He must have lost the keys very early, when Bitcoin was just a fun experiment, and that would still be dubious: how did he imagine his creation would be so big as to prompt destroying his keys right there and then? The common human response at that idealistic stage would be greed.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
I think it's likely when they started Bitcoin they used a "genesis" account which they never intended to keep the keys of
They probably also had other keys that they mined early coins on that they did keep, this would be consistent with Satoshi being Hal Finney or Nick Szabo
> I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
1. They probably made enough off BTC to retire rich already, why go through any trouble to make even more money (not everyone has the drive to accumulate billions when they already have millions)
2. If they've destroyed/lost the original keys there is no way to prove they are Satoshi and nobody would believe them, like Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi and started a BTC fork which picked up very little traction
You don't need 15yr of foresight. I can see someone keeping their mouth shut for the first X years on the basis of "things are going well, my project is being adopted, I had better not F with it by increasing the number of coins in play lest there be unintended consequences" and then at some point deciding that things have gotten out of hand, the stakes are too high, pulling the hard drive off the shelf, drilling it and tossing it in the bay.
I can't see anybody having that self-control is my point. I can't think of any person in history that has shown this level of restraint, especially about a very valuable and very controversial invention.
Occam's razor says it's easier to assume he's dead than trying to imagine him as the most patient Buddhist monk, with deep economic and cryptographic knowledge, the world has ever seen.
But we could go on with this discussion for years, so let's just agree to disagree and wait and see if his name surfaces again or not. There's bound to be more and more hucksters trying to claim they're Satoshi the longer this legend lives.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.