Topic: Let's say satoshi is cashing out 1million BTC - page 2. (Read 5227 times)

A total of 2,650,000 coins were mined in 2011. So Satoshi might be having around 5,300 coins from 2011 (considering the median scenario). It will represent just a small fraction of the coins which he mined during 2009, and so we can ignore them. But proof seems to indicate that he gave up mining in 2009 itself.

Well you could always try and go the illegal way - which I don't recommend - but it is probable that some people may choose to do so. In that case you could try to sell them to someone in a dark alley and live off of dollar notes for the rest of your life.

Someone said on a hacker forum.

If Satoshi cashes out 1 million bitcoins, it will drive the price down, as there will be more bitcoins available than the usual, which is only few thousand bitcoins which are supplied by the miners daily, this will let the price fall significantly and boy i will buy so many bitcoins if that will happen .

Choose one.

You know why?

Someone doesn't know how to properly format their posts....
It gave me a headache....

Well, he's going to get taxed to hell if he does cash out, no matter what he does.
He's not going to find enough people in Localbitcoins with 1 million cash, he would need years to cash out the whole thing. Any other method will require that he pays measly amounts of taxes, which would mean it's not worth it to get these Bitcoins out.

What if Satoshi is dead ? Nobody would know and his bitcoins would be stucked forever...

If he does cashes out his bitcoins there will be a big drop in the price of bitcoins, and we can buy Bitcoins in a much cheaper price as there will be more bitcoins in the rotation than the  current  demand of the bitcoins. High supply than the required demand = lower price, I will buy more bitcoin if it were to happen

Add the netherlands to that list
I know for a fact that the USA has a huge impact on some EU states, especially because of the huge financial power they have over them (think of import/export)
The top developer seems to know who he/she/it (Satoshi) is and claimed to have talked to it about btc 2.0.

Interesting, but i don't think he is dead, he said "he is not Dorian Nakamoto" in a hacker forum after Dorian Nakamoto was reported by that journalist last year.

Mix the coins for an extended amount of time and then cash them out privately or on shady exchanges over time. I think it's difficult but doable for Satoshi. But on a serious note: I don't think Satoshi will ever cash out a single Satoshi (no pun intended) of the coins that people know belong to him!

Getting to the heart of the OP's question, the way I would go about it is by having a chain of intermediary brokers do the transaction with a buyer. Still though, at best it's pseudonymous.

Here is a very basic idea of a chain of intermediary brokers, it's very similar to a generic mixer in computer theory:

-Tell one proxy that you are looking for a buyer for some sort of item, the code item, and to work with particular groups/sets of people.
-Inform a subset of parties that if they are approached with a seller of the code item that person is actually selling BTC.
-Have a trusted escrow agent work with proxy for transaction purposes.

The simple chain can be expanded to as many "obfuscation" layers to complicate true nature of sale (Code Item 1, is Code Item 2, is Code Item 3, and so forth until "BTC level"). Similar can be said for proxy agents, and with trusted escrow agents. Once again though, the moment chained parties work together anonymity is lost.

Weirdly enough, you aren't the first person to mention that I might be. 

But the fact is, I'm not.  Really and truly, cross my heart, I'm not Satoshi.

Which, of course, is the exact same thing I'd tell you if I were.   

I didn't write that though. And personally, I disagree with the idea that Satoshi selling part of his BTC stash constitutes an acknowledgement that BTC is a total failure. Whether or not others want to believe that a dev selling a portion of their creation constitutes a failure of said coin is their choice. And for the record, some people did think that coblee selling his LTC was a negative thing for Litecoin and it has been mentioned numerous times as well.

Example:


Also, a Bitcoin core dev sold half of his coins too during the GHash.io debacle:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/

The crux of the matter is that Litecoin is far bigger than just coblee and Bitcoin is far bigger than Satoshi or Peter Todd. And whether or not either coin amounts to a failure is something for the community to decide, and not individual people.

But what about this part:


Why does coblee selling his LTC not constitute an acknowledgement that LTC is a failure and yet Satoshi selling his BTC does?

You can't compare Bitcoin's early history with that of Litecoin. The potential ramifications of Satoshi selling 1 million BTC far outweighs the impact of coblee selling his stash of LTC. When Bitcoin was first announced, Satoshi was the only one mining it. Even 1 year after it was created, Satoshi was still pretty much the only person mining it (check out the historical difficulty charts for proof of this). Compare this to Litecoin which was publicly announced on Bitcointalk and already had many people mining it when the genesis block was launched.

Secondly, coblee sold his LTC long before Litecoin even became significant. Had Satoshi sold his coins in 2010 when the price was still mere cents, it would not have the same impact as selling today.

I just met with him he sold me 2 addresses. He liked my  thread on the genesis block and told me I am worthy of holding the keys for it.  So I now can remove the 15 + btc added to it if I chose.

He also wonder If I could buy an early address for him and keep it untouched for another 67 weeks you know right after the next half happens.

So I took out my stash box and hand him 1,000  100 dollar bills and said sure man no worries.

 My point is  I could send him to 10 buyers of his coins that would keep the address frozen for a few more years.

So you can't possibly know if he sold them all to a trusted few.   Unless of course you are him the great satoshi. Just playing with us.

It's interesting to note that coblee, the creator of Litecoin actually admitted to selling most of his litecoins long before the bubble in November which saw prices skyrocket to $48:


Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1rl63z/from_the_bottom_of_my_heart_thank_you_coblee/

I wonder why we instantly assume that Satoshi selling even a single BTC would equate to an unthinkable betrayal of the community and yet when others like coblee do the same, it's not really considered to be a big deal.

And just to add; apparently Satoshi was the only one (or at least one of only a few) who didn't choose to combine his mined coins into a few large addresses. So the coins that he mined are distinguishable from other early adopters who mined back then.


Uhh... Hundreds of people on board? You mean hundreds of thousands right? And even then, 1 million BTC is still A LOT. That's over 1/20th of the supply. It would still completely devastate the price. In fact, he probably wouldn't even be able to sell all 1 million BTC at once simply because he would run out of sell orders to dump his coins into (yes even the ones at 1 cent!).



The most common figure is 1,000,000 coins, or slightly less (e.g. 900,000 coins). The number was deduced by looking at the addresses containing 50 BTC which were mined by Satoshi in the early days of Bitcoin and left untouched since then.


There are no big accounts. Just thousands of small accounts which have remained untouched. It's possible that he could sell 20,000 individual private keys or his wallet.dat file containing 20,000 individual private keys to a friend in exchange for fiat but the buyer would have no way of knowing whether Satoshi has or hasn't kept backup copies of the private keys or wallet which would make the coins not truly "theirs" since Satoshi would still retain shared control. And if the buyer moved them, then that would be instantly noticeable by looking at the blockchain.


As I already mentioned above, it's impossible to know if the seller still retains copies of the private key(s) when buying a private key. And if they moved the coins, then that would be visible on the blockchain and would defeat the whole purpose of selling the private keys as opposed to simply doing a conventional sale since the coins are going to be moved anyway.



I think it would depend on his financial situation. If he was a poorer person, then I can definitely understand and possibly see him selling a few coins while still remaining undetected. Assuming that he didn't abruptly stop mining in 2010, it's only once he starts trying to sell millions upon millions of dollars worth of BTC that it would become noticeable. I wrote about this possibility in another thread here.


Agreed, although $2 million is still a tiny fraction of what Satoshi owns. The value of his bitcoins surpassed $1 billion at one stage.


This is probably what you're looking for:

http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins

Currently, there is little over 14 million BTC in circulation. Satoshi is estimated to have slightly less than 1 million BTC.


Nice link. For those who can't be bothered to read it, the important part is this:


If Satoshi ever chose to move his coins (mixed or not) then this would be instantly visible from the blockchain. The news that Satoshi is possibly preparing to cash out would depress the price significantly since people would be preparing for a massive dump before it even happened. Satoshi wouldn't get anywhere near the current market value for his coins. By the time he is in the airport and ready to begin his traveling, BTC might be trading at $30 per coin.


Definitely.