this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
707 points (86.9% liked)
Technology
58022 readers
3157 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh, there is. But while they keep this game up, there's still plausible deniability for everything.
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.)
No single wallet has even close to 1 million Bitcoins. It's a public block chain and you can find a list of the largest wallets in a website like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html
Also, regarding the unfair advantage of the genesis block, Bitcoin's code was actually written in a way that prevents this balance from being transfered. It's forever locked in the wallet at this address: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.
True, the Genesis Block is fixed, but it's speculated that Satoshi did most of the mining during Bitcoin's initial experiment. I have seen estimates online that the first 22k blocks were mined almost exclusively by Satoshi, all to different BTC addresses, 50 BTC each. Worth practically nothing back then but worth over 2.5M today. Every 10 minutes or so, Satoshi found another one.
if you can't present evidence, then you're just spreading uncertainty and doubt.