Now this is till unconfirmed therefore we cannot just take this news and move forth. At the same time the article uses *CLAIMED* therefore the fact that he did have 1 million bitcoins is not something that is proven. I do think that even if he have died and no one knows where his bitcoins is, it would be more like *long term holding* until his family finds them and decides to sell.
First of all, I agree. There is no evidence for any of this and even if 1 million worth ob BTC was to be lost it would still not account much for the market moves as it is still BTC out in circulation, maybe no longer accessible.
The scarcity of BTC does not change. The only difference is that it might be lost and if it is it won't affect the market. So the news is completely market irrelevant.
I think you're misunderstanding. It's not 1 million
worth of Bitcoin that is being discussed here, but 1 million Bitcoins. So it is not market irrelevant at all, it's a massive amount of coins that could be taken out of circulation.
Mircea was an interesting character to me and I have followed him through the years. He ran a securities exchange that cost 50 BTC to register and trade on, and at no point did that amount ever get reduced (even after Bitcoin increasing 1000x in value from when that rule was established). He ran a prediction market called BitBet.us before selling it off, and I actually used it before it was shut down completely. There were some huge bets on that site, even for what BTC was worth at that time, notably one that had 5.5k BTC volume.
http://qntra.net/2015/03/largest-bitcoin-bet-resolved/Mircea had his own blog
here where he posted financial statements of the securities that traded on his exchange as well as philosophical musings/rants, and as you can see through the history he posted very frequently (basically every day). Last post was on June 23rd.
Go through that blog and you'll see that if he is dead, he's probably not the kind of person that would let anyone access to his coins in the case of his death.
He might not have had a million BTC, but it wouldn't surprise me too much if he did. He certainly was a whale and I've always believed him to be in the 6 digits.