People were spending tens of thousands of Bitcoins on stuff like pizza in the early days and there were significantly fewer Bitcoins back then. That's hundreds of millions of dollars today.
So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did, too.
Satoshi could have also mined later when difficulty was still not so bad and have other wallets people don't know about. So in theory Satoshi could have cashed out couple millions from his later wallets already and be living on some island in Caribbean.
It's definitely conceivable that he/she would not be so greedy as to touch the origin coins. It's enough to cash out couple millions from later wallets, buy some nice house near beach and live very comfortably.
Of course, I still think much more likely scenario is that Satoshi is dead or lost his/her private key.
It's very unlikely that he/they are either dead or in prison. Satoshi went silent for over a year, and then only came out and sent a single message when Dorian Nakamoto was pegged as Satoshi.
This assumes they only mined into a single wallet. They could have easily switched personas as a normal early bitcoin enthusiast. I would suspect that if you wanted to track the real Satoshi(s) down, you would start with a list of the earliest adopters. I would also look at people that maybe weren't the most vocal as they probably wouldn't have wanted to bring attention to themselves. Maybe they really did just completely step back though.
There’s no way to tell the entire holdings of Satoshi though so it’s quite possible she/he had other wallets and has made bank. Mining was easy for quite some time and once people were selling lots of coins it’s possible Satoshi was a buyer (if for no other reason than to help kickstart the market for them).
Wow. Didn't know that. So if he/she tried to cash out, then the identity would be out right, since he/she would be attempting to deposit the cash equivalent ( FIAT ?) into a real bank account?
Given the amount of secrecy Satoshi has demonstrated before it'd be shocking enough to see the coins move much less move to a well known address (e.g. coinbase).
So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did, too.
Satoshi has a million Bitcoins.