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As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
Great. Thanks for adding the link. I was just about to ask you for one.
in my opinion that was the only time he slipped up as "satoshi" and it was only a week in. after that he maintained the dual personality pseudonym perfectly
Wow. I know a lot of people over the years have claimed that Hal is Satoshi, but I didn't know there was proof of it. Never saw anyone mentioning this message.
Thanks for posting this.
Playing Devil's Advocate for a mo: $200 trillion divided by 20,000,000 is easier to work out than $200 trillion divided by 21,000,000
But I prefer your hypothesis.
It might just be an interesting coincidence but it is suspicious. 1. Hal is very smart. 2. Hal might've noticed coins would get lost, or that some would simply never move. 3. 1 million coins lost is the number he might've approximated.
Or he's Satoshi and had been pondering this very piece of the puzzle that is building a coherent bitcoin version 1 .
Len Sassaman was likely Satoshi: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
formatted a little better here
http://diswww.mit.edu/bloom-picayune/crypto/142207
Interesting
hal calculated bitcoin's value based on 20 million not 21 million one week aver it was released
how could he know 1 million would be locked as a honeypot canary for bitcoin's security
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10152.html