Being labeled as Satoshi Nakamoto is basically a fucking death sentence due to how much money is on the line. It feels deeply irresponsible of HBO.
Very likely not him, and he’s like the 20th candidate whose been paraded by the news
Sorry, why is it a death sentence?
He potentially has billions of dollars in bitcoin
Bad people do bad things for big sums of money
But … there are other billionaires out there who are not going into hiding because they are billionaires.
You can’t torture the money away from most billionaires. Someone who has most of their wealth in Bitcoin theoretically could have that happen to them.
And after stealing the money, there’s not that much chance of getting caught, unlike if you just tried putting billions into your regular ass bank account.
You can’t torture the money away from most billionaires
Have you tried though?
I’d like to.
Other billionaires also have security. The accused people who aren’t really Satoshi likely don’t have the means to properly protect themselves the same way.
Yea - Taylor Swift, as an example, has serious security around her due to her wealth and also the personal threats she’s received… that doesn’t come cheap.
Satoshi could liquidate 4.76% of all the bitcoins that will ever exist, that would wipe the crypto market and potentially bring the stock market along for a very bumpy ride, wipe a ton of money in pension funds and so on.
The fact that one person owns that much Bitcoin should worry anyone who is invested in it.
Yes but having billions in Bitcoin more closely resembles having billions in cash than billions in stocks / other assets which are harder to steal and get away with.
Ironically, that’s the kind of “issue” you need trustworthy banks for. The thing crypto was meant to replace. But none of the crypto exchanges that exist are trustworthy enough
I still don’t understand why crypto exchanges exist is an unregulated, decentralized currency, wouldn’t an exchange remove part of those benefits?
yes!
Yup, if you robbed Elon Musk you’d just walk away with some IOUs that might be worth millions… and also billions in Twitter debt.
The actual Satoshi has billions in untraceable cash equivalents that already happen to be in a currency that drug lords like dealing in.
That was a good read. I haven’t watched the documentary or kept up with this, but the part
Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles as Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the Bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared.
seems pretty strongly like the guy to me though. Hopefully the documentary goes into that?
I still don’t know what Bitcoin is.
A confidence game too many people believe in
That can be said of all currency though.
deleted by creator
Abolish all currency 👐
“Money” that’s only used to buy drugs or try to get rich quick.
Bitcoin was the very first solution to how do you prevent a digital item from being copied and used repeatedly aka double spending.
Nothing digital was truly safe from this until bitcoin as you always had to trust someone who could double spend or steal it if they wanted to, or the database/system being hacked and things altered.
Things became truly immutable once committed to the chain.
The whole system needed an incentive to keep everyone aligned to reject double spends, and the coin itself was the reward. (Edit and there’s a limited number of coins, making them scarce)
Miners get rewarded for ensuring transactions are legitimate. It costs money to gain the reward so it’s better for them to just keep the reward instead of risking losing it
Edit: it also created the first time we could prove something digital existed at a point in time. Everything before this involved trusting someone data wasn’t altered to ‘prove’ it. Since blocks are immutable, their timestamp proves something existed then. E.g. a hash of a picture. It’s irrefutable the picture existed on that day.
You know the blockchain, right? Basically, whenever anyone trades a bitcoin, that transaction is recorded on the blockchain. And there’s a bunch of math work that goes into recording each transaction. When people do this math work, they get rewarded with a tiny bit of a bitcoin. This is what mining is. So then you have some bitcoin. And some other people accept bitcoin for goods and services.
Bitcoin itself is a virtual currency, just like Runescape gold or the dollars in your online bank account. It’s just numbers on a computer. The blockchain part is what makes it different.
Now don’t get me wrong, for the majority of applications this is overkill and not at all useful. Bitcoin and blockchains are solutions looking for a problem.
