evoorhees nailed it. There are only 2 mil coins which have never moved and arguably at least some of them are lost. The remaining coins are held by multiple people. Even if they are all spent recklessly at most we are talking about 20 or so 100K BTC plunges. While bad it is hardly fatal. As time goes on it becomes less of a danger. The market depth for BTC is continually increasing. An x BTC reckless sale today will have less price movement than a year ago and hopefully in 1 year, 5 year, 10 years it will be increasingly less.
Topic: z - page 3. (Read 10179 times)
These never been spent coins are often on my mind and I wonder when if ever will they get spent. The potential to cause serious damages is huge if someone decided to foolishly dump all of them but I can't see someone doing that. I sometimes also speculate what the chance might be that the owners of these coins, mainly Satoshi, have deleted their private keys and actually on purpose lost the coins.
I think the "potential to cause serious damage" is vastly overblown. An individual or group who held lots of coins could, at worst, cause a very sudden drop in price. However, doing so is A) very costly and highly disincentivized and B) can only be done once. The second point is the most important. Say someone drops a million coins on the market, it would crash the price, everyone would freak out. Then, the price would find a new equilibrium, rebuild, and we'd go on about our business... and the attacker wouldn't be able to attack ever again.
For anyone who understands the true value of Bitcoins, a huge dump on the market is a blessing, and anyone doing that nefariously becomes impotent afterward.
Interesting that someone mentioned pooled mining, since I didn't think of that. Wonder if you can tell how many blocks have been spent exactly one times and then haven't moved after that?
Not sure how pool operators do it - with payout thresholds and all. I suspect it's more than a single move from the block reward to the miner's payout.
eligius pays out using the generating TX in mined blocks. Dont' know wether these show up in znorts analysis?
I think this : http://ecdsa.org/stats.html is fairly close to what you're describing.
Nice charts.
2009 - mining and hoarding
2010 - mining, and some half of the 2010 coins transacted
2011 - some more of the 2010 coins transacted, during the bubble of Jun 2011 also maybe 20% of the 2009 coins
It suggests the miners of 2009 are big hoarders. They only transacted something during the bubble, probably to cash-in carefully.
that's the way I see it, too. Still, the theory that at least some of the 2009-coins are lost cannot be discarded.
I think this : http://ecdsa.org/stats.html is fairly close to what you're describing.
Nice charts.
2009 - mining and hoarding
2010 - mining, and some half of the 2010 coins transacted
2011 - some more of the 2010 coins transacted, during the bubble of Jun 2011 also maybe 20% of the 2009 coins
It suggests the miners of 2009 are big hoarders. They only transacted something during the bubble, probably to cash-in carefully.
Interesting that someone mentioned pooled mining, since I didn't think of that. Wonder if you can tell how many blocks have been spent exactly one times and then haven't moved after that?
Not sure how pool operators do it - with payout thresholds and all. I suspect it's more than a single move from the block reward to the miner's payout.
eligius pays out using the generating TX in mined blocks. Dont' know wether these show up in znorts analysis?
Either the guy's a modern times Michelangelo that has been steeped in
very many different disciplines or bitcoin was designed by a pluridisciplinary
team.
very many different disciplines or bitcoin was designed by a pluridisciplinary
team.
Not to downplay Satoshis achievement, ingenuity and balls to pull it off, but many of the things bitcoin is made up of have been invented before by other people (sha, public key crypto, ecdsa, proof-of-work, ownership tracking using transactions).
I think he did it himself. I'm sure he talked about it with some crypto-friends or colleagues who probably understood how it worked but said either: "That's not new, dude, look at my stuff, it's much more interesting" or "this will never catch on". So he grew a pair and pulled it off. Kudos!
Satoshi's a patient guy.
Satoshi's dead. There is no other explanation. Why else would he disappear so suddenly, and without saying fair well to the community. It was a sudden death like being hit by a bus, or drowning, or a heart attack. If it was cancer or something that takes its time, he would have told us, and he would have transferred his coin to a successor.
RIP Satoshi Nakamoto
?? - 2011
Interesting theory...did no one really know _anything_ about him? Surely someone knew something...if no one really knew anything, then I doubt he's dead...he was always planning to disappear.
Naw, he got Gavin to agree to take the lead before he left. I mean it is possible that he knew he was dying or something, but it's clear that he didn't just get hit by a bus one day.
Did he say why he was leaving? Glad the dude didn't (presumably) die suddenly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Sassaman there is one theory that he was satoshi.
http://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81084436518674433
http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/07/len-sassaman-on-bitcoin.html
These weren't particularly negative comments, but rather fairly
accurate analyses of the system's lack of built-in anonymity.
Sure doesn't sound like a proud father talking about his baby, that's for sure. No one would design Bitcoin the way it is if he knew the kinds of things Sassaman did.
Satoshi's a patient guy.
Satoshi's dead. There is no other explanation. Why else would he disappear so suddenly, and without saying fair well to the community. It was a sudden death like being hit by a bus, or drowning, or a heart attack. If it was cancer or something that takes its time, he would have told us, and he would have transferred his coin to a successor.
RIP Satoshi Nakamoto
?? - 2011
Interesting theory...did no one really know _anything_ about him? Surely someone knew something...if no one really knew anything, then I doubt he's dead...he was always planning to disappear.
Naw, he got Gavin to agree to take the lead before he left. I mean it is possible that he knew he was dying or something, but it's clear that he didn't just get hit by a bus one day.
Did he say why he was leaving? Glad the dude didn't (presumably) die suddenly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Sassaman there is one theory that he was satoshi.
http://twitter.com/lensassaman/status/81084436518674433
http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/07/len-sassaman-on-bitcoin.html
I think the theory that satoshi felt violated by Gavin going to the CIA only a week or so after satoshi gave him the bitcoin "master key" makes the most sense.
http://forums.microcash.org/topic/529-did-gavin-andresen-push-satoshi-out-of-bitcoin/
http://forums.microcash.org/topic/529-did-gavin-andresen-push-satoshi-out-of-bitcoin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Sassaman there is one theory that he was satoshi.
Interesting.... [tinfoil]
OK, So here's a wild-ass theory:
~April 25th 2011: Sassaman (Satoshi) sends Gavin the "alert key" to Bitcoin.
April 27th 2011: Gavin publicly announces CIA visit in June. Satoshi ceases communicating with Gavin. (on the run?)
June 15th 2011: Gavin speaks @ CIA
July 3, 2011: Sassaman dies, in an apparent suicide. His wife was in Texas at the time. (twitter status)
Did the CIA assassinate Satoshi?
[/tinfoil]
Satoshi's a patient guy.
Satoshi's dead. There is no other explanation. Why else would he disappear so suddenly, and without saying fair well to the community. It was a sudden death like being hit by a bus, or drowning, or a heart attack. If it was cancer or something that takes its time, he would have told us, and he would have transferred his coin to a successor.
RIP Satoshi Nakamoto
?? - 2011
Interesting theory...did no one really know _anything_ about him? Surely someone knew something...if no one really knew anything, then I doubt he's dead...he was always planning to disappear.
Naw, he got Gavin to agree to take the lead before he left. I mean it is possible that he knew he was dying or something, but it's clear that he didn't just get hit by a bus one day.
Did he say why he was leaving? Glad the dude didn't (presumably) die suddenly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Sassaman there is one theory that he was satoshi.
Satoshi's a patient guy.
Satoshi's dead. There is no other explanation. Why else would he disappear so suddenly, and without saying fair well to the community. It was a sudden death like being hit by a bus, or drowning, or a heart attack. If it was cancer or something that takes its time, he would have told us, and he would have transferred his coin to a successor.
RIP Satoshi Nakamoto
?? - 2011
Interesting theory...did no one really know _anything_ about him? Surely someone knew something...if no one really knew anything, then I doubt he's dead...he was always planning to disappear.
I think the theory that satoshi felt violated by Gavin going to the CIA only a week or so after satoshi gave him the bitcoin "master key" makes the most sense.
http://forums.microcash.org/topic/529-did-gavin-andresen-push-satoshi-out-of-bitcoin/
Interesting that someone mentioned pooled mining, since I didn't think of that. Wonder if you can tell how many blocks have been spent exactly one times and then haven't moved after that?
Not sure how pool operators do it - with payout thresholds and all. I suspect it's more than a single move from the block reward to the miner's payout.
It would be neat to have code that could query the block chain and plot the number of bitcoins unspent (or spent a certain number of times or less) within a certain time frame (ie, since generation, last 6 months, etc). A 3-D generalized version of this would be very informative.
Interesting that someone mentioned pooled mining, since I didn't think of that. Wonder if you can tell how many blocks have been spent exactly one times and then haven't moved after that?
Not sure how pool operators do it - with payout thresholds and all. I suspect it's more than a single move from the block reward to the miner's payout.
2 million Bitcoins get invested into a future economy by Satoshi. Wealth is produced.
God help us all.
...or imagine 2 million Bitcoins being sold into hands that actually want them at prices they are willing to pay over others. Let's try not to think what would happen if the market allocated the resources to better hands at proper prices.
Those 2 million Bitcoins should go to hobos to spend on dirt.
God help us all.
...or imagine 2 million Bitcoins being sold into hands that actually want them at prices they are willing to pay over others. Let's try not to think what would happen if the market allocated the resources to better hands at proper prices.
Those 2 million Bitcoins should go to hobos to spend on dirt.
Incomprehensible post is incomprehensible.
That was my impression.
I made a quick-and-dirty plot showing the fraction of unspent coins (from Znort's data), Gox price (from bitcoincharts.com), and difficulty (roughly estimated from plots on bitcoin.sipa.be):
Several interpretations (some contradictory, some compatible with others) come to mind:
Any other thoughts?
Several interpretations (some contradictory, some compatible with others) come to mind:
- Early miners didn't care much about then-worthless coins, and many of early coins are lost
- Early miners hoarded their coins as they didn't have to sell them to make up for the production cost; mining was dirt cheap (but so were the coins)
- Miners generally hoard about 30% of their coins, however with the advent of pooled mining block rewards had to be spent first (even if earned fraction is then hoarded by individual miners) - and this shows as drop in hoarding
- The nature of mining changed with the advent of SR: many newcomers set up mining operations specifically for SR purchases (freshly minted coins are significantly more anonymous then exchanged)
Any other thoughts?
I think your interpretation that the nature of mining operations changed is spot on. Only a few people can afford doing single mining, where they can keep the block reward locked into an address.
Jump to: