He would have to do a hard fork and get it accepted by all the nodes.
Discussion
Is this because we have forked along the way since inception (I think?)? So their BTC wouldn’t be “incompatible” with the current chain?
I am a normie I don’t know vernacular
Would be*
Creating an increase in the supply would require a hard fork. That new chain would immediately be rejected by every node because no one is going to want to dilute their position. There are mining implications here too, but we don’t even need to discuss that.
Satoshis 1 million coins is in the 21 million max supply though
What would happen if Satoshi appeared out of nowhere after all these years and tried to sell some of his coins? Probably not much. First, Satoshi would have to move these coins to an exchange. That would instantly be detected because all of Satoshi's legacy addresses are watched. This would also mean giving up anonymity, since most reliable exchanges with any liquidity require KYC. Second, even if these coins could be sold, they would quickly be absorbed by buyers. If they were sold in large chunks, it could depress the exchange price temporarily, but it would soon recover. We'd all have a good laugh, a lot of memes would be generated, and we'd get lots of cheap coins to lock away for the future. Unlike premined proof-of-stake coins, no entity, not even Satoshi, has any more control over the state of or rules of the network. He would just be another participant.
Bingo
Ok ok i thought that’s how those chains came about but i started getting real confused when you said it was impossible. I got you.
There have been many forks. All of them were failures.
Great chart
I’m speaking of hard forks by the way, ones that created a new token. Soft forks have been useful to add new functionality, but they don’t render old UTXOs incompatible. That’s the difference.
Ok so this is what I meant earlier when I asked if his coins would be “incompatible”. I thought there had been small changes to the network over time but I wasnt differentiating between soft and hard forks.
Yeah, that’s not easy to understand at first.
Two books I would recommend on the subject:
Inventing Bitcoin by nostr:npub1fqn4fgzkk8nm2x3wd600n935c9tc7xgg9jhk5dfa0kuvrgvsyv7sgu536l
The Blocksize War by Jonathan Bier
nostr:npub1h8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wq36rpev recorded both of them on audiobook, they’re outstanding.
I mean Satoshi doesn’t have to sell BTC on a KYC exchange. He is not dumb
Where would Satoshi sell his corn, on Bisq? Do people actually think…
My brother in sats, have you even tried to trade 0.1 BTC in one single P2P transaction?
I was thinking Satoshi has rich cypherpunk friends who would swap his BTC for him? Does this make sense
This is basically how Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash came to be. It was the hard cap supply that was changed, but block size and other features. Those chains exist and their coins are worthless while the Bitcoin main chain carries on with the most value along with node acceptance.