dhork , 1 month ago

If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today’s dump, that’s still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe’s infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.

However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash – at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.

However, one doesn’t have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying “I am Satoshi” with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn’t happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)