Topic: Satoshi's 1m instamine (Read 540 times)

Bitcoin is still an experiment. It is a social, economic and technological experiment. And this after almost 10 years of the paper. We do not have version 1.0 yet. Everyone who is participating in this experiment will be very well rewarded if it is a success. And that is why the vast majority participate.

Now, when Satoshi created the code, the idea that he could be well recompensed in the future simply did not exist. What he mined was just to continue his early studies and the costs far outweighed any rewards he might have. Since the market was non-existent.

He did not plan, as it is now very common, to accumulate an amount before the coin was adopted to finance his life or his work with Bitcoin. We do not know how organized he was, but it is quite likely that he would lose the seeds of the wallets over time. That supposed value he would have accumulated should never be interpreted the way you did it.


This is very interesting, this amount is quite small. If compared to how many dollars are annually destroyed by use, the difference should be exorbitant.

Bitcoin is unique among all cryptocurrency.  Bitcoin is the true revolution, everything else is derivative.  Even Bitcoin has precursors in much of the technology, but Satoshi uniquely put the pieces together and distributed the first versions of Bitcoin and launched the blockchain, mining when Bitcoin was worthless and encouraging others to join and really to experiment, test, build, explore what we now know as a new paradigm.  Satoshi saw what could be and created it.  And when no one else saw his vision, he mined it and continued, because he believed in it.

Then following Satoshi were some of the other cypherpunks, some of which you see as people with low user ids on this forum.  They believed in the power of Bitcoin, and I have to admit that when I first looked at the technology in late 2011/early 2012 I thought it was pretty impressive and a great idea.  However, I didn't realize just how revolutionary it was, probably because of my own experience in seeing how innovative ideas that are dangerous to the status quo are too often stifled.  I believed the power of "the powers that be" would kill Bitcoin were it ever to come close to threatening their businesses.  Banking, after all, is the biggest of the big, the most deeply entrenched of all of the structures of control that have shaped civilization.  You think governments are bad?  Ok, bad example, they are.  But banks are so much worse.  The control wielded by those that control the money is immense, even governments are subservient to those powers.  But the power of the many is greater than the power of the few, and the ability to exchange information of all types (including Bitcoin blocks, but also including tweets, YouTube videos, and this very post) with all people, means that the many will defeat the few.

Bitcoin is a great example of what can emerge when people work toward a shared goal and strongly believe in something.  Bitcoin has value because we value it.  I know that sounds cliche, but I believe that to be the case for anything of value.  If nobody wanted to buy the Hope Diamond, it would be worth nothing.  In May of 2010 was the first known Bitcoin purchase of a real-world item, the infamous Bitcoin pizza (actually the wiki is telling me two pizzas) for 10,000 BTC.  At that time, these pizzas had more value to laszlo than the BTC, or at least he wanted pizza more and felt that 10,000 BTC was a fair trade (based on the price of the pizza, each BTC was worth $0.0041 at that time).  From that point forward, Bitcoin proved that it can be used as a form of money.  As more people got involved in mining it, and more people studied the economic model around Bitcoin (~21M BTC, 50 BTC block reward, halving, etc.), it began to establish value through the same supply and demand dynamics, as well as through the store of value properties that underlie a currency.

No one (at least known to the public) knows how many BTC Satoshi mined, though I do believe some of the estimates are based on sound reasoning.  I hope he is happy with his creation and his great contribution to humanity.  In the years and decades ahead, the creation of Bitcoin and its blockchain will be recognized as a turning point in human history.  I also hope that he has earned enough money from addresses that maybe we don't know about to live comfortably.

I believe that as long as Bitcoin remains true to its purpose and the people involved with it believe in its power, that it will never cease to be relevant.  It will live in monetary history in perpetuity, like gold.  The dedicated people who maintain Bitcoin are really contributing to something far greater, the reshaping of society around principles of decentralization and the removal of power from the few, giving it to the many.  If Bitcoin were to "fail", it could cast doubt on this overarching aim.  But so long as the people that maintain Bitcoin continue to do so with integrity, and that the software and the blockchain and protocols it implements are maintained to keep up with the pace of change, Bitcoin will remain the true gold standard.  I believe that they will.

Best regards,
Ben

And with "destroyed" coins, they don't even exist on the blockchain any longer.

No. With 'burnt' coins the proof is there.
With 'lost' ones, maybe some'll be recovered by scouting in waste-dumps, recovering hard disks or remembering passphrases.
Here's another historical thread with attempts to add up lost coins; a random post:

Good Information, I also used to think that Satoshi  exclusively mined 1M bitcoins for himself.
Can we compare lost bitcoin same as bitcoin burnt.

There are at least 2196BTC burnt: https://blockchain.info/address/1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr (Counterparty), https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa (Genesis), https://blockchain.info/address/1111111111111111111114oLvT2 (smallest possible Hash160) and https://blockchain.info/address/1QLbz7JHiBTspS962RLKV8GndWFwi5j6Qr (largest possible Hash160)

Most of the early mined coins are still sitting on the addresses they were sent to during mining. if i remember correct

Or in jail. I can think of a few reasons why someone would want him gone.

What do you count as a destroyed Bitcoin? Just one that has been sent with an unspendable script?

The Counterparty proof-of-burn address has over 2130 Bitcoins in it, and I don't think anybody is going to be able to spend those any time soon.

No significant positive or negative experiences.

My god.  Hallmark could not express a better sentiment.  The accuracy of this statement is only overshadowed by the inspiration it imbues.

In these futuristic times it's easy to forget that Bitcoin was a nothing from nowhere when it launched.

I'd definitely recommend reading a copy of Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. It gets boring later on, but it covers the very early days really well.

You get the sense that Satoshi would've been totally delighted if two or three other miners had joined in from minute one, let alone hundreds, but barely one single person gave a shit for months on end and there were periods where there were bursts of interest and then it went totally dead again.

He couldn't have attracted people to a dead network so it was down to him to keep it alive by mining solo for long periods hence the large number of coins he wound up with. For someone with his aims I'm sure he regarded every extra coin in his possession as a failure.

There was no premine. It was open to anyone from minute one. Hardly anyone but him cared.

That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin is so unique. A launch with that level of purity can never happen again.

Wow.  That thread is a treasure.  Thank you very much for linking to it.  I can't wait to read through it!!! 

Agreed.  I've always thought him to be Hal Finney.

Anyway, appreciate the information.  I have zero doubt that I am misinformed about many things crypto-related and otherwise.

The search for truth continues...

PS- since you are an old timer, and you use your real name... have you had any negative (or positive) experiences as a result of being known here?  My default is to let people know who I am, but have been heavily warned against it.

This quote comes from the thread where figures like "1 million bitcoins!!!1" were first mooted and then thoroughly debunked.


There were plenty of miners other than satoshi in those very early days.

If only the myth could be laid to rest.

Or perhaps misinformed.


It is a rumor.  Some people did some guessing.  Then they did some maths with their guesses.

If their guesses are correct, then they have computed that perhaps Satoshi has approximately 1 million bitcoins (give or take a few hundred thousand).

If their guesses are incorrect, then their computations are meaningless.



No.  Bitcoin did not have any mining prior to announcement.  Bitcoin did not have any instamine.


Nearly all bitcoins still exist.  Relatively few have been destroyed.  I think the total amount of destroyed bitcoins is less than 150 BTC.


Satoshi is probably dead.

I think that I'm being misread here a bit.

I was certainly not indicating that Satoshi had done anything improper or untoward.  I believe that the creator of anything should derive a benefit from the creation; certainly whomever or whatever Satoshi is, Bitcoin was a gift to the world.

I was simply curious if the 1m BTC that I'd heard about was instamined or if it was mined prior to announcement?  Obviously there wasn't a short term incentive to liquidate if all or even a majority of the coins still exist.

Charlie Lee's exodus from LTC was surprising to me, and it showed that not everyone is committed to the same ideals as Satoshi.

This is one of the main reasons Bitcoin is unique and unrepeatable: When satoshi was mining, Bitcoin was worthless. "Cryptocurrency" didn't even exist, it was not a phenomenon it is today.
You were literally losing money by mining, since you were wasting electricity in something that had 0 value.

Someone had to get the job done, and satoshi was the creator so he was obviously the first guy to start mining to get the network working, but he released the project into the wild, open source for everyone to mine. If someone didn't pay attention is that they didn't care enough about the subject, they weren't interested.

The fact that it was mostly crypto punks and people interested in technology like Hal Finney was a possitive thing. You want the biggest amounts of coins in the hands of people with an interested in the field, not with an interest in getting rich quick, like all the scammers that came after that.

You can never a cryptocurrency again with an organic development, unless you have a time machine to release it before Bitcoin. This is another reason why Bitcoin is the coin that will always win above the rest.

OP, should really know better by now than to make assumptions. Even the most basic Bitcoin knowledge, coupled with some low-level research to look up this over/under 1 million bitcoin addresses would have answered your basic questions. All the coins there were generated just the way all bitcoins have ever been.

If the theory is true (I'm sure it's mostly true anyway) what I've always been curious to know though is why those coins were just left there and not introduced to circulation. I doubt it was an oversight to have almost 5% of max supply languishing there (not to mention all them dust people keep sending to these wallets), but perhaps they/he never found a solution he/they liked. I'd like to think there's some reason behind it, and that we'd find out some day.

First, it's not a fact that Satoshi mined 1 million coins, it's a theory that might or might not be true.

Second, there was no "instamine" or premine, he added "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" to prove that he didn't mine any blocks before that date with intention to publish longer chain later. So, whatever he mined rightfully belongs to him, this doesn't violate any rules of the network or it's core principles.

Since today the price of btc skyrocketed, you are worrying about the 1m coins. What if satoshi didn't mine and the btc network wasn't popular? you would not have worried about the 1m coins which would have been worthless today. Once the genesis block was mined on Jan 3,2009 it took around 6-10 months for the coin to get popular.
Just read through the history another time and try to get a clarity on how was btc created. Why didn't you mine the coin during 2009 as it was meant to be. You could have got 1m btc which would have made you a billionaire today.

There was nothing like an instamine. When the genesis block was mined, it generated 50 coins newly. When you continuously mine it for around 2 years you could have easily generated 1m as the difficulty was easy at that time.

It took around 2 years for him to mine the 1m coins from Jan 2009- Dec 2010.

Genesis Block code for your reference: