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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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The blockchain keeps track of who owns coins and Satoshi's coins have never moved. The original creator has never sold any.

(Although the original creator could have created other wallets with smaller amounts that have been spent).

My pet conspiracy theory is that aliens dropped the white paper and mined the original blocks.

I don't really know much about finance, but why couldn't Satoshi use his bitcoins as collateral to borrow money, just as super wealthy people whose money is tied up in stocks do?

It seems much easier for Satoshi to simply also have a second (or third fourth and fifth etc) wallet with enough millions in it that there's no need to touch the original for most values of living large.

Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do. Also Satoshi actually moving his Bitcoins would cause massive reverberations throughout the Crypto economy so it isn't really just a matter of 'I am Satoshi, here is proof, I have 2 million Bitcoins give me a loan'.

It's like if you were in a gold-based economy and half of the Gold had been used to create the tomb of King Satoshi II, and there would be a Jihad upon anybody who actually touched said gold. Yes, King Satoshi II's heir would be wealthy in the sense of owning that gold, but actually moving it would be impractical.

Would have to disclose/prove to the people involved that he is indeed Satoshi, which is hard to do.

On the contrary, Bitcoin makes proving ownership trivial: Satoshi only needs to disclose his public key (which can be verified using public information in the blockchain) and then sign a random challenge string provided by the lenders to prove that he has the corresponding private key. This proves that he has the ability to spend those coins.

(Technically, this doesn't prove he is Satoshi, original author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, per se, but rather that he has the cryptographic keys needed to spend millions worth of Bitcoin, but the latter is what the lender really cares about anyway.)

Yeah, but the act of spending those coins would cause severe reverberations throughout the Crypto economy which is what makes it tricky.

Then again a sufficiently large Crypto entity could lend him money so he doesn't move the Bitcoins.

There really is an interesting Catch-22 that is based off a meta-question:

Do people investing in Bitcoin believe that Satoshi's coins will EVER move, or that they're effectively 'burned?'

I have no doubt that the price would move down heavily if the Satoshi wallet showed any activity, but to what extent is that possibility already 'priced in.'

And indeed, to what extent is the fact that Satoshi would know moving the coins would disrupt the markets a sufficient reason to not try to move them?

Realistically, the ultimate win condition for Satoshi is for Bitcoin to become a universally accepted currency so integrated into the global economy that he can start purchasing whatever he wants with his bitcoin directly, rather than having to convert.

The more integrated BTC is into the global economy the bigger a deal the Satoshi coins moving would be, though. It does feel unlikely that a hypothetically alive and healthy Satoshi's participation in Crypto is exclusively limited to those coins, though, so he's likely not struggling for money.

I agree with all of this. And yet, Elon Musk borrows silly money off the strength of his Tesla stock, even though it could not be easy for him to move it.

It would of course, be hard to verify that you were Satoshi, but Satoshi is a talented cryptographer. He would be able to do it if anyone is.

My guess is banking regulations would prevent loaning billions to an anonymous person. You could do it outside the US but even the the long arm of American financial regulations goes to a lot of places.

Like maybe Russia would lend to an anonymous US person backed by bitcoin. But then you also become public enemy to the deep state.

It would of course, be hard to verify that you were Satosh

Completely trivial actually. You only need to sign a message with the same keys used to generate any of his known wallets. This is such a common thing that we're developed a protocol for exchanges to do it called "proof of reserves". Satoshi could prove he is himself with total certainty in a matter of seconds.

This is what makes the claims of impersonators like Wright so ridiculous and funny, because any story of someone that want to claim to be Satoshi has to start with "I lost access to all the information Satoshi would know to store extremely carefully, but it is really me I swear".

The hard part would be to provide a proof and keep that a secret. Since Satoshi's identity is such a notorious secret.

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