Im sure Satoshi does not care much about bitcoin. He just wants to cash out his holdings. I'm guessing for him it's a full time occupation, working out how he's going to do it. I cant imagine anyone with so much money would be bothered to work. Plus he would need to keep a close eye on the exchanges and news to watch for anything that could affect his net worth.
IMO, (many ppl may not agree - fair enough) Satoshi is not one person. It is 3 people as identified by a magazine article recently published , with undeniable evidence that has been presented about Satoshi. If one goes through this article and does some research on the people mentioned, looks at their previous postings (one in particular has a style very similar to satoshi), you will also be able to see that they have posted on these forums under different usernames since Satoshi disappeared. Whilst using the search function I noticed 1 suspicious example.
http://bit.ly/WkjEHgRE: uncirculating bitcoins
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdfIt is interested that apparently an 'unknown entity' has commanded 3 million BTCs distributed across 78,000 addresses. Im not sure if the entity still owns this many BTCs however. It would be interested to identity this person.
Similar anonymous entities (ex Mt Gox & identified mining pools) have processed: (just copying from the paper here)
940,000 BTC
870,000 BTC
690,000 BTC
...
with a further 11 entities processed amounts of over 400,000 BTC.
Now ok I understand that this list is probably mainly mining pools & miners but also could more than 1 of them be Satoshi. The number of ppl who could accumulate so many BTCs in such a short time is very small (this was in May 2012).
(up until May 13th 2012) we discovered that most of the minted bitcoins remain dormant in addresses which had never
participated in any outgoing transactions. We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000
bitcoins.
The design of bitcoin, the complexity around it, required more than 1 very smart person. In addition, the way in which someone has distributed their holdings amoungst so many addresses - it's very smart. I dont think any of these coins are 'lost'. IMO these coins will emerge at some point, maybe alongside 'Satoshi' himself.
Thanks also to Citigroup for this research as it seems they funded the paper.
THe biggest 4 addresses as of now have been identified to below to Silk Road and Coinad.
I don't think Satoshi created the bitcoin just to cash out his holdings, looking in retrospective everyone can claim that they should have come up with such an idea, but who could have envisioned that this thing could become so successful that it can actually produce a few millionaires? It would seem plausible that the only attention bitcoin would get is some random people coming around to take a glimpse at his paper and code, and leave some trashy comments, and nothing more-the internet is full of dead projects. If someone was so convinced to devote such a huge part of his/their time to create and maintain such a project, I am sure there was something else motivating him, other than wealth. Not to say that whether it's one or several people, their intelligence and capability should be able to land a fine job for them.
