Or they lost the key to the wallet before the tokens were worth cashing out.

this is evidence that he wasn't in it for the money. If you came up with an elaborate scam with intentions of hustling people - how likely are you to be wildly successful, but accidentally lose access to the funds you worked so hard for?

This seems like a post hoc rationalization to support a narrative. Key management is hard and just because people mess it up, it doesn't meam that they weren't serious about using that key. Designing and building novel software is a different skill set than keeping your stuff organized enough to not lose things.

I could just as easily come up with a post hoc story that says that the reason that he has never come forward to claim credit is out of extreme embarrassment about the size of the fortune he lost, and that this is evidence that he does care about the money.

I'll just stick with my "innocent until proven guilty" opinion. Taking the most outlandish route possible to smear someones name seems rather unhealthy for everyone. There's no precedence for someone pulling off a huge digital scam and failing to cash out because they forgot their password. Could it happen? Sure, there aren't many things outside of the realm of possibilities when you're tasked with proving a negative. Lucky for us, that isn't the responsibility placed on most anyone in social situations and definitely not for criminal accusations in court.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the most outlandish route possible to smear someones name". I fail to see why me asserting that not spending the coins isn't strong evidence about Satoshi's motivations is some how a smear or trying to assign guilt?

The entire conversation started because someone pointed out that just because Satoshi said something doesn't mean it has to be true (although they made that point in a rude way.)

The vibe I am getting from your responses is: 'satoshi is a saint, everything he said has to be true, and any attempt to point out that we have little evidence about Satoshi's character is a baseless smear.'

I am sure that is an inaccurate and unfair characterization of what you are trying to see, so please correct me as to where I have it wrong.

I see your interpretation now, my apologies. When I read "scheme" I understood that to be slander and mean satoshi had malicious intentions. If you understand scheme to simply be a benign way of suggesting his plan was wrong then it de-escalates this entire conversation.

I thought you were defending the a comment claiming satoshi was being malicious. I would've done better to search for a more charitable interpretation.

Persono, I think that Satoshi was an idealist but not a saint and the reasons that the funds have not been accessed are not due to altruism.

If Satoshi did stretch the truth or lie in that quote, I would be inclinded to view it as motivated by ideolatry rather than greed. However, any speculation as to motives is fairly pointless given the lack of information.

That's not a rude comment. Regardless of how much money he made or didn't make from the endeavor, Nakamoto still made many incorrect statements.

If he wanted to make clear his intention to never ever cash out, he could have burned those bitcoins.

are you aware of what it means to "burn" bitcoin? It's simply putting the coins in a wallet and destroying the keys.

For all we know, these coins have already been "burned"

No, burning is sending coins to an obviously unspendable address.

that isn't possible in bitcoin - there are no "obviously unspendable addresses"

like I said, the best you can do is burn the private keys, but that isn't verifiable - you can't prove something doesn't exist