Whatever other effect this has, it's likely to put bitcoin back in the mainstream news. "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" "Who would waste a million dollars?" People love mystery and high stakes.
Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload.
EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)
It could also be that the founds are somehow related to illegal activities and this is just a way to get rid of them. Remember how hard it was for the Bitfinex hackers to launder their Bitcoins.
This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.
How would this help that hypothetical person in any way? If the coins are stolen, then the victim will want the money back. They won't care if the "same" coins are given back or not. Money is fungible. If someone steals a $10 bill from you and burns it, are you going to forsake your claim to $10? I bet you'd even be happy to get two $5 bills back rather than nothing.
They purchased them on Binance, theoretically with a fully KYC'd account given that Binance tightly regulates large withdrawals (especially now after the DOJ coming after them).
People know who Satoshi is or was, in that it's the same Satoshi that invented Bitcoin. (But nobody knows who that is or was "in real life".)
But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard.
I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
BTC is trackable. How would the NSA use $41B when everyone in the world could see where and when it moved?
And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time.
re: who profits from this, got me thinking - even though $1m is a drop in the bucket of the market cap, could burning that amount of funds have any meaningful effect on the price? since the time of this transaction, prices have gone up 1.5% which is not huuuugely significant and causation != correlation
I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho
Wouldn't that hacker include some text in the transaction to prove who did it or send it to an address they control? How they can prove they are the ones that can brag?
He may be convinced that wherever the this Bitcoin will be tracked wherever it goes. And confiscated if it ever reaches a centralized exchange. (Due to pressure from law enforcement, the whale and even Binance)
Unfort we have somewhat replaced "password" with "phone access" + pass code for majority of cases since 2FA is really just "phone (password manager) or password" + "phone (sms or one time token app)".
Block 824513 was mined on Jan 5, 2024 7:00 PM UTC [1]
Block 0 was mined on Jan 3, 2009 6:15 PM UTC [2]
Delta is almost exactly 15 years.
Someone who is grateful for Bitcoin celebrates by provably and forever shrinking the overall supply by BTC 26.9 (coinbase of block 0, the addie the coins were sent to, is unspendable by design) thereby making every other Bitcoins out there a tiny bit more valuable.
[EDIT]: as nullc correctly pointed out somewhere else in this thread, these BTC 26.9 actually can be spent if you happen to have the private key to block 0 (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive, would).
Only the coinbase (the block reward) of block 0 can't be spent by design.
So this now looks like a "thank you Satoshi on Bitcoin's 15th" and not a provable way to shrink the supply.
BTW, beyond mass media claims, the top Satoshi "archeologist" is Sergio Lerner, on a series of articles that go deep (in the hacker sense) [1] you can see the list on his blog but some examples are: "A New Mystery in Patoshi Timestamps" (2020) [2] and "The Patoshi Mining Machine" [3]. Many previous articles recommended.
There is an speculation that Satoshi himself is "just" dead.
I'm pretty certain Satoshi's identity is known, although not publicly stated and/or confirmed by anyone. I believe a handful of the early developers had very strong suspicion as to who was behind the name, but never pursued a confirmation of it.
My money is on Len [1]. The sheer number of coincidences, crossing of rare skill sets and interests, time, place, penchant of pseudo anonymously publishing things and happened to take his own life <2 months after Satoshi's final gloom-filled message, "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future".
Great twist, as someone who knows Sergio since elementary school he was always perfectly capable of being him but from my knowledge of other details I don't think so. Just an opinion.
BTW2: adding a little bit of serendipity to this Sunday I came up with this repository [1] which seems very dangerous and fishy. It says that "34 000 Satoshi Nakamoto wallets with pubkeys (50 BTC each other)" but the download points to a .zip with an .exe. In GitHub you can denounce people but do you suggest to investigate the .exe before right? Seems like a good, and probably simple, reversing play.
On the context of Satoshi's public keys, you cannot (like some other blockchains) get his/her/their public keys from the address.
Many of us have to work for decades to gather this amount of money, if even possible. Not even taking in account that we need to spend most of it to go through this amount of time.
Average mid level programmer in our country will have to work 190+ years for this amount of money.
[edit]
Now, I think I should focus on other things. Average politicians can earn (/s) 50x more money in 5 years than what average programer earns in 190+ years.
Time is a concept of human design to demarcate wealth into units to be sold to the poor through the value exchange of labor.
You’re welcome, I’m not saying you don’t need money to participate in the experience of being a human. But there is more power in our belief in their unit (as this particular experience exposes about one store of value…. It certainly says about another.
A very similar thing used to happen with people accidentally using a QR code linking to a popular blog post or something explaining QR codes ("PLEASE INSERT QR CODE HERE --ed.").
Somewhat hilariously, even Google's (discontinued) Titan security key had this type of blunder in its Bluetooth software: It was using the example key from the Bluetooth specifications for all keys, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks [1].
Readit News
Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload.
EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)
This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.
I doubt this is just some hackers.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884
https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id
If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to
- crowdfund the development of multiple technologies
- harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities)
- mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity
The "bottom up" psyop
But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard.
I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time.
nothing but conspiracy mongering bunkum here
I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).
I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
If those were to be dumped on the open market, it would eat a lot of USD.
Also if you can send BTC to some wallet, why couldn't you send it to another wallet where you indeed have access?
(I said it was a new theory, I didn't say it was a good theory.)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk
Deleted Comment
Block 824513 was mined on Jan 5, 2024 7:00 PM UTC [1]
Block 0 was mined on Jan 3, 2009 6:15 PM UTC [2]
Delta is almost exactly 15 years.
Someone who is grateful for Bitcoin celebrates by provably and forever shrinking the overall supply by BTC 26.9 (coinbase of block 0, the addie the coins were sent to, is unspendable by design) thereby making every other Bitcoins out there a tiny bit more valuable.
[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/824513
[2] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0
[EDIT]: as nullc correctly pointed out somewhere else in this thread, these BTC 26.9 actually can be spent if you happen to have the private key to block 0 (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive, would).
Only the coinbase (the block reward) of block 0 can't be spent by design.
So this now looks like a "thank you Satoshi on Bitcoin's 15th" and not a provable way to shrink the supply.
There is an speculation that Satoshi himself is "just" dead.
[1] https://bitslog.com/
[2] https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-time...
[3] https://bitslog.com/2020/08/22/the-patoshi-mining-machine/
My money is on Len [1]. The sheer number of coincidences, crossing of rare skill sets and interests, time, place, penchant of pseudo anonymously publishing things and happened to take his own life <2 months after Satoshi's final gloom-filled message, "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future".
[1] https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...
There is a HN thread about this [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37793543
BTW2: adding a little bit of serendipity to this Sunday I came up with this repository [1] which seems very dangerous and fishy. It says that "34 000 Satoshi Nakamoto wallets with pubkeys (50 BTC each other)" but the download points to a .zip with an .exe. In GitHub you can denounce people but do you suggest to investigate the .exe before right? Seems like a good, and probably simple, reversing play.
On the context of Satoshi's public keys, you cannot (like some other blockchains) get his/her/their public keys from the address.
[1] [potential malware]
[edit] Now, I think I should focus on other things. Average politicians can earn (/s) 50x more money in 5 years than what average programer earns in 190+ years.
You’re welcome, I’m not saying you don’t need money to participate in the experience of being a human. But there is more power in our belief in their unit (as this particular experience exposes about one store of value…. It certainly says about another.
The joker is real. ;)
Although in all seriousness, what is going on in your life?
Party A explains how to send bitcoin to them but used a well known wallet address in their documentation/guide (Satoshi's).
Party B didn't use Party A's address and committed a bad case of copy-pasta.
A very similar thing used to happen with people accidentally using a QR code linking to a popular blog post or something explaining QR codes ("PLEASE INSERT QR CODE HERE --ed.").
Somewhat hilariously, even Google's (discontinued) Titan security key had this type of blunder in its Bluetooth software: It was using the example key from the Bluetooth specifications for all keys, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks [1].
[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_s...
May even just be a low-information buyer.