Quote from: futureofbitcoin on April 19, 2015, 11:12:07 AM

How about satoshi takes out the dust coins, and make the genesis key public? Cheesy

I don't see why this couldn't be done. After all, NXT pretty much did the exact same thing when its founder purposely made the private key of the genesis account easy to guess.

Quote from: futureofbitcoin on April 19, 2015, 03:45:05 PM

collector items are usually something you can show to others. For example, you can't really collect a secret that Einstein shared with your great grandfather and passed down to you. There's no verifiability and you can't really show it to anyone.

Pretty much the same with these addresses. I mean I guess you can "show" you have access to it by sending some bitcoins to someone's wallet from that address, but that's not really showing the item itself.

You could also sign a message from it as well.

Quote from: Sarthak on April 19, 2015, 04:22:52 PM

Simple! The account holds 65.44243457 BTC! I would send 65.44233457 (0.0001 tx fees)!
No more! No Less Cool

#Like_A_BosS

Quote from: bitgeek on April 19, 2015, 04:55:42 PM

I wouldn't pay more than 65BTC or the equivalent in fiat. It's doesn't have any special value to me and I wouldn't treat it as a collectible.
I'm sure it's worth a lot more to some people, just like art. For one person it's just a pretty picture worth $50. For another, who's a fan of the artist and collects his works it can be worth a million.

Quote from: philipma1957 on April 20, 2015, 03:06:05 AM

yeah I would think to some it has a lot of value. to others it is worth just 65 btc in change.

I've noticed many other people saying that they would buy it for ~65 BTC as well.

To be clear, the initial 50 BTC in that account is unspendable. It would really only be worth ~15 BTC + the value of the coins that might be sent to it in the future (which probably isn't significant now that the price of BTC has risen so much) + the collectible/coolness value of having the private keys to the genesis block. The value of the second one is speculative and the value of the last one is entirely subjective.

Quote from: futureofbitcoin on April 20, 2015, 08:28:03 AM

so is the total number of "usable" bitcoins, assuming none are lost to accidents, 20,999,950 instead of 21 million?

Quote from: zebedee on April 20, 2015, 12:14:30 PM

There were 100 BTC lost in two duplicated coinbase transactions (i.e. two pairs of blocks with the same coinbase txn, and as the protocol assumes txnID and output index are sufficient to designate an unspent output, means the later coinbase "overwrote" the earlier as it hadn't been spent by overwrite time), which is why version 2 blocks were created to eliminate that loophole. So no, there are 150 BTC at first glance "granted" in blocks that are actually irretrievable forever...

Quote from: teukon on April 21, 2015, 04:22:51 AM

This is a thorny topic and really depends on what you mean by "usable" and "lost to accidents". Of the oft-cited 21 million BTC total:...

I understand futureofbitcoin wasn't referring to coins that were lost after the creation of the genesis block, but to expand on the above two replies, this link might be of interest:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253

Quote from: Troonetpt on April 20, 2015, 08:53:00 AM

if it can't be payout, then it worth nothing.
The only use of the genesis block/address key is used to prove the identity of satoshi.

Quote from: chennan on April 20, 2015, 09:22:12 AM

It is no worth more than 65.44243457 BTC if the amount is spendable otherwise it is worthless.

The 50 BTC is unspendable. The ~15 BTC that others have sent are spendable. At the bare minimum, it would still be worth ~15 BTC.

Quote from: zebedee on April 20, 2015, 12:22:29 PM

Quote from: walter3211 on April 20, 2015, 09:31:54 AM

I doubt satoshi owns the key of this genesis bitcoin address due to the fact that the 50 BTC is unspendable. So many ppl just send dust amount to this genesis address to destroy their bitcoin.

You're assuming a lot. The genesis block was the only block where in some sense Satoshi was guaranteed the coins, as by construction he was competing with no one.

Only by construction. We know that he was mining pretty much alone for an entire week. And even after that, it was mostly just him and Hal Finney mining. A single 50 BTC block really wouldn't have changed things at all. A conscious decision to make the genesis block coins unspendable by design would probably have been done out of principle rather than for any practical reasons.

Quote

He may have viewed this as unethical, and therefore deliberately left out the code to add the genesis coinbase to the UTXO set - I find it hard to believe, though possible, that he wouldn't have realized that it wasn't in the UTXO set. I suspect it was a deliberate choice.

Once he had released the code and anyone could download it, he might have ethically viewed all subsequent blocks as fair game (though no one other than Hal has stepped forward to claim a block earlier than #78) and so mined for all he could.

The fact that the genesis block coins are unspendable was a much later discovery although I guess it's possible that Satoshi knew of this beforehand. I believe the assumption at the time was that they were in fact spendable and to the best of my knowledge, Satoshi didn't say anything that would indicate otherwise.

Anyway, I'll see if I can find the exact quote...

EDIT: Found it:

Quote from: theymos

This is how the Bitcoin client worked when Satoshi created it: The client maintains a block database and a transaction database. When it finds that its block database is empty, it inserts the genesis block into its block database to get things started. This block includes a transaction sending 50 BTC to 1A1z..., but the client does not insert this transaction into its transaction database. So even though this transaction is part of the block chain, if the client sees a transaction spending this 50 BTC, it won't be able to find the 50 BTC transaction in its transaction database, and the spending transaction will be rejected. In other words, the genesis block's transaction isn't considered to be a "real transaction" by the original Bitcoin client.

(Current versions of Bitcoin-Qt handle the block/transaction databases in a totally different way, so the genesis block's transaction is now just a weird special case in the code.)

This could easily have been an oversight, or Satoshi could have intended this transaction to be unspendable. This quirk wasn't discovered until after Satoshi disappeared, so no one had a chance to ask him.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1nc13r/the_first_50btc_block_reward_cant_be_spend_why/

Quote from: futureofbitcoin on April 22, 2015, 01:44:31 AM

Thank you. I always wondered about how there could be exactly 21 million coins despite bitcoins not being infinitely divisible (at least not currently). Now it makes total sense. Thank you for taking the time to actually read and answer. So many people nowadays don't even read the OP.

It might be possible to asymptotically reach 21 million coins if Bitcoin adopts sub-satoshi mining rewards since the reason why the total supply is 0.0021 BTC less than 21 million BTC in the first place seems to be because there is no 0.000000005 BTC mining reward after the 6,929,999th block:

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Long_Term