I think somebody smart enough to invent Bitcoin seems likely to have been smart enough to mine coins on a separate account, knowing he would never be able to touch the genesis wallet. I think Satoshi is alive and well and enjoying his riches. Good for them

Exactly. Anybody that mined those earlier blocks on the weird unknown hardware was also able to mine on known hardware under another identity.

so

A) Satoshi has other earnings, in bitcoin, that was held long enough to make Satoshi extremely rich, and sold under their normal known identity. While never needing to associate with the other identity.

B) The private keys to the bitcoin mined in those original blocks were sold for cash over the counter for very large amounts to funds with longer time horizons. Bitcoin can operate in temporarily trusted environments. Bitcoin price has tanked every time very old Bitcoin is transferred onchain, so there is no need to transfer them onchain. We would never know.

The problem with those private keys being sold off-net is that the buyer can never be sure the seller deleted every copy. Who would take that risk? And who would buy it and not use any of it?

Even if the value tanks it'll still be a ton of money.

Correct, with all single signer ownership you can never be sure how many custodians there are

So you’re right and we would never be able to prove that any amount has changed hands or not, only assume that others wouldn't take the risk

Prove no, but it is not very likely IMO.

Sure, it is a network based on trust. But the whole idea of bitcoin's principle of trust is that you trust the majority of an entire community.

By making a deal with a single party for their wallet credentials you have to trust only the seller. One single party. In a shady deal involving a fortune.

And like I said, who would spend obviously phenomenal amounts on something and then never even touch it? When the buyer could simply move that trust from one party to the community simply by transferring the balance to a new wallet.

Of course the ripples in bitcoin's value would be unprecedented. But the buyer would hold so much of it that one way or another they would be extremely rich.

I'm not really talking about the sharing of keys in general by the way. Just about the thought of Satoshi's genesis wallet keys being sold this way.

I think what they were trying to say was that buying them off chain would be extremely unfavorable as the buyer gains zero of the protections that a blockchain claims to offer in this case.

And my original post wrote that bitcoin works in trusted environments, and maybe they didn't know that meant small networks of humans trusting each other with private keys off of the blockchain even though that was the only context possible, now they know so we’re just intentionally talking past each other at this point

> Anybody that mined those earlier blocks on the weird unknown hardware

Which “weird unknown hardware”. Early in Bitcoin, you could just mine bitcoin with any CPU — you still can.

A.) That’s a possibility.

B.) As someone mentioned already, this doesn’t make sense from a trust and security standpoint. Yet discarding this possibility doesn’t prove that (A) is what really happened.

Satoshis first bitcoin blocks dont have a signature that matches known hardware. It doesnt matter if it was general processors like cpus or application specific integrated circuits.

You seem like a guy that's read the studies/blogs on the Satoshi/genesis nonces

yeah, I have, there are so many ways to elevate or downrank any altrustic version of Satoshi, or a dead/hiding Satoshi, or an incompetent Satoshi that lost private keys, since its also possible for there to already be an extremely rich Satoshi that doesn't have any incentive to look back

its all fruitless to speculate

Satoshi probably destroyed the keys to the genesis wallet as a gift to humanity

There are enough stories like the 10,000 BTC pizza and lost hard drives it's entirely plausible he doesn't have that early coin any more.

It would be funny if he's just a normal engineer somewhere who did this as a quick side project and won't come out as the creator because he's too embarrassed that he lost the keys.

Embarrassed is one thing, at this point he’d be putting himself in mortal danger

No way that paper and implementation is a "quick side project". Even if Satoshi were some kind of Bill Joy, Jeff Dean, John Carmack hybrid that's a full time endeavor

I may be wrong but aren’t their a significant amount held from day 1 that haven’t been moved?

To be clearer: that people would give away 10k of them to buy a pizza indicates back then they were seen as essentially worthless, meaning you'd probably not take much care to preserve the ones you mined for a while while playing with the software you wrote.

A lost key would explain it. Maybe that was your point.

If money didn’t move, that may be because the owner didn’t want it to move, or because they couldn’t move it bascule they lost the access key.

From an outsider’s perspective, both look 100% identical.

That or they nuked the private key