A great deal of effort must have gone into staying anonymous, and planning & designing & developing the client, the network, the scripting language, the economic progression (difficulty levels, decreasing block rewards, etc) and even the ascii content embedded in the genesis block. There must have been a plan for the first mining operation as well, why put in so much effort and then be surprised it catches on?
The "unfairness" of pre-mining (or early mining) must have been considered.
OTOH i haven't looked at the numbers. Would a dump of Satoshi's holdings crash the market?
I like this theory too. There was a lot of thought put into creating the platform, so it's reasonable to assume that Satoshi just opted to mine enough to bootstrap the network, and decided to throw away the keys in order to not be tempted to use.
Had Satoshi used the coins before its time, it could have "contaminated" the experiment, and possibly crashed permanently the market. By mining and not using it, it increased its early value. I'm sure there's a mathematical proof somewhere that this would be the best option, especially if Satoshi is in fact a group of people.
Of course, Satoshi may still have the keys, and waiting a bit more before cashing in.
That's the beauty of bitcoin open ledger: we'll all know for sure in the next 10-15 years...
A great deal of effort must have gone into staying anonymous, and planning & designing & developing the client, the network, the scripting language, the economic progression (difficulty levels, decreasing block rewards, etc) and even the ascii content embedded in the genesis block. There must have been a plan for the first mining operation as well, why put in so much effort and then be surprised it catches on?
The "unfairness" of pre-mining (or early mining) must have been considered.
OTOH i haven't looked at the numbers. Would a dump of Satoshi's holdings crash the market?