
If Satoshi Nakamoto has over 1,000,000 BTC, why doesn't he just sell it now? - joshmn
Even if he asked for a stupid $500 per 1 BTC, that&#x27;d still be a $500,000,000 payday.
======
junto
Occam's Razor:

For some reason he can't sell them. We just don't know what those reasons are.

Lots of people can speculate, but the reality is that we don't know.

The ones I've heard mentioned are:

1\. He is dead

2\. He cannot sell them without risking his anonymity

3\. He lost them (machine crash / re-install)

4\. He treated the early mined coins as test data and deleted them

5\. If Satoshi starts dumping, then the market will definitely crash. If the
public believe that Satoshi has lost faith in BTC then everyone is going to
want to sell too. It is like putting a gun to the head of his own child and
pulling the trigger.

Whether or not he really has 1,000,000 BTC is also debatable I believe. Often
people quote this figure as the bulk of the early coins that were mined, and
make the assumption that Satoshi was the only one mining. Nobody really knows
which addresses Satoshi really owns. It is all "educated" guesswork.

------
andrewmunsell
You could only sell it if someone was willing to buy it all-- there's no
exchange that would buy $500,000,000 or more worth of Bitcoin at once.

Alternatively, he could slowly sell it off over time, but there's no way
anyone could sell that much at once. Of course, he very well could be slowly
selling it off right now.

------
NicoJuicy
Because then his system would crash.

His bitcoins are currently something like gold backing USD at the moment. If
he sells his bitcoins now, the entire market will going to fail, because
people will loose faith.

He could just sell 100 bitcoins from time to time and still earn a lot of
money from it.

------
taternuts
I think it might be because satoshi cares more about changing the world than
he/she does about cashing out - doing so before bitcoin has a stronger/stabler
adoption might ruin the whole thing. My guess is satoshi's already making
decent money somewhere being smart and is just sitting back with a smile
watching the whole thing take off

------
chewxy
Or really, Satoshi's laptop died and he couldn't be bothered anymore about
Bitcoin

------
francoismathieu
It would be easy to sell 1,000,000 BTC without anyone noticing. It's only 100
BTC per minute for a week.

~~~
michaeldhopkins
The combined 30 day volume of the five exchanges on the homepage of
[http://bitcoincharts.com/](http://bitcoincharts.com/) is about 140 bitcoins
per minute. Adding 100 per minute all on the sell side would be a 70% increase
in volume, and there would not be a corresponding buy interest added until the
price of bitcoin fell considerably. This would reduce the value of the
bitcoins.

------
f3llowtraveler
Because those coins are all worth a million dollars each -- what fool would
sell them for $700?

~~~
krapp
A fool who realizes no one's going to pay what they're "worth"?

~~~
f3llowtraveler
The price of Bitcoin in January was $13 -- no one was willing to pay more than
$20 for a Bitcoin back then.

But BTC is trading for over $900 now... and plenty of people are paying.

What you do not understand is that Bitcoin is a new technology, that gives us
capabilities that we never had before. Just like other powerful new
technologies, it will slowly eat its way through every aspect of society until
it has changed the world and everyone's life.

The same as happened with electricity, with the computer, with the Internet
itself.

If you want to know where Bitcoin is going, take a look at the adoptions of
other important technologies:

[http://www.uversity.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/Comm...](http://www.uversity.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/Communication-Technology-Adoption-Peter-Leyden.png)

------
poissonpie
maybe he doesn't need/want the money in a "bona-fide" currency?

