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Good point. I think his private PGP key and moving some coins around might be pretty convincing though... Even a stupid version of Nakamoto would understand that private keys are kept offline and in safe storage, especially if you made software as complex as Bitcoin. I think I would have thrown away my wallet so that the early mined blocks simply could not be moved even if I wanted to.

And in any case, Nakamoto may not be a single person after all.



The identity could remain unverified for eternity if original keys aren't available, and it's possible there was a deliberate destroying of the keys. Satoshi has said that the losing of coins were a donation to everyone else -- and who else would make a donation to the entirety of the Bitcoin ecosystem other than Satoshi?


Why not provably destroy them then (send them to an output that can never be spent)?


If you wanted to throw coins away, wouldn't a better solution be to transfer them to an address like 12345678901234567890...?




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