alt Hacker NewsI think the wallets go well beyond "hundreds of millions". Aren't there like a million Bitcoin in dormant wallets associated with Satoshi? Personally, I'd assumed that whoever the person or persons were, they're dead because nobody can resist the pull of tens of billions of dollars regardless of their ideological position on cryptocurrencies. But that's just a guess.
There's absolutely a public interest in this. Sorry. This is a trillion dollar market now. Was this a state actor? If so, why? what was the plan here exactly? I see absolutely no reason to respect anonymity here. You don't get to sit on $50 billion and have people respect your desire to remain hidden.
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If you were to attempt to transfer money out if those wallets it would have a knock on effect on the price.
An estimated 22,000 addresses, 1.1 million Bitcoin. Present value $78 billion. That would make him the 23rd richest person in the world. Bill Gates by comparison is 'only' worth $102 billion these days.
If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.
Couldn't agree more. If you don't want to be famous in today's day and age, don't do infamous shit.
More likely they were playing with the system when they were the system in the early days, and just didn't keep those keys (IMO). Remember, even into the GPU era people were still giving bitcoin away; those wallets weren't worth anything.