If he still owns the private keys of the coins he mined, he can create a huge selling pressure.
When people see that satoshi's coins are moving to the exchanges, this will create panic. Satoshi has around 1 million coins and anybody in the right mind will be afraid because the number is so huge, he can manipulate the market in any direction he wants.
On the top of that, satoshi is seen as the ultimate holder. If any coins move from his addresses, then it pretty much means the game is over. Run for your lives.
Yes, I was thinking along the same lines. Estimates range of Satoshi mined coins to be from ~800,000 to 1.1+ MILLION. Today there is ~18,474,000 coins in circulation with
only 900 coins mined (added to circulation) each DAY. Imagine the impact of Satoshi dumping, say, 1,000,000 coins overnight on the market? That is roughly 5% of the entire amount of coins circulated. Think about the impact to the
gold market if someone suddenly wanted to sell
5% of all of the gold ever mined all of a sudden
Technically it is ~5% of the
existing coins in circulation, but Satoshi's coins have been dormant over 10 years so some started to wonder if they were lost for good (fun fact the last suspected 'spend' transaction for Satoshi took place on July 22, 2010...if you are interested in a technical analysis of Satoshi's other suspected spent coins see my recent thread
Chain Archaeology revisited -- suspected Satoshi SPENT blocks analysis )
snip technical blah...blah....
To be honest I was secretly hoping that Satoshi's special miner was simply burning the coins he mined to keep bitcoin going in the early days, but now I don't believe that is the case. I guess he had to test out his wallet code he was actively involved in developing/maintaining before he move on so why not stress test it with his own massive coin collection? I now believe, and fully expect, that some day Satoshi's coins will surface only to prove to us that Satoshi is even smarter than we all believed and be crowned as the
ultimate HODLer....I just hope Satoshi's coins don't appear all at once