It's actually a lot worse then that: if anyone gets access to Satoshi's private wallets (i.e. via finding the keys printed out on paper in a personal effects safe or something) then those coins could move.
There's no way to absolutely sure that the keys are gone and inaccessible permanently.
I'm a complete n00b so this is coming from a place of ignorance, why is that such a factor in the current price? Someone is sitting on $50B in a $1T market, who cares?
selling $50B doesn't move the market from $1T to $950B
$1T is the market cap when each bitcoin is trading at ~$52k, but if $50B were sold over a short period of time, it would likely drop the price to $25k or less as the buy orders would all get eaten up
That totally makes sense. But the comments I was replying to made it sound (to me) like it was going to be some long-term disruptor. $25k was the all time high just a couple of months ago. If it dipped to that because someone unloaded Satoshi's cache wouldn't everyone that already had a buy just double down? Seems like it would recover almost instantaneously.
It is impossible to know because there is no objective way to price Bitcoin. There's no way to say that all the bitcoin in the world should be worth exactly $x.
It all depends on what the market perception of that drop is: "this is the end, oh fuck, sell everything" or "ooh buying opportunity".
Because it is not actually a 1T market. If Satoshi's coins aren't on market they really aren't part of cap. Thus we are talking about 950B market... And then count out rest of "lost" coins and actual market cap start to shrink and that 50B is starting to be much bigger thing...
Yes theoretically it is 1T, but practically much lower...
Yeah, but if Satoshi - or anyone - finds the keys again (I'm fairly sure the keys are lost tbh), I doubt they would try and move it in one go.
Also, again I'm no expert but, I think the mere news of the BTC moving from that wallet would have much more of an impact on the BTC price than the BTC ending up on the market.
The crypto market is highly irrational and influenced more by memes than straight supply and demand. I'm confident that the crypto news sites are all owned by people holding crypto. If I had a ton of money and a lot more to gain, I too would invest in paying or setting up media outlets to try and direct the price upwards even further.
I mean I'm fairly sure that's market manipulation, but it's only a crime if it can be traced back to me AND if crypto is considered an investment product, beholden to market manipulation laws.
I mean if I put a haunted plant on sale on ebay and pay a bit of money for the media to report on it, and some schmuck comes by to buy it for $10K instead of its real value of $10, does that make me guilty of market manipulation? I mean the answer is yes, but is there a punishment for that?
Because market cap is an awful way to measure a cryptocurrency's "value" or "market size" - if I create FooCoin, mine a million FooCoins and then sell you one for $10 then the market cap is $10 million, but clearly only $10 worth of activity has occurred.
The daily volume of BTC is somewhere between $3bn and $25bn depending on how much fake volume is being reported by shady exchanges. And it might be far less because that will include things like transfers between wallets, payments and exchanges from and to fiat currencies and other cryptos.
But even at the high figure there Satoshi's coins are worth twice as much as is traded every day, meaning that selling 10% of their stash would be between 20% to 150% of everything traded in a day and would tank the price drastically. Just a few days ago the price of BTC dropped 23% in one day after a mining pool sold off only 3,633 coins in one go:
This seems strange to me. Relative to the doubling that has recently happened, why would 5% of the total number of bitcoins suddenly moving have any drastic impact on price?
It is BTC that has never moved before. It would reveal at least one piece of information about the author of the bitcoin whitepaper - they are alive and engaged. Intent would be unknown, and destabilizing. Many pretenders would claim ownership. It would break a 12 year expectation in the story of Bitcoin.
Satoshi's wallets have 1.1 million bitcoins, which are worth $56.4 billion at today's price. That would place Satoshi Nakamoto among the 25 wealthiest people on the planet.
It's still a huge known unknown for Bitcoin. What is Satoshi was linked to a shady organization, or something the general public wouldn't want to support for instance? Imagine if Satoshi turned out to be an avatar for the American, Russian or Chinese government for instance, that would both give them a huge leverage on the blockchain and mean that they'd benefit hugely from widespread adoption of the cryptocurrency.
In turn that could motivate other governments to heavily regulate bitcoin as they'd see it as a foreign-controlled currency.
That's just fiction, but that's the point, nobody knows for sure who or what Satoshi Nakamoto is, and that's a risk.
It's not just knowing who he is -- if he's identified he might decide to move those coins. If he did that, it could affect the price. I'm not sure anyone knows what the exact impact of that would be.
I don't personally believe Satoshi was an actual person, and don't believe he'll ever be identified. Most likely the keys to those early blocks have been destroyed, and most people wouldn't do that unless there was an institutional reason for it.
> Just identifying him doesn't mean he'd liquidate
True, but it is not a super unlikely outcome either. Identification alone could also result in a loss of trust in the system of Satoshi turned out to be, say, a government.
Could go the opposite way too. It's an unknown that is worth calling out.
~50B in the account at current valuation, if Satoshi starts liquidating the value goes down dramatically; if it gets out that it isn't actually Satoshi acting, the value goes down even more (OMG if the creator of bitcoin can get hacked I can get hacked, this is a terrible investment, I'm out).
I don't think it'd be possible to recoup the investment, but if you have a strong argument otherwise I'm sure some billionaire/nation-state investors would love to hear it.
My pet theory is that all those bitcoins are lost forever, just Satoshi performance tuning the miner he'd hacked together with perl one night and letting it run for a few hours. Close terminal, poof, everything gone. Who cares, can mine more later. Bedtime!
(disclaimer, I know nothing about bitcoin, there's likely 100 reasons why this makes no technical sense)
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