The argument has been made by quite a few people that satoshi's alleged stash is a cloud over the market since he could decide to start selling it at any unknown time.
Satoshi could also decide to reinvest his stash back into Bitcoin R&D, education, marketing, bootstrapping, etc.
Imagine the headlines if He started to pay people (in highly-collectible OG Bitcoins) to teach farmers/tutors/doctors/unbanked/emigrants how to use Bitcoin!
Dunno. The best way for him to "spend" his coins might be if they went in a single tx to "1LongLiveBitcoin..." (or otherwise visibly destroyed). I do think the market-overhang is an issue, and that's the only way to completely resolve it.
[ can you imagine what the bitcoin-days-destroyed chart would look like? heh... ]
Another (quite longtail) option: if bitcoin continues to gain traction, give govs each a key to an M of N address and ship the 1M BTC to that address as a global "stability fund". That'd provide some traditional "elasticity" and central management to the bitcoin money supply (which obviously govs will demand), but keeps it decidedly limited. They'd probably blow the 1M BTC pretty quickly anyway and then bitcoin would be even more embedded into the global economy (and still limited supply and transparent).
If Satoshi wanted to destroy his coins he'd have done it by now, and "govs" are the last entities to which He would entrust Bitcoin.
With
tree signatures, Satoshi could allow ~everyone to vote on if/how they are used....
Agree on both counts, unfortunately.
Unfortunately because Satoshi's coins are indeed a negative for the ecosystem. People need to trust that:
1) Satoshi won't just dump 'em for diversification (I personally doubt it)
2) Satoshi won't dump 'em for some other reason (ie, he goes insane, finds himself under duress, etc)
3) His keys don't get hacked
4) He doesn't ultimately pass the stash on to others who are less ideologically-motivated and less careful than he seems to be
In short, it seems clear that the ecosystem would be better off without having to worry about the above, even if they're only tiny concerns.