That being said, rather than a group of friends, a government agency or a highly secretive group of cyberpunks, I could imagine two or more family members keeping such a secret. However it would still be hard to resist the urge to cash in on even some of those mined coins, unless you were already stinking rich.
I know that many have theorised that Satoshi could have simply lost the coins, but as the author states in his article, it seems like Satoshi went out of his way to back up his clients on a regular basis. That isn't the action of someone who loses things so easily, especially if they both believed in, and could appreciate the impact of the project.
Just my two cents.
They could probably still get wealthy by getting in on the action fairly early with a separate set of mining identities, if that's what they wanted.
A great deal of effort must have gone into staying anonymous, and planning & designing & developing the client, the network, the scripting language, the economic progression (difficulty levels, decreasing block rewards, etc) and even the ascii content embedded in the genesis block. There must have been a plan for the first mining operation as well, why put in so much effort and then be surprised it catches on?
The "unfairness" of pre-mining (or early mining) must have been considered.
OTOH i haven't looked at the numbers. Would a dump of Satoshi's holdings crash the market?
Had Satoshi used the coins before its time, it could have "contaminated" the experiment, and possibly crashed permanently the market. By mining and not using it, it increased its early value. I'm sure there's a mathematical proof somewhere that this would be the best option, especially if Satoshi is in fact a group of people.
Of course, Satoshi may still have the keys, and waiting a bit more before cashing in.
That's the beauty of bitcoin open ledger: we'll all know for sure in the next 10-15 years...
It makes a lot of sense if you start to think about it. With a small group of people working on it, it spreads the knowledge out, decentralizes any authorship or specific authority for credit and makes it easy for the team to simply vanish without a trace since most people are looking for one person, instead of many. Sounds a lot like BTC itself, doesn't it? I wouldn't doubt this was part of the design from the very beginning.
It then leaves the by-product behind for others to pick up and push forward - which is essentially what's happened.
That said, "Satoshi" could have had a group of suboordinates or collaborators working with him on the grunt work. Though again, from what I've read about the original C++ code, it looked like the work of a lone genius-albiet-non-programmer.
With multiple people in a consortium, I cannot believe that one of them can resist appearing on the front page of Time magazine. Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.
I agree on this point. But if you have three people with the integrity and high moral cause, there's no reason a group of people can keep a secret.
Look at all the secret societies we currently have just in this country.
>>> Loners are much better at staying hidden. E.g. the Unibomber or any number of serial killers who worked alone.
This, however is not true in terms of serial killers. Most get caught because they want to get caught and like the media attention and the trying to out smart the police.
The only reason the unabomber got caught was that he was upset about the 9/11 bombing overshadowed one of his recent bombings and was stealing his media attention. Shortly thereafter, he insisted his manifesto be published, which then led his brother to turn him in after he read it.
It was the very pursuit of attention that you say leads groups to not be able to keep secrets that did in many high profile serial killers who often worked alone.
The one exception being either the Zodiac killer or the Golden State killer who you could just as easily call outliers.
To have a currency backed by processing power is not really an old idea either. It was at most 10 years old and nobody really had a good idea how proof-of-work (POW) could make a currency at that time (around 1999). I'm referring to the "Bread Pudding" variant of MicroMint (http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf), not Cryptonomicon which doesn't really mention distributed computing or POW.
The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain. The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off. Now, I am not saying nothing about bitcoin was new, just the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea.
Bit torrent was released in July 2001, bitcoin 2009 so the idea of distributed networks was fairly well established at the time.
PS: And yes, there was a lot of early criticism about the public nature of bitcoin.
Bittorrent was way easier because it was about copying, whereas a currency has to in a sense make copying impossible via some sort of time-stamping to prevent double-spend.
That's the point: No one knew how to do that before Satoshi.
> The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain.
Are you joking? If you knew about the blockchain and miners before 2008, you could have simply created Bitcoin yourself and become multimillionaire.
> The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off.
The issue was no one knew how to create a trustless consensus mechanism. And Bitcoin is not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. True anonymity only became possible after Bytecoin's innovation in the use of ring signatures. Nowadays the most popular coin with true anonymity is Monero (created in 2014, as a fork of Bytecoin with a fair distribution).
> the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea
Clearly you don't know what you are talking about.
> Bit torrent
What does that have to do with anything? Bittorrent doesn't use a blockchain.
I'll also wager 0.05 BTC that he's male, lives in the US, and is currently under 40.
I think he could actually be under 30, honestly. Though no younger than 24.
edit:
On second thought I'm not that sure about him living in the US either, in part due to some of his use of British spellings.
I'll change that to "lives in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, or New Zealand".
edit: I'm not sure if I was downvoted because I failed to notice the person I was replying to was joking, or for some other reason.
There's also always the chance his parents are Japanese but he was born in an English-speaking country, but I think considering the fact he clearly wanted to hide his identity, he probably picked a name that was unrelated to his true nationality and ethnicity.
After this article came out Szabo denied that he is Satoshi.