His unsold hoard is currently worth about 20 billion dollars.

Assuming he had some later money (in the Blockchain) that's maybe "just" a few dozen / hundred million worth.

That's plenty money for one person without the liability and the publicity. You can live a life in pure luxury and fulfill all your material wishes.

Maybe he lost the keys or threw away the machine after a year or two. There's nothing to be gained from going public in this case but a massive threat to your life.

Selling this may ruin the story and crash the price. It would probably go against his values and mission. He could easily have other early wallets and have $B's. Most likely explanation though is that it was Hal Finney who passed shortly after Satoshi disappeared.

> It would probably go against his values and mission

He could have sent his BTC to zero address.

It's not. Trying to sell it would crash the market.

Still worth a lot, obviously.

Can he just pay off some kind of smart contract with it that ignores the provenance of the Bitcoin?

Like, get a loan for $20b in a stablecoin with the payback being $21b in btc in a year?

If any of the BTC founder's blocks suddenly became active it would crash the price because most people would suspect someone found an exploit in the contract/hash or the keys were stolen.

That’s fine when you’ve already locked the price into something else that’s not-btc.

While you could sign a message with your key, you would still need something that accepts the proof but isn’t public, which might be possible with a properly structured/constructed smart contract, maybe?

The issue is finding someone willing to loan you $20B for your bitcoin without doing the research of how that would tank the price of bitcoin.

It would be a great deal for Satoshi, but no other party would accept.

It's not just about the provenance. I don't think the bitcoin market can stomach a 20 billion sell-off, no matter who does it.

That doesn't really answer my question. If you're a modest private person, what can you buy with 20 billion that you actually want, that you can't buy with 300 million?