Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

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Uh, the bitcoin community has come out unilaterally against the concept of premining and ICOs. Bitcoiners fucking hate that shit and have been heavily criticizing it from when it first started. Which was substantially after bitcoin started, i.e. literally years later.

What you need to realize is that the bitcoin community != the crypto community.

Bitcoin was not premined and did not have an ICO.

It's weird to talk about "Satoshi's net worth." Satoshi may not have been a single person, may be dead, and anyway, it doesn't look like those coins will ever be spent, so if Satoshi is alive, he hasn't profited financially from the coins he mined and is presumably living a poor or middle-class life, unless he happened to be independently wealthy before---but we'll probably never know.

Go with independently wealthy, and probably highly engaged in other pursuits. That’s a massive amount of potential money sitting there.

Of course, if you can trace the coins’ motion, cashing in may break anonymity too, so maybe they need to sit there like the money bag in Get Shorty.

I do realize that, that's why I explicitly said the crypto community and not the bitcoin community. You misunderstand. And I would consider Satoshi's early actions to be functionally the same as premining, and there are lots of other people besides Satoshi who got rich through the same actions. So I don't think you can actually say the bitcoin community is against it in practical terms either, otherwise they would have stopped using bitcoin or forked it long ago to remove the unearned wealth from the early miners. The fact is, they actually can't do that, because the super wealthy already control the bitcoin network, and the community does not.

>Satoshi may not have been a single person, may be dead, and anyway, it doesn't look like those coins will ever be spent

I hope you can also see how this is precarious and irresponsible of the bitcoin community to allow this situation to continue, you just have to hope that this anonymous and unaccountable billionaire (or group of billionaires) is dead or benevolent, because if they aren't they could seriously screw up the network.

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