I think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
Wait. Are you claiming that there's some sort of link between "Gates's relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011" and the Gates Foundation which launched in 2000 by merging with the Gates Sr. Foundation from all the way back in 1994?
Yes, "charitable work". I'm sure a foundation like that could make a good front for child trafficking. Not that Bill would ever do such a thing obviously, his common interests with that old rascal Jeff must have strictly included other things.
Are you asserting that the Gates Foundation was a front for sex trafficking? Or are you just saying shit because you think the memes are cute and will get you social media approval?
I assume you think you're adding some kind of value to the discussion, here. But who knows, maybe you just really fucking love malaria.
I'm not denying bill did improper sexual things. But I think his goal was to evade taxes, which Epstein likely helped out with. In return, bill was likely blackmailed for his access to Microsoft, which benefits Israel.
Gold is a weird one. It’s has a hell of a run over the last decade. I’m not sure it looked so rosy in 2015. I kinda feel like betting on gold is betting on the end of civilization. I don’t really want to be right.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
The dollar is trading pretty much at 30-year historic highs relative to all other currencies. You have to go back to ~2000 to find a stronger era, and then the 1980s before that.
I don't know how you know that, but even that argument is a straw man, unless you're asserting that all of the other currencies declined in value equally against whatever theoretical good(s) you're holding out as the objective standard for value.
> He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
I broadly agree with you, however: during the classic gold standard years, gold did have a pretty stable purchasing power (as eg measured by your favourite inflation index) in the long run.
However, since the world largely went off the gold standard, the purchasing power of gold has been a lot more volatile.
Hype would not cause a price increase in this case. The value of bitcoin is partly due to scarcity. 1.1m previously inaccessible bitcoins suddenly becoming liquid would cause a drop in price, even if they were sold slowly. It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
As a weaker point: I would expect an increase in the market capitalisation of the bitcoin float. Ie if you multiply the price of bitcoin by the amount of movable bitcoin right now and after the first Satoshi is sold, you compare with the new price of bitcoin multiplied by the newly enlarged amount of movable bitcoin.
The strong claim is that the price per bitcoin would go up, too. Not just the market cap of the float.
> It could also cause panic selling as it might indicate the wallets have been brute force cracked.
Suppose I brute force cracked it to get access to the bitcoins. I would:
Quietly amass a large offsetting position in the bitcoin futures market (and wherever else you can do this), before I make any moves. Then (assuming I couldn't hedge my whole exposure at decent prices) I would use all means available to pretend that Satoshi had woken up again. Eg use specially fine-tuned LLMs to mimic his style to post on the usual mailing list etc. Some people will believe you, some won't.
I'd say post a bit in Satoshi's name to build interest. Then skeptics will say: prove it. And you 'prove' it by selling moving a few Satoshis between your own wallets back and forth. (Don't sell anything yet.) The hype will build, and you sell into it on the futures market.
The last step is important, because you can get rid of your bitcoin exposure this way, without any trace on the blockchain. So you can even vow to never release any of the stash on the market and other shenanigans. That should help the price.
Well, the futures will come due eventually, and then you can move the stash. The price might or might not crash, but you don't care, because you already locked in your profits on the derivatives.
> Partially due to scarcity, but also due to hype.
I agree with you, but isn't the value of gold also almost entirely due to hype? Sure, there are some industrial applications, but those are minor components of demand for gold.
Hype is just another way of saying "people obtain pleasure from owning this thing" and that's pretty much what sets demand for most goods. Don't even get me started on diamonds. The whole wedding ring having a diamond is hype.
Bitcoin just makes this explicit and impossible to deny.
Well, there's pleasure from directly owning the thing: you can look at gold in your vault and appreciate it for itself.
But a bitcoin in your vault by itself is indistinguishable from a shitcoin I just made by forking bitcoin with the same code but a new genesis block. Or even more pointed: the alternative futures of bitcoins after any route not taken by the community after any hard fork.
In any case, I agree that much of the value of gold comes from social conventions, too, yes.
Which is why fining the owners of the wallets should be a huge deal: they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.
If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.
Why do you assume the original creator(s) still have the keys to those wallets? Wouldn't it be extremely unlikely that they didn't make use of them by now if that was the case? This is well beyond sell your soul money for most people.
> they can crash bitcoin whenever is most convenient for them.
I'm not so sure about this. Bitcoin thrives on vibes. The second coming of Satoshi (as evidence by control over his wallets), would surely drive a lot of Bitcoin hype.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.