True. Although I think there are ways to provably burn bitcoins so everyone can be confident they will never be retrieved. This conversation has me wondering what Satoshi is going to do with his stash, and what I would do if I were in his shoes. Something that would benefit bitcoin. Letting them sit forever unused would cause uncertainty in the market for reasons described. So, either burn them or use them for something. But what, and when?
I agree completely, Satoshi needs to do something with those coins, it would be the single biggest boost to Bitcoin. Here is what i recommmend:
1. Make Goxed account holders whole and any other bitcoin disaster where addresses and accounts are known (yes I was Goxed
2. Announce the ultimate give away. Using a well thought out strategy, pay out all remaining Bitcoins to current holders, excluding largest 10% of addresses.
Price would sky rocket!
DieJohnny: I believe that you have good intentions with these suggestions; however, both of them seem to be quite pie in the sky and far-fetched.
1st: Good idea, yet determinations of damages and people screwed over in various bitcoin scams would be quite the endeavor - and would likely need to appoint some kind of administrator to sort out any determinations regarding who receives bitcoins and how much each of the screwed ones should receive. A big ass job in order to do it properly.
2nd: Here you are suggesting distribution to people who have already invested in BTC, and there seems to be at least a couple of problems with this. On the technical end, difficult to determine how many coins people hold because some of the coins are held on the blockchain and other coins are held in various centralized systems (exchanges and other sites). On the practical end, seems kind of arbitrary to exclude the top 10% of holders, and on the fairness end, NOT sure if only bitcoin holders should deserve some kind of bitcoin distribution? There may be people and/or institutions (that do NOT already hold bitcoins) that are more deserving to receive some kind of BTC distribution.
