Status of the first million Bitcoins

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.0

by mdelias • 13 years ago

124 115 13 years ago

pyre2• 13 years ago

While the title here[1] is better than the title of the thread[2] it's still sort of misleading. There is no consensus in that thread about the status of the first million Bitcoins.

Though there are some interesting comments:

  > But what is true is that anybody running Bitcoin
  > that year with a consumer Core 2 would make about
  > 2000 BTC a day. 
  >
  > [Bounty] 201600 BTC for a time machine, I only need
  > a few hours...

If someone decided to go 'all out' and threw significant computing power behind Bitcoin in the early stages, how would this have affected the outcome. Would it have encouraged others to join in (i.e. "look what he's doing, there must be something to this thing")? Would it have effectively pushed everyone else out of the space (i.e. "I can't match his resources, and he seems to be mining significant amounts of Bitcoins; may as well give up on this Bitcoin thing")?

  > I think the likeliest scenario is that hundreds of
  > people downloaded and ran the client then, got a
  > bunch of blocks that were at the time useless because
  > they were valueless, then deleted their clients.

It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.'

[1] "Status of the first million Bitcoins ever created" as of this writing.

[2] "Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD"

seanalltogether• 13 years ago

"It seems disappointing (?) that significant chunks of the finite amount of possible Bitcoins might be lost 'forever.'"

So I'm kinda curious, as the power of the collective network grows, how difficult would it be to turn the incredible hashing rate toward discovering the the private keys of wallets lost long ago?

drivebyacct24• 13 years ago

How do you know if the wallet is lost? I'm guessing most people who lost their wallets, probably lost their public address too. (Unless they were using it as a donation sink or something). Plus, if you can crack the keys, you would just target the biggest wallet and be done with it.

teraflop• 13 years ago

Hashing doesn't help you crack private keys. Bitcoin uses ECDSA to sign transactions, which means you need to be able to solve the discrete logarithm problem over an elliptic curve. In any case, even the combined computational resources of the entire planet probably aren't enough to break a 256-bit ECDSA key in a reasonable amount of time.

kzrdude2• 13 years ago

The protocol could be updated to allow "mining" of addresses that didn't move for sufficiently long time. But that's never going to happen.

drivebyacct24• 13 years ago

So, there's 100 coins that represent an abstract value X.

Now there are only 50 coins because 50 were lost. Do they still count as that same value X? What if you can't know how many coins were lost?

wmf2• 13 years ago

In theory this is priced in already. Lost BTC is treated no differently than "hoarded" BTC; in either case it doesn't contribute to market liquidity.

philix0012• 13 years ago

The offer/demand will adjust the price of the remaining bitcoins. Think of lost bitcoins as a small donation to all bitcoin users.

ZeroCoin4• 13 years ago

According to these calculations: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc...

The first 1.6 million bitcoins were mined by at most ~15 people.

ryandvm• 13 years ago

Fascinating, but I certainly don't hold it against him. 100 MM seems like a pretty modest take for a guy that invents a revolutionary currency.

There are certainly easier ways to make 100 million dollars.

joshmlewis• 13 years ago

Like what?

jquery• 13 years ago

Being a co-founder of the internet company I work for? As much as I respect my company, it's no Bitcoin.

rkuykendall-com• 13 years ago

There are a lot of people and companies worth over 100 million dollars. I only know of one revolutionary crypto-currency.

archgoon2• 13 years ago

Winning the Nobel in physics, or winning one of the Clay Mathematics prizes.

treelovinhippie• 13 years ago

Greatest pyramid scheme ever.

efnx• 13 years ago

Can you explain why?

antiscam9• 13 years ago

I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or maybe just out of greed. Their claims, which fueled the recent speculative frenzy, have always been that Bitcoin would have a continuous, exponential growth against all other currencies. "It always goes up." "Get in before it's too late."

I can see how relatively small amounts of money could be invested into Bitcoins as speculation or just play. Several tens of millions of dollars have presumably been transferred to Bitcoin holders so far, in the aggregate. But many people are investing on claims that a single bitcoin will eventually be worth $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million. For that to happen, the world would have to transfer massive wealth to the early adopters, as this early adopter explains:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175833.msg1830933#ms...

Why would anyone do that rather than setting up an alternative? Massive delusions are possible, but it seems far more likely that the claim that a bitcoin will be worth $10,000 will start to seem ludicrous to everyone, as it obviously is.

After that, why would anyone buy a bitcoin for $100, or even $30 or $10? There's little practical use for them other than drugs or illegal gambling. And they're hardly worth speculatively buying at $100 just so that they could be sold at $120 or $150.

It's got to die eventually, unless everyone decide that they don't mind depreciating the value of everything else just so that the early adopters of this scheme can have untold wealth dumped into their laps. It's a fascinating technology, but that doesn't mean the speculative delusion will last forever.

Pyramid scheme? Just so. Of course, to some degree so is gold -- but gold has a much wider existing distribution (compared to Bitcoin), a much deeper history, and backers far more significant, both intellectually and financially, than the childish ideologues of bitcointalk.org.

rmc3• 13 years ago

The earlier you get in, the more you get.

saosebastiao3• 13 years ago

If someone wants to go dumpster diving in Cleveland, there is a Samsung 80 gig hard drive with about 120 Bitcoins on it. I won them from a tor gambling site after betting a single bitcoin that was given to me. They were selling for less than $.20 at the time so I didn't care enough to do anything with them when I scrapped my hard drive.

I obviously didn't foresee Cypress.

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

Yeah, that tree was pretty unpredictable.

dfc• 13 years ago

What is Cypress?

rbol• 13 years ago

I think he means Cyprus?

consz• 13 years ago

>Cypress is the name applied to many plants in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is a conifer of northern temperate regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress

saosebastiao3• 13 years ago

An alternative spelling to Cyprus, Ciprus, Chipre, Cipris, etc. It is one of two anglicized versions that I know of, and I can never remember which version is more accepted.

Anyway...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...

ZeroCoin4• 13 years ago

Cypress was a killer GPU firmware made by ATI that mined a lot of Bitcoins for me back in the day.

Cyprus on the other hand: that's a country that was just recently rocked by the world banksters.

damian20002• 13 years ago

Sorry I'm a complete Bitcoin noob, but is there some way for you to recover them via their transaction ID, or get the seller to re-issue them to you?

SolarNet• 13 years ago

Bitcoin is decentralized, no one can reissue bit coins because no one runs bitcoin. If he lost his private keys (his "wallet") than he looses all of the coins associated with it.

primitur• 13 years ago

Seriously, this is worth knowing more details. When did you lose it, where, and what else is on the drive?

There is more mining to be done of hard drives, indeed, in your average metropolis ..

saosebastiao3• 13 years ago

I threw it in the garbage in Mentor Ohio back when the price was less than $0.20. You'd probably have more luck panhandling.

waterlesscloud4• 13 years ago

I've seen idle chatter about scouring the internet for posts from early bitcoin adpoters and offering to buy their old computers. And then of course searching the hard drives for forgotten wallets.

Not something I think anyone will actually do. Yet. But check those hard drives before you sell/donate any old PCs!

Permit2• 13 years ago

If this is true and any individual holds 1M BTC, it must take an incredible amount of self restraint not to dump those coins. That means the book value of his coins would have fluctuated between approximately $250M and $100M this week.

You'd also have to keep in mind that he would have been through the previous crash in which his coins varied in worth between $29 M before falling back down to $2M.

It would take a special someone not to sell those coins before they hit the prices we've seen these past few weeks.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Please read the whole thread; the first million BTC are definitely not held by one person.

(Also, I think you'd get no more than $50M for 1M BTC but that's a minor detail.)

Permit2• 13 years ago

My point was not that he currently has them, it's that if any person were to have them, they'd have been sold a long time ago.

jacquesm3• 13 years ago

Trying to liquidate that much would simply cause the market to collapse.

pdog• 13 years ago

Do you have any idea what the size of the order book is?

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

Yes, if the holder was liquidating it all at once.

What could be done though, is selling a little at a intervals, or selling a chunk whenever the price hit some level.

rmc3• 13 years ago

They could be playing the long game.

There are only 21M bitcoins possible. 1M is about 5%. The goal of many bitcoin-folk is for bitcoin to be in the top 3 currencies. Imagine only 5% of all the Euro in circulation... or 5% of the USD... $250M is nothing in comparison to that prize.

(BTW this is one problem I have with bitcoin)

ZeroCoin4• 13 years ago

The same question/comment was posted to r/bitcoin a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc...

This comment on that post seems to calculate the number of people mining bitcoins for the first year: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c48u0/how_did_bitc...

If satoshi was indeed just testing the network... why not use "testnet" or simply re-set the blockchain once you were satisfied with the results of your work and release it to individuals?

Oh, wait... because you wouldn't hold 7.8% of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist then if you did that.

Just because almost half of those first 1.8M bitcoins mined were "transferred", doesn't mean that they ever transferred ownership.

shredfvz3• 13 years ago

Yeah, some guy recommended I mine back in the earliest of days. "If only I knew then what I know now" ... hahah. So sick to think that my old Core 2 Duo could've made me a millionaire. I was turned off by the ugliness of the bitcointalk forum, and decided it wasn't worth the time to understand the Satoshi client.

I don't think it's right to get on the case of the earliest bunch though for not being more egalitarian. How could Satoshi have been more fair to you? After all, nearly everybody had the short-lived opportunity to mine 50 BTC blocks with ease. Clearly Satoshi believed in his concept more than most of us did, and deemed it worthy of putting in lots of effort into mining. He did his part to warn the world of his invention. Fair's fair.

dustcoin• 13 years ago

Bitcoin was announced on a cryptography mailing list and released to the public at most a week after the blockchain was created, as proven by the headline in the genesis block. The Bitcoin whitepaper was released months earlier. Anyone had an opportunity to mine early on.

ZeroCoin4• 13 years ago

The "yes men"/cult mentality on bitcointalk.org is infuriating.

Namely comments like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175996.msg1834237#ms...

It's obvious what's going on. They own a lot of bitcoins, but can't be made to look stupid by admitting to this travesty of a pre-mine that they all overlooked.

ewillbefull3• 13 years ago

There was no pre-mine. The genesis block contains a headline:

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

He made bitcoin public exactly after this. He even announced it on a mailing list months before. Unless he had a time machine it's impossible for there to be foul play.

incision• 13 years ago

Tilting at windmills.

More accurately, asking the most ardent followers of bitcoin to help launch an investigation into their prime diety.

This discussion and variations of it has been going on for years now. Each new attempt has/will be dismissed by the faithful with some combination of the following:

A) You're wrong.

B) He deserves it.

C) That's just like everything else.

D) You're just envious.

ixacto• 13 years ago

For all we know about satashi he/she/it could be working with in-q-tel or any other politically motivated entity.

What really matters though is that whoever owns 7.8% of existing bitcoins has the ability to manipulate the market, due to their 'I got there first with my old gpu farm' advantage. Want to crash the market? Go for it... Of course they don't have the control that the Federal Reserve has, but they also don't have anywhere near the flak. Treat bitcoin like you treat going to the casino, except Mt. Gox doesn't give out free drinks.

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I would put my faith in currencies that are backed by strong operational second-strike nuclear capability and a developed economy. This leaves USA/FR/UK as the winners, with India/Russia/China as runners up, since they are not developed nations yet. CHF is also a good reserve, but everyone especially the Europeans have been fleeing to it, and the Swiss caved to the USA so their 'banking secrecy' is not what it is advertized to be.

jes51993• 13 years ago

Satoshi's motivations are interesting to me. What was he/she/they actually trying to accomplish by creating bitcoin? Were they really hoping to anonymously buy things? Or were they trying to get rich? Or were they trying to get geeks to commit to a pseudonymous-but-public cryptocurrency to prevent a zerocoin-style really-anonymous currency from being developed? Or were they trying to get a distributed computing project going to really test the strength of sha256? Or were they trying to sabotage Folding@home and distributed.net?

Tichy3• 13 years ago

He invented something a lot of geeks had been dreaming about for a long time. That alone is probably incentive enough.

brazzy• 13 years ago

You're over thinking this based on current information and developments.Seems pretty clear that the primary (and originally only) motivation was to create a decentralized cryptocurrency, just to show that it is feasible and practical, and for the satisfaction to see one's work have an impact.

jhales• 13 years ago

"Nakamoto’s work appears to be politically motivated, as quoted: “Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.” – Satoshi Nakamoto “[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though.” – Satoshi Nakamoto In the Bitcoin network’s transaction database, the original entry has a note by Nakamoto that reads as: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” Some claim this quote implies Nakamoto had great concern or contempt for the current central banking system."

http://bitcoinreport.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/

jes51993• 13 years ago

But isn't that also exactly how someone would talk if they wanted to manipulate technolibertarians into joining a project?

waterlesscloud4• 13 years ago

Should Bitcoin succeed, that makes an anonymous crytptocurrency more likely in the future, not less.

If we have one main cryptocurrency, we'll also have a number of secondary ones, filling various niches.

For some reason, a lot of criticism of bitcoin seems to focus on it becoming the sole currency, but that's never going to be the case.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Regardless of the cash value, I think it's interesting that so many people continue to accept that "Satoshi" was in fact a single real person, who created bitcoin out of an ideological desire.

Given the famous quality of its cryptographic design, it seems at least plausible to me that bitcoin is in fact a research project out of academia or a national government, with the Satoshi mythology a brilliant marketing wrapper.

nestlequ1k• 13 years ago

I still think it's the most probable scenario. If it were a group, there would be a lot more people who have incentive to go forward and "expose" the true story. There would be huge financial rewards for doing so.

It's definitely plausible it could be an institution, or a small group. But I'd bet my bitcoins that it's a single dude.

damian20002• 13 years ago

There's a comment by Hal Finney on another bitcointalk thread on this

Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.[1]

Remember too that at the time noone could have foreseen the popularity and success of Bitcoin.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#ms...

Tichy3• 13 years ago

Could be a challenge to anonymously sell those first bitcoins.

chii• 13 years ago

why does it need to be anonymously sold?

Tichy3• 13 years ago

Because so far Satoshi has kept his real identity a secret.

buro93• 13 years ago

I can't be the only one here to have lost some.

Somewhere in my house, or perhaps at my old workplace, there is a USB stick with approx 250 bitcoins on it, the gains from early mining and experimenting. I'd backed them up before I rebuilt my main machine, and then didn't restore them immediately (mining was approaching diminishing returns and I gave up).

I'm pretty sure I haven't over-written them, but I also have no idea where they are. A few weeks ago I looked again, fruitlessly. I'm sure they'll turn up some day.

bdcravens• 13 years ago

A $25,000 USD USB stick. (as much as $70,000 at one point) Pretty sure I'd search a bit harder :-)

buro93• 13 years ago

I have searched harder! I can't find any of my USB sticks. I'm assuming they're all together and I tidied them up. I don't feel like I've lost them (hence no panic), just that I don't know where they are.

Though I really didn't comprehend they were worth so much. The last time I looked they were GBP 750. Am now leaving the keyboard to look again.

Status of the first million Bitcoins

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