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Comment by thegeomaster | Hacker News Reader

Although I really love crypto and innovative solutions with it, I am a little embarrassed to say I've never actually put a lot of effort into understanding how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies work under the hood. This article has pretty much cleared it for me (although I'll surely refer to Satoshi's original paper for some further clarification). Nice read.

Somewhat unrelated---I didn't know that the original Bitcoins were not spent! That's really strange to hear; I can hardly imagine a person resisting the urge to cash them in at some point (whatever the reason of resistance). Crazy stuff.

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Satoshi most likely has a stash of several thousand Bitcoin that were mined using a standard miner without their tell-tale finger print. (Something about the odd nonce distribution with Satoshi's coins gives away his main set.)

Also when Satoshi left the development team in 2010 he could've been mining normally like everyone else, and he could have easily amassed 10,000+ Bitcoin in that time without it ever being linked to his early 1,000,000 coins.

I think it's likely Satoshi has cashed out millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, just not from the pile of coins everyone is watching.

I bet Satoshi lost his private key

"cash them"? I think you meant "spend them". Remember bitcoin is money, why convert it to another form of it? How would you "cash out" bills? Convert them to gold? The "What is money" section of the article taught you nothing?

Sorry, it was a slip of tongue and has to do with the meaning of equivalent words in my native language---what I meant to say was closer to "exchange them for a form of money you can buy a yacht with." Not sure why the hostility, though, we are all wrong sometimes.

Can't blame him. Almost everyone who talks about Bitcoin talks about it as a speculative asset, instead of a currency. People are too fixated on the fact that its price in USD jumped a lot.

I guess "cash them" means "turn the speculative good into money".

The "What is money" section seems to agree (when leaving out the word "only"):

"The real difference between Bitcoin and a national currency is that national currencies are backed by governments, whereas Bitcoins aren’t really backed by anyone other than the miners."

So, the thing that is backed by governments is money, the other thing is not.

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