If Satoshi attempts to spend his coins, this might reveal his identity. Which in turn would increase a risk of kidnapping/blackmailing/torture/etc from anyone willing to get a share of his stash. Same applies to his heirs in the future. My guess is that he may have deleted all the keys to early coins traceable back to him, just to avoid temptation.
He could have mined a lot of cheap coins in 2010-2011, though, so he's probably not without a big reward.
I'm thinking of how is this any different from your standard "hey I got rich suddenly" situations (startup exit, a large contract as an athlete, etc)? Bitcoins themselves are hard to trace / anonymous, but once they are "out of the system", they will be in a regular financial institution and the situation is analogous to your regular internet millionaire.
I guess the thing is that he ows such a large fraction of the Bitcoins out there that he can't conceivable liquidate all his Bitcoins in a reasonable amount of time, thus exposing himself to a certain time period where he is known to have a large sum of Bitcoins that are by nature anonymously transferable to a kidnapper?
IMO such threats depend largely on where he lives. If he lives in highly affluent areas, then the typical security precautions and rich neighborhood surroundings used by fellow millionaires should be sufficient protection. There are plenty of "rich people" in the world who get by just fine without being kidnapped. Just wander over to your neighborhood Silicon Valley rich neighborhood, and you'll bump into plenty of 8~10 figure people.
As time goes by and Bitcoin becomes more widespread, it gets more expensive. Can you imagine a guy today with 5% of economy in wealth? Also, even if it is not economical to steal from him, there is usual level of paranoia that many crypto folks share.
""it's hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in [Slim's] pocket." You can barely make a call without doing so: Slim's phone company Telmex — snapped up on the cheap in 1990 — controls 80 percent of the landlines; its subsidiary América Móvil handles 70 percent of the cell service. "
"For Bill Gates to have the same grip on the U.S. economy, says Brian Winter in Foreign Policy, he would have to be worth "909 billion" and own "Alcoa, Phillip Morris, Sears, Best Buy, TGIFriday's, Dunkin' Donuts, Marriott, Citibank, and JetBlue.""
> My guess is that he may have deleted all the keys to early coins traceable back to him, just to avoid temptation.
If he did that, he was, for once, very stupid. You don't want to delete the keys, since no one will believe you. ('Sure you did, pal, sure you did. You took all those careful precautions to remain completely pseudonymous and you expect me to believe that?')
What you want to do is publicly, verifiably, irreversibly destroy coins. This is perfectly doable and there are at least two ways to do it: you can send bitcoins to invalid addresses where no corresponding key can possibly exist, and you send the coins with a transaction where the scripting language will never evaluate to true and release the coins (something along the lines of 'release coins iff 1==2'). As the inventor of Bitcoin, one would expect Satoshi to know of these methods and other approaches I don't know of.
I recommend Satoshi to spend his coins by depositing them to a Bitcoin ATM and withdrawing cash - this should be completely anonymous :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU3vht4LTZI
Edit: Or he can use one of the bitcoin "mixer" services. Or send a fraction of them to an online wallet, and withdraw (most online wallets just mix all their users' coins). Or he can create transactions moving coins around, pretending they are being spent from user to user, until he spends them one time (and the recipient sees a chain of 100 transactions between a block presumably originating from Satoshi, he would simply claim he received them through someone else). Etc.
There's no way those ATMs are stocked with enough cash for him to withdraw even a small percentage. I guess he could withdraw some every day, and probably live quite well on that income; but coming back to an ATM over and over wouldn't be so great for anonymity.
Or you know, more likely - completely tank the market since the current price is incredibly unstable, but still represents an assumption that no one individual has a large stash of coins that might become liquid suddenly.
He probably created a new wallet each time he restarted the miner. If he found a large enough investor (e.g. the Winklevoss brothers), he could just transfer a number of his wallet files to the investor. The investor could do a transaction himself to transfer the coins into a wallet he is sure to own, and Satoshi's real identity would never be involved in any transaction.
Wait, you write "If Satoshi attempts to spend his coins, this might reveal his identity", but, would that now contradict the claim of anonymity in bitcoin transaction?
There is no anonymity in Bitcoin. There are ways to go about this, such as selling BTC for LTC and then back to BTC, and there's been a suggested modification to Bitcoin called zerocoin that would make it anonymous, but by itself, Bitcoin is not anonymous.
I think US paper currency, aka the Dollar, provides for anonymity. If one pays with paper bills and coins rather than by electronic means, anonymity can be fairly effected.
Could he sell (I'm ignorant of BTC details) to John Doe like I could sell a chunk of Citibank stock to someone? Presumably some known and trustworthy investor says he's looking to buy $xx Million worth BTC and Satoshi responds.
Then he's just another rich person, holding cash, not BTC coins that can be taken after a serious beat down.
(URGENT BUSINESS ASSISTANCE STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL)
COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
Good Day!
My name is Sir Akadayo Olemobado, I am the manager of bills and exchange at the foriegn remittance department of the (Mt.Gox Exchange ). I am writting you this letter to ask for your support and co-operation to carry out this transaction. We discovered some abandoned sum $15,500,000(FIFTEEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND BTC ) in an account that belongs to one of our foriegn customer who died along-side his entire family in march this year in a terrorist train bomb blast in Spain some few months ago.Since this development,we have advertised for his next of kin or any close relation to come forward to claim this money,but nobody came yet to apply for the claim.
To this effect,i and other official in my department have decided to look for a trusted foriegn partner who can stand in as the next of kin of the deceased as we cannot do it only ourselves and claim this money.We need a foreign partner to apply for the claim on our behalf because of the fact that the customer was a foreign and we don't want this money to go into the treasury as unclaimed fund.
Every document to effect this process will emanate from my table and i will perfect every document to be in accordance with the banking law and guideline,so you have nothing to worry about and we have agreed that 30% of this money will be for you,while 10%will be for any expenses incured on both sides wihile 60% will be for my colleagues and me. If you are willing to help us,please indicate by replying this letter and putting in your name, private telephone number,fax and permanent residential address via my private email address below.I awaits your immediate response to enable us start this transaction as soon as i recieved your reply,i will send you a text application form for immediate APPLICATIION OF CLAIM.
Please contact me even if you are not intrested in my proposal to you to enable us scout for another partner in the event of non-interest on your part. Thanks for your co-operation
Yes or probably thousands of other transactions for some or all of the value of these wallet(s), but the real question is there a secure way to get most/all of the value out without revealing enough information to leak his/her/their identity?
What if he transfers them at a huge loss, say 30%-50% cheaper with attached conditions? Or use LLCs and offshore corps? If there's a will and lots of money involved, there's a way
Now that someone's identified these coins people will watch them very closely. It's gonna be very difficult for Satoshi to ever get their millions out of the system.
Exactly. Anyone who gets a payment from Satoshi with any identifying info (including "meet at midnight on a bridge"), would be tempted to sell it to gangsters for at least $10M.
He could have mined a lot of cheap coins in 2010-2011, though, so he's probably not without a big reward.