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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

As the article states, if this person had really wanted to profit, a far easier method would have been to use Satoshi's identity to manipulate the price of Bitcoin. Either he didn't, in fact, realize that opportunity (despite his claims), or he has other motives besides simply profiting from the hack. (Or something more complicated is going on.)

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To "use Satoshi's identity" would require his pgp key (at a minimum).

Except when people want to believe something or have fear (of losing mass amounts of money) of something, they tend to act irrationally.

He wouldn't be able to convince myself of his identity without one of his private keys, but there are thousands of people who would have latched on, and then once those people start confirming the story it only convinces more people and so on, in a snowball effect.

And even if you don't believe it, you still might sell your BTC, fearing that others will.

You don't think his email alone would be enough to at least bump the price? I bet if you sent emails to a few select journalists from an account known to belong to Satoshi, implying that you will begin offloading coins, you could easily cause the price to drop. I'm sure there are other ways too. Even if they thought to authenticate his identity, which many wouldn't, they would still write something up about it, and the speculation alone would have an effect.

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