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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

why does everybody assume that whoever is Satoshi still has access to their wallet? It's absolutely possible whoever is Satoshi has simply lost the key.

We're talking new technology where you're running fast and loose. It's absolutely possible, and I'd say a big reason why someone would not want to admit to being Satoshi.

I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.

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Further, no one would believe them, and they'd still endlessly be a target for criminals. No benefit to revealing any information beyond mild dismissals, IMO.

> I'm Satoshi, but I also lost billions because I messed up a Debian upgrade.

That would be very funny. I used to own a whole bitcoin when it was worth nothing.Didn't think it would be ever worth anything and formatted my hard drive to change distro.

I did this with 15 btc :]

I commented elsewhere in this thread theorising that Satoshi could be the work of both Finney and Back. If that has any basis in reality, then it stands to reason that perhaps the wallet is locked away in a trust or at least legally unobtainable until certain conditions are met (e.g. Adam Back's passing). I can imagine a scenario in the future where a law firm makes a press release confirming they're in possession of Satoshi's wallet and have been instructed to liquidate and donate its proceeds.

I think this is plausible as well. One of the emails used by Satoshi was tracked to CA (where Finney lived), the original paper talks in plural "we" (fwiw), and the Dorian Satoshi person lived in CA and could have been an inspiration for the name (if Finney had come across him somehow) since he was a very private, anti gov person (not saying he had anything to do with BTC)

Or what if Satoshi deliberately destroyed their key?

The motivations behind Bitcoin were clear.

All the wealthy people I know don’t really do it for the money. The money is the gauge or the metric they use to judge how well they are playing the game but what motivates them is the love of the game and their sense of purpose.

If someone was to truly believe that Bitcoin was going to be a gold/USD/Eurodollar/swift etc. replacement then their metric of success isn’t money if they got in early.

100% and just based on the cypherpunk origins of this whole thing, this the most likely scenario.

Also I think that people discuss this stuff in a very narrow minded way. “Is it one person or multiple people?” Maybe it was one person to begin with then others joined in to contribute under the pseudonym.

Given all the available information (including the DHS worker revealing that Satoshi was identified by the USA government and he was multiple people)[0] this is the most likely case.

[0] - https://youtu.be/MAOrjlub4Qc?t=2612

It's entirely possible that Satoshi has deliberately destroyed the keys, but lost them? I doubt it. All these early cryptography guys were very conscious about keeping their keys secure, they discussed it endlessly.

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