When the Bitcoin network first started, only Satoshi was mining coins. He released the white paper, he talked about it publicly and encouraged people to try it, but it took a while for other nodes to join up and start mining. He could hold half the coins mined in the first 6 months. (If it were half the coins in the first 6 months, that would be 1.3 million coins, currently worth $129 billion). That is a potentially destabilizing amount of money.
Because there is a huge number of bitcoins in the wallets believed to belong to Satoshi.
A lot of the people in the bitcoin markets just assume that those wallets will remain dormant indefinitely, and if there is any activity on them it might unnerve enough of them to cause a collapse.
I’ve often heard about these legitimate fears, though why would revealing Satoshi’s real identity destabilise the bitcoin economy/make him a target?
Genuinely unsure.
When the Bitcoin network first started, only Satoshi was mining coins. He released the white paper, he talked about it publicly and encouraged people to try it, but it took a while for other nodes to join up and start mining. He could hold half the coins mined in the first 6 months. (If it were half the coins in the first 6 months, that would be 1.3 million coins, currently worth $129 billion). That is a potentially destabilizing amount of money.
Because there is a huge number of bitcoins in the wallets believed to belong to Satoshi.
A lot of the people in the bitcoin markets just assume that those wallets will remain dormant indefinitely, and if there is any activity on them it might unnerve enough of them to cause a collapse.