In my opinion, anybody who thinks 'Satoshi' didn't create Bitcoin with the intention (at least, in part) of getting rich, I think you're fooling yourself.  It's clearly built into the structure.

At this point, it's in the hands of the community.  The OP's post is relevant because depending on how many BTC Satoshi owns, he can cash out at any time.  The stronger the community becomes, that gives Satoshi less incentive to cash out immediately.  If there are overwhelming signs of an absolute market crash, Satoshi is the one who can solidify it. 

+1

In was in response to several comments to the OP addressing early adopters. My point being that every worthwhile endeavor has early adopters, all taking a risk, hoping it'll become profitable. You'll always have somebody wishing that they were on the ground floor before it went viral.

I stand behind my wiki posting.

Yeah, that bears remembering.

Kind of an aside here, but did any of you read the cryptography list discussions when he initially introduced the bitcoin protocol? Everyone was like "oh shit... neat... but how do you do X process?" and he was all like "just do it like this." Essentially he'd had the hard stuff done up, complete before he brought it to the public eye, which is very impressive. And his explanation? Something along the lines of "oh, it was just as easy to write the code to see if it would work than to prove it any other way..."

Anyway, who gives a fuck how much he/she/they own. I hate to be a downer here OP but this is newbie stuff that comes up over and over again. It's a bit boring.

+2 (for the post before the one I quoted)
+2 (for this post also) but like on Who's Line is it Anyway--The points don't matter.




If you visit the Newbie threads, you see a whole slew of them coming down the pike. A lot of them simply post, "Whitewash me! I have something very important to add to this or that conversation."

They can't wait to add their thoughts to the Bitcoin community.

Hehe. For some early adopters, "very little" might still be in the thousands, though.

I can understand some of them cashed in too early, though. Imagine you're a little short on cash and the bitcoin value just shot up 400% to USD 0.80!! I'd be tempted to sell, myself. I've been having a hard time holding on to my little stash myself at times.

This just emphasizes the point that being an early adopter, an being it successfully (holding on to the bitcoins), is not so easy, and these people can be envied, but it's not unfair in any way. We all had the same chance. Of course some luck was involved, too, but that's almost always the case. So don't bash the early adopters, they're the ones that got the stone rolling in the first place. Like someone once elaborated on in a TED talk: it's not the leader/inventor that is the most crucial person to the success of something, it's the first follower (showing a video of a guy standing up and starting to dance pertty stupidly, then another one following, then more people successively, until everybody dances). He argues that without the first follower, there wouldn't have been a party, and the leader would've looked like an idiot. I think it's true.

+1,000

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html    WATCH THIS VIDEO--ONLY 3 MINUTES LONG


I saw that video a couple months ago, so knew where to look.

Excellent post!


Here's what I propose. The next time another thread like this gets started, simply post the link to this video and kindly request to lock the thread, for the subject will be closed. If the OP of the new thread doesn't get it, he should receive 500 lashes with a wet noodle by (insert your favorite board member here).


http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html


Speaking of Ted.com, what are the chances of having Bitcoin's main spokesperson give a talk at TED about Bitcoin early next year? Seems to me to be a perfect fit.

 You never know, some day new information might come up. There's totally some good stuff in this very thread. We can't just reject stuff out-of-hand like that.

I believe that vast numbers of Bitcoins were found and lost in the early days, because back then, people were mining just because Bitcoin was an interesting technology project. When they lost interest and quit mining, wallets were easily lost in OS reinstalls etc. because why would you bother backing up a bunch of funnymoney?

So I predict that a big portion of those early Bitcoins that have not been moved, will never ever be moved, because the wallets are just lost.