Rainy, long weekend, time to go down the rabbit hole again. Let's forget about the usual suspects (Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, CW, etc.) and discuss 3 other candidates, some of them I haven't even heard about until today. 1. Adam Back "He doesn't cash out because he got involved with companies that profit off the current state of Bitcoin and makes his millions that way. If suddenly wallets that hold a huge amount of Bitcoin start cashing out, even slowly, it might trigger a crash simply from sheer panic. There's (some) stability in having that much locked away. Those massive holdings are also, effectively, leverage. He holds an enormous part of the entire crypto-economy in his back pocket, able to be used at any time he needs it. It also allowed him to imply that Satoshi was no longer active and, in effect, mythologized him. Now "Satoshi" isn't a guy who might give an interview, express an agenda (or be condemned for that agenda), he's a figurehead who can be used as needed by his disciples. Since Back's companies profit off of Bitcoin as it exists, it also makes it far harder for anyone to try and fork the whole thing to make it function better. After all "that isn't what Satoshi would have wanted". YT video, the meat starts around 24 mins: 2. Paul Le Roux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux#Satoshi_Nakamoto_candidate "Lots of evidence pointing to this, especially the online drug trade and his vast amounts of experience with encryption coding. Satoshi stopped posting online at the same time he was arrested." 3. Len Sassaman "He committed suicide two months after Satoshi said he's not going to be around in the future. He writes British English even though he's American, is an academic, and he lived in Belgium at the time, which matches the time zone when Satoshi was active in forums. There's also a memorial to him embedded in the Blockchain. Furthermore, the project he's famous for (anonymous remailers) has a distributed architecture that's very similar to Bitcoin." https://news.bitcoin.com/the-many-facts-pointing-to-cypherpunk-len-sassaman-being-satoshi-nakamoto/
You will know the wallet address once he will sell off everything he got on us and that's about it we can guess until tomorrow.
All I know is this guy/girl/group has to be dead right? Very small chance they lost the private keys but I don't think that is likely at all. What seems impossible is this person/group is alive, has the keys, and hasn't sold any bitcoin at all, even though they were (and likely will be again) one of the richest people in the world. I'll never buy that one. Satoshi has 1MM BTC, so at 17k that's 17BB. That's the 83rd richest person in the world (after a 75% drawdown!) 1MM at the highs of 69k is 69BB. That would be the 14th richest person in the world (tied with Charles Koch) Ill never believe somebody doesn't take advantage of that wealth if they could/were alive.
There are over 20,000 Bitcoin wallet addresses and private keys that belong to Satoshi Each address/private key combo mined 50 btc's as block reward It is not one or a few private keys...
It is possible he was mining to a generated address without saving the private key so as not to get tempted in the future as in now At the time he mined each block with 50 btc's as reward, there was no market for them and each btc was worth $0
I didn't actually know this and find it very interesting. And even though @destriero points out the addresses are inactive, this is no way means they are inaccessible. Of course logistically, its doubtful he kept such good records that he would have keys to all of these addresses, and especially since they are all randomly generated so its not like he could have used a system for generating new wallets and only having to remember the system as to be able to reconstruct the private keys. I understand the math of how long it would take for a collision to happen naturally, but its still crazy for me to think that there could be machines out there trying out random private keys all day long that would eventually hit a wallet with coins in them. And then it hit me. If this is an actual fear, you could simply do a multisig setup. Finding one set of key by accident is said to be impossible for about 10,000 years, but now if you had to match it with another set of keys, well, that is magnitudes harder. But maybe what I don't understand is that perhaps two private keys simply go into a hash function and generate a private key that is still a 256 bit password. In this way, I wonder if its possible that one day, there could be some person who generates a new wallet address which would actually be the same as they private key that is used for a multi-sig setup. (my knowledge of multi-sig is very limited)