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Comment by 1053r | Hacker News Reader

A few of the very earliest participants in the bitcoin community (who got in before the first big peak at $32) have 100K BTC.

As a rough order of magnitude estimate, if Bitcoin gets to be as big a thing as gold, then it will be worth about $10 trillion. Since there will be about 20 million BTC by then, those individuals will be worth about $50 billion. This is a lot of money to be sure, but there won't be many of those people, and this is not out of line with the world's very highest net worth individuals.

The people who got in after that peak will probably be worth at least an order of magnitude less. And if Bitcoin turns out to be a smaller deal than gold, it might "only" create fortunes worth 9 figures of USD.

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Apparently Satoshi has around 1 million BTC [0] which is staggering plugging your numbers. That'd put him at $500 billion which is insane. Since you said 20 million BTC (less than the total there will ever be), we're talking within about 20 years right? It would be incredibly interesting to see what happens if somebody ends up with a theoretical worth exceeding the top 10 wealthiest people in the world, but I wonder whether the mystery of who he is could actually stop that happening. Also only 4 individuals are worth more than $50B so that's pretty incredible too. [1]

[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-mints-its-first-bil... [1] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/

That also assumes that he still has the private key to his address(es).

Inflation adjusted, that would put him in the range of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, etc. If (and it's a big if) bitcoin was worth as much as the world gold market, it isn't disruptive like an internet startup, it's disruptive like Marxism. We could argue about the insanity suggesting that bitcoin will reach that sort of value, but if it somehow did, then $500 billion isn't totally out of line.

I think it's pretty obvious at this point that Satoshi Nakamoto is just Gavin Andresen's pseudonym. Is there anything wrong with that assumption?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Andresen

https://github.com/gavinandresen

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen

https://plus.google.com/117494054859918211010

I haven't really researched either character, but Gavin seems to claim/imply he isn't Satoshi.

' This is quoted from the defunct Bruce Wagner Bitcoin podcast:

"Bruce Wagner : When was the last time you chatted to satoshi <laugh> Gavin Andresen: Um... I haven't had email from satoshi in a couple months actually. The last email I sent him I actually told him I was going to talk at the CIA. So it's possible , that.... that may have um had something to with his deciding " '

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113609.0

My reading of that thread is that it's common knowledge/expected that they're not the same person, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be sure.

That does very little to exclude him from the list of candidates potentially responsible for the Satoshi Nakamoto alter-ego.

A lot of people are using 'gold' as the measuring stick, but i dont think gold goes far enough.

The basis of all wealth is trust. Gold has value because people have trust that it won't be duplicated easily. The worth of all gold in the world is ~ 10 Trilion.

The stock market has value because people trust that commerce will continue to happen regardless of much else on the world. The value of all the world's stock is around 600 Trillion - which means there is more faith in the continued operation of companies than there is in the demand for gold.

The REAL breakthrough of bitcoin has nothing to do with money; it's the blockchain - an indisputable public record. If people trust that system to continue - a system oriented around an irrevocable record - it could easily be worth some fraction of the stock market. What happens if btc market cap goes up to 100T?

I think gold's real utility is that it's useful for things other than currency: jewelry, electronics, alloys, etc...

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