Topic: Implications of Satoshi holding 10% of bitcoins (Read 8002 times)

Casiascus is Satoshi?

Seems quite an obvious thing to do if you possess (potentially) great wealth. Fame and riches have their price, there are enough crazies and criminals who won't leave you be. Or groupies Or paparazzi. Or relatives, friends of relatives, random people on the street etc.

The above must play a role, though the impression given is that he is a very private person and there is nothing wrong with that.


Imagine he got declared a saint in a couple of hundred years

It's his choice and I respect that.

FTFY

It cracks me up how the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto grows.  First he was some Japanese dude with a really good idea.  Then he can't possibly be Japanese and is a mysterious libertarian benefactor who wants to change the world.  Now he's a woman and is hoarding her coins in order to benevolently "protect" the bitcoin market from instability.  I can just see people in the future commenting on price fluctuations: "Looks like ol' Satoshi is at it again, God bless 'im!"

It's a very important political economic problem for the bitcoin society to be solved.

I heard that the Gavin team still keep in touch with Satoshi through email, though Gavin don't really know who Satoshi is. Maybe Gavin should send a Satoshi a message, that we need him or her to give us a message, what he or she is going to do with his bitcoin. For the success of the idea, Satoshi need to sacrifice more. If he or she cares only about his own privacy or safety,   the whole bitcoin will be suffered from panic again and again, just like what happened on the past weekend, an early miner had started to move about 17k BTC, then the market started panic selling.

And I really don't understand, why is anonymity so important for satoshi. The wikileaks are doing a more hostile-to-government job than bitcoin does, and Assange didn't hide from the public.

Why Satoshi hide? I want to hear some plausible explanations.

Sotoshi could have mined hundreds of blocks that people don't know about. Even if sold just a few it kind of makes sense, if he can't withdraw the money, he might leave in mt.gox to help the market a bit. Or yeah he could just use an intermediary.

one can not manipulate the market without a metric crapton of Bitcoin and USD.

to the best of my knowledge, Satoshi is not wealthy in USD - only in Bitcoin.  not that it matters, because:

Satoshi's Bitcoin holdings appear to remain - as a blockchain watcher above pointed out - unspent and un-exchanged.

therefore:  Satoshi has not manipulated the market, for good or ill.

and anyway, in his position, he'd be a fool to sell in the light.  dark sales for cash through a well-trusted intermediary: get cash, keep stability, maintain anonymity...

I wasn't concerned about the get-rich-easily angle. I was concerned about the power angle, and how much leverage he would have to manipulate markets further down the road. But that power is open to any state/billionaire who buys into bitcoins, so Satoshi's holding isn't a particular problem.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here but all of that could be factored into the plan as misinformation. And other supporters coming forward etc. The end result will have to speak for itself, but by then of course it could be too late.


That kind of numbers would have to be through an exchange and none of them have the liquidity currently, apart from any limiting rules (at $1000 a day it would take over 100 years).

The problem with this theory is that "one or two million [bitcoins]" is already worth a big chunk of money, namely 20-40 million USD.  If your goal was just to get rich easily from your new currency invention, isn't 20-40 million enough?  I feel like if he was going to just take his money and run it would have happened by now.

Yes that's my assumption. My original concerns have been answered by the fact that any evil billionaire/state could easily buy up 10% of all bitcoins anyway, so it's a general problem, and Satoshi's holdings of bitcoins are probably the least of our worries.

Last year I offered a bounty of 100 BTC for someone to compile a version of Bitcoin that worked on a 32-bit Fedora system. Satoshi won the bounty, but refused to accept payment from me, saying that he had enough coins already.

Also, if you read through Satoshi's forum posts, it's obvious that he is motivated by the desire to see Bitcoin succeed rather than being motivated by greed or financial ambition.

Noah's Ark?

Flug has a point. Satoshi's sandwich acquisition in itself could cause a mass panic. If you are looking at the extremes, having that much coin doesn't help in smoothing out bumps unless you sell some upfront, and I'm sure many are watching for the early blocks like hawks, even if they are in smaller lumps (like 65k or something, which is still major, already). On the other end of the spectrum, Satoshi, whoever he/she may be, does not need to be evil. He could bequeath his wealth to an heir and a few generations later there could be a dynasty of dictators. Or he could be, and the dynasty is planned. Maybe 'Satoshi' is a team of NYC bankers doing the same as they did in 1910, a carefully planned execution of cornering the market before it even exists. We simply don't know.

Then again, supposing Satoshi is a benevolent saint, there is nothing preventing the current elite from simply starting to use Bitcoin too and reestablishing their hegemony. I don't mean buying up real estate on the cheap (or at expense later). Rather, a certain kind of person will do the same kind of thing whatever tools he has at his disposal, and be equally successful at it, because the rest will let them, just as it is now. A turd always floats to the top, regardless. Bitcoin's given technical properties cannot change human nature.

Anyway, it's far more likely no mainstream merchants will ever adopt Bitcoin because of pressure from the established banking system, supported by the occasional FBI raid on anyone falling out of line, starting with the exchanges, perhaps supported by some technical attacks on e.g. the bootstrap IRC channels. I don't believe they will need anything like a 51% attack, but if so, pretty sure some agency can be tasked with putting together the appropriate ASIC farm.

See My Screenplay:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16137.msg210928#msg210928

This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cosmically wonderful if a side effect of Bitcoin were the creation of a new generation of billionaires and trillionaires, created not by greed or by inheritance, but by idealism.  I would prefer Satoshi over a lot of the current multi-billionaires we have!  Imagine, Bitcoin a deus ex machina for the miserable state of affairs around the world.

Yeah, probably a pipe dream.

There are absolute limits to wealth.  At the absolute upper max, you could be the "boss" of every person on earth.  There is no way to be wealthier than that, since money is merely a means of compelling others to do things for you.  Now, already, almost all of us are "servants" of, probably, the top 1% or 2% of the world.  And that 1% or 2% got there by bleeding us dry!  I'd rather be Satoshi's servant, if that's what it comes to.

I'd love to go down the pub and have a beer with Satoshi, hear what he has to say.

He's buying

romantic thread ... *sigh*

lets hope Satoshi is romantic, too.

Given that the early generated coins are known to be his, it will be very difficult to spend them without revealing his identity.

This is compounded by the fact that he has so many.  A mixer can only mix if there are a comparable number of coins to mix yours with.

Tricky.  All that money, in exchange for all that anonymity.  Given the trouble that governments would be willing to make for the inventor of bitcoin, he might find that his anonymity is worth more.

I'm jealous because if I had Satoshi's bitcoins, I would buy this:
 
 http://rinkerboats.com/boats.cfm?model=340
 
It's not too big and gaudy, and goes well at my local lake. 
 
I'm also slightly perturbed at myself that I didn't see bitcoins earlier than a couple weeks ago... normally I'm all over what's "underground" (I know this isn't underground but you know what I mean) and I'm sad that I could be sitting on the small fortune that the early adopters are sitting on, but I missed it *sigh*
 
So now me and my 15 bitcoins are able to buy me another HD 5770 *sigh*

It was all a prank. None of it was worth anything anyways, it was all virtual, he fooled everyone!