> Behind every marker crash there's people's lives changing forever.
Absolutely.
My reply was directed towards bitcoin as a technology.
The market volatility but more important the constant manipulators and bad actors really have a negative impact in people's lifes.
But most often we see this happening to people that are invested in crypto but not users of it. Because they keep their money on exchanges, they are not taking advantage to the security and self sovereignty that comes with crypto.
There is no evidence that bitcoin will die or wouldn't recover from market dumps.
However there's plenty examples of exchanges going under or stealing people's assets forever.
Nobody knows how much Satoshi mined. And a rational actor would not "dump" coins on the market for giggles, but for profit, hence avoid a market crash. Besides, bitcoin currently has a trading volume of around 10 billion per day, hard to crash that.
If it's "poured" into the market, the value will crash so whoever's trying to sell them won't make as much money. That said, at this point, any activity in that wallet will cause a huge stir in the community.
That said, there's probably a nontrivial amount of processing power currently being used to crack that wallet / find the secret key.
A theory is that Satoshi themselves lost access to their own wallet, so if there is activity, it may mean someone got the private key.
Anyway yeah, it is a huge risk, and it's proven by the billions scammed from people when new coins were created and the creators themselves held onto a lot of the coins themselves to sell when the hype cycle is trending upwards.
lots of bitcoin from large old blocks have moved before, it is news within the crypto space and pretty fun drama. bitcoin from blocks from when satoshi was mining have moved before, and people start rumors that this exact thing is occurring and turned out not to be a satoshi block.
price dips have happened over these movements. the rumor mill is pretty cyclical. the price dips have had less and less magnitude over the years, as there are so many computing bullish and bearish forces in bitcoin now. headlines today that move bitcoin up 1% would have crashed bitcoin 35% a decade ago.
bitcoin has a lot more liquidity now, or in some periods of time has a lot more liquidity than now. a large sell can be absorbed. people's confidence in the bitcoin concept doesn't really shake just because someone selling ... runs out of things to sell.
many large bitcoin holders don't want govbucks, or state currency. they can do so much with their bitcoin, mostly earning yield by depositing it into something yield producing in the crypto economy, investing in other projects, supporting causes they believe in. it isn't important to them if a team or merchants gets govbucks somewhere down the line or immediately.
Yes, all those known wallets should be burned if anyone really cared about the stability of bitcoin. Others aka "shit coins" do not have this massive amount of cash that could all of a sudden be spent causing a huge crash.
Although very unlikely that anyone will ever crack those keys it is possible that the keys are found by someone or Satoshi himself spends it.
The bitcoin core maximalists should focus on fixing their block including moving to PoS instead of pissing on all other coins constantly.
POW fixed a problem POS does not solve, it is an entirely decentralized, trustless system. It is not possible to move to POS, the only coins who can do that are coins that are not decentralized and trustless to begin with.