When Satatoshi started mining the genesis block, he put some code into it to prove that the genesis block was not created earlier than that date:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"But why did he not take a natural event like an earthquake, storm, flood or some other random event not caused by humans?
The financial crisis could have been planned/forseen. And also the newspaper item could have been planned in advance because it was done by people.
So to me it is no proof that the genesis block was not created earlier than 03/jan/2009. There could have been a lot of people knowing this in advance.
There is also another concern, the difficulty:
These are the first days of bitcoin mining03/01/2009 18:15:05,0.00004971026962962963
04/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
05/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
06/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
07/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
08/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0
09/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0006959437748148148
10/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0015410183585185184
11/01/2009 18:15:05,0.005269288580740741
12/01/2009 18:15:05,0.004424213997037036
13/01/2009 18:15:05,0.0057166810074074075
14/01/2009 18:15:05,0.006263493973333333
You see there were 5 days where Satoshi turned off his mining machine.
What could have been the reason for that?
Was he waiting for others to join the mining first so that he did not end up with way too many coins?
Was the genesis block created (days, weeks, months) earlier and did he do something in between? (Fork the chain, hide some coins, I don't know)
Are these things a real concern? I mean, what if there are some coins hidden on a side chain. Couldn't we agree to fork the bitcoin code into declaring january 9th the day of genesis?
I've been reading about bitcoin on a daily basis for the last two years and these things are the only concerns for me to not put the remaining of my life savings into bitcoin.