Quote from: xtraelv on June 10, 2018, 02:22:04 PM

Quote from: QuestionAuthority on June 09, 2018, 04:53:06 AM

Harold Thomas Finney II, a southern California coder, was Satoshi. He claimed to have received the first transaction from Satoshi just a few days after the genesis block. I think he sent the transaction to himself. Satoshi used a @gmx.com mail address. Finney was the very first person to post on the Sourceforge page of Bitcoin using a @gmx.com address. His vernacular and writing style are almost identical to the posts of Satoshi.

Finney knew in late 2009 that he was dying of ALS. The Satoshi persona was a necessary creation to remove him from the limelight. Bitcoin was too much for him to control while dealing with the onset of a terminal disease. He turned over the alert keys to Gavin Andresen and backed away from an active role in the development of his creation.

He knew his creation would never be trusted if most of the initially mined testing coins were ever to show up on the market so those coins were never spent. He may have intentionally disposed of the private keys to many of the addresses to ensure they would never hurt his brainchild. Some of the coins he mined in the beginning were used to pay for medical bills and cryogenic preservation of his body after his death. Those Satoshi addresses are as dead as Hal Finney.

Hal Finney would be my favorite pick out of the candidates for being Satoshi. He was an amazing inspiring person without the Satoshi identity.

Bitcoin and me (Hal Finney) is one of the posts he wrote.

...

Quote from: Kakmakr on October 10, 2018, 05:56:24 AM

Here is my 2 cents. Roll Eyes

I do not believe Satoshi ever conceived that this experiment would become this successful and that bitcoins would become this valuable. I think he only mined coins in the beginning to get things going and he most probably lost most of the private keys for those mined coins.

Remember, back then most of these coins was virtually worthless, so throwing them around and playing with them was not a big deal. Just imagine if Satoshi has to emerge now and admit that he lost all of the private keys for those coins that was mined in the early days. Grin

If Bitcoin was solely Hal's creation, he actually made a post early on in the developer section of the sourceforge Bitcoin board where he talked about the price of bitcoin increasing relative to a potentially growing user base vs supply and demand in terms of the world population etc.,

If I recall correctly it ended with him saying that this was "something to think about" ? or something to that effect. I will dig it out and post it if I can find it perhaps.

EDIT: Actually it's in the 2009 bitcoin-list ... herewith ...

- https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/21312757/

Quote

Re: [bitcoin-list] Bitcoin v0.1 released
From: - 2009-01-11 03:16:43

Satoshi Nakamoto writes:
> Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash
> system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
> It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority.
>
> See bitcoin.org for screenshots.
>
> Download link:
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar

Congratulations to Satoshi on this first alpha release. I am looking
forward to trying it out.

> Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed
> to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half
> every 4 years.
>
> first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
> next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
> next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
> next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
> etc...

It's interesting that the system can be configured to only allow a
certain maximum number of coins ever to be generated. I guess the
idea is that the amount of work needed to generate a new coin will
become more difficult as time goes on.

One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even
ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it
at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable
argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins.

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

Hal