Nobody seems to have a good answer to where Satoshi has gone and why he and his coins have not been seen for years.
I can think of only a few reasons why that might be.
1. He wants btc to succeed and knows spending his coins will cause a massive panic.
2. He is already rich and has no need for more money.
3. He was hired/tagged by an agency or institution and is under NDA.
4. He is sick of btc.
5. He hates attention/spotlight and does not want the leadership role.
What if the answer is even simpler? He had a car accident / heart failure and died. His wallets are lost and therefore never spent.
This is so much more reasonable and probable than "satoshi is an AI" or other crazy theories here. It's sad, but I think this might be the truth.
1. Bitcoin wasn't worth but maybe a dollar a piece when Satoshi went silent. So he wasn't concerned with panic. Not to mention that nobody who was here really cared that he had mined all those blocks.
2.Close. Probably not rich but comfortable. He probably had/has a 6 figure a year salary as a programmer or the likes. He most likely remained anonymous because he worked for someone that might try to claim it as intellectual property since it would've been easy to convince a court he was working on it on company time. If you think about it, nobody who attempted something like this went anonymous (that I've ever heard) when releasing the precursors of e-cash years before. So there was no precedence for him to go anon.
3. Companies are greedy and would've taken the coins that haven't moved already.
4. I think he went public as a bystander and has been working on BTC in some capacity, though way removed.
5.If you read his posts, he was not afraid to speak up and be and was well versed in most related concepts to Bitcoin.
My guess is, he had to work in real life or travel when he went silent here. He then saw that BTC was still running and doing fine with others taken over and decided to stay on the side line. Or he had a time limit for him being the central piece and that was when it hit a dollar he would let it go and let it be a truly decentralized project. As for the blocks he mined, he either burned the private keys or he still has them but is scared to move them now.
I agree with most of this except I think Satoshi was probably 2 or 3 people. Enough people so you can manage the working parts initially but not too many since even with 3 people it would be hard to keep a secret (eventually someone gets pissed off and goes public). History is riddled with failed digital currency projects so they were probably almost as surprised as everyone else at how fast it took off and hit $1/btc. It's a good guess that they premined whatever they did (5-10%?) so that if it ever reached dollar parity they would become millionaires.
One thing I've realized: the anonymity of satoshi was initially actually just as important to bitcoin's success as anything else they did. Satoshi probably had already had legal problems (at the very least he saw others having them) when developing earlier versions of cryptocurrency as a non-anon dev.