Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

Post by zaroth » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 1:07 AM UTC

jameskegel wrote: post #29

acover wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mining difficulty was much lower at the beginning. Satoshi, the creator, has about 1 million bitcoins from this early mining. [0] [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

Also Hal Finney and others who helped in the beginning may have left sums of BTC behind (RIP). A personal anecdote, somewhat related: In the early days, I mined several blocks from the wallet itself, on an AMD Sempron or Duron, at about 800-900mhz. Even then, this took a few days and then weeks before eventually becoming impossible with the advent of mining pools and GPU mining arrays. Speaking for myself only, some…

Post by phil21 » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

omgbananas wrote: post #31

adventured wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what was claimed about the Internet bubble, over and over and over again in every bubble touting story about how it was "the new economy" and "different this time." Besides the Internet did in fact involve a once in a generation economic paradigm shift. Just ask China, $6+ trillion in annual online payment processing / exchange flow. Their entire economic output was $800 billion circa 1998. Entire vast…

> Was there a huge automobile bubble? There sure was. I'm not familiar with a past (or any) automobile bubble. Are you saying you think we're in now? I've heard this theory before, but I don't know what would cause it to pop, or how one could protect oneself (if that's even needed) from it popping.

Post by kbvk » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 1:22 AM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #33

mtgx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were spending tens of thousands of Bitcoins on stuff like pizza in the early days and there were significantly fewer Bitcoins back then. That's hundreds of millions of dollars today. So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did…

Satoshi is dead, or in prison. No way they could go 10 years without spending a single coin.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #21

tempestn wrote: post #16

"In turn, financial investors get a secure, levered exposure to bitcoin that is not hostage to an unproven price-setting and without the expense of setting up a system to hold physical bitcoin." I realize that securely holding bitcoin at scale isn't completely trivial, but isn't part of the value of bitcoin supposed to be that these costs are not large? Especially the use of the term, "physical bitcoin," seems a bit…

Bitcoin security is partly based on public-key crypto. So anything you would do to secure a private key, you can use to secure your BTC from being stolen. Encrypt it with a passphrase, or store it on a thumb drive and lock it in a safe, or print it out on paper and put it in your wallet to be scanned (e.g. in QR code format) only when needed, or even store it in a tamper-proof hardware dongle.

Post by drtillberg » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 1:40 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #32

jameskegel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Hal Finney and others who helped in the beginning may have left sums of BTC behind (RIP). A personal anecdote, somewhat related: In the early days, I mined several blocks from the wallet itself, on an AMD Sempron or Duron, at about 800-900mhz. Even then, this took a few days and then weeks before eventually becoming impossible with the advent of mining pools and GPU mining arrays. Speaking for myself only, some…

I think people massively underestimate the number of Bitcoin which are forever lost. I’d put it at well over 50%, and the true market cap is much less than we think it is because of this. IMO “Satoshi” coins are part of this unrecoverable set, but of course I have no data to base that on, just a hunch.