshi owns, it's just a guess for the very early coins and that guess gets progressively less accurate as time goes by. And this was a long time ago. There was no particular reason to think back then that Satoshi spending his coins would tank the price. Everyone back then was spending Bitcoins because that was the only way to build the economy. The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea when Blockstream killed Bitcoin as a genuine means of exchange and it became all about sitting on them as a speculative "investment".

But if he did want to spend he could just start from his last coins backwards.

This [1][2][3] seems to have a methodology for identifying Satoshi's coins, mined from 2009 to May 2010. But yes, for coins mined after May 2010, he likely can spend without scrutiny.

>The idea that if his coins move everyone would panic is a post-2015 idea

Here are 2 people in 2013 expressing that idea: [4][5].

[1] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-...

[2] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-...

[3] https://bitslog.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accu...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569077

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569346

There's ambiguity here. When people talk about crashing the market they mean if he attempted to sell every last coin he owns for dollars all at once. Of course that would be a signal of lost confidence. What I mean is the more likely scenario of spending coins to achieve some specific goal or project.

I have no idea about any of this stuff - but if I were trying to hide my identity I would go out of my way to misalign my real self with my hidden identity.

e.g. Pick a name that puts people on a false trail.

What are your thoughts about Satoshi's last message offering support for Blockstream?

Edit: I see you addressed this elsewhere. Thanks for contributing!

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