Bitslog

> The only problem here is that coffee is a commodity, not a startup. Anyone can grow it and sell it.

The better comparison is to oil. Oil is a commodity, in that anyone can buy it and sell it: but there is a fixed amount of it, and one can only acquire oil by taking oil from the fixed supply. Further, the earlier you got into oil, the more money you made, and the same is true of Bitcoin: the authors have made out to the tune of [100M or more](http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/) simply by being the first miners.

So I don't know exactly what kind of definition you want to use for "startup", but bitcoin is certainly software, that was written by a small team of people, that solves a problem, that has made the authors wealthy in a very short amount of time. If someone like Rockefeller started out today, I think we would probably characterize his operation as a "startup", and the founders of Bitcoin are doing much the same thing that he did.

That's fine though, because at that point our theory has been proven wrong. So I propose we take the best guess that fits the available evidence and act accordingly. In this case, that action has already been taken: to notify Bitstamp that if the person trading those coins is an associate of Mt. Gox, then there's a high probability that illegal trades are occurring on their servers. This would let them take an action like freezing the account until they can provide an explanation about where the coins came from. (We're slowly turning into Paypal...)

analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's

You just reminded me of something cool (but totally offtopic): https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ Someone recently came up with a previously-unknown technique for mapping out Satoshi's fortune.

The upper bound on how many coins he's mined is roughly 1 million (the best estimates I'm aware of come from https://bitslog.wordpress.com ). So you can just interpret the current exchange rate of X as X million. On http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html I see Bitstamp at $169 right now (MtGox, as pointed out here, is not a useful benchmark anymore), so that's $169m in bitcoins.

(modulo all the usual reasons it's less than $169m: the estimate should be an upper bound and so the real amount lower, he may have lost his bitcoins, you can't cash out that much without crashing the price, he'd have to pay taxes on such an enormous amount, etc etc)

From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1].

As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.

So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.

[1] http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Someone pointed that out to them,
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/ethereum-dagger-pow-is-flawed/

And now they've stated,

"We have made a preliminary decision that we likely will fund a contest, similar to that used to develop AES and SHA3, to determine the best ASIC-proof (ie. going beyond just "memory hard" as a heuristic) mining algorithm"
http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vh94e/dagger_updates/

> do large mining operations network their miners so that they don't overlap their hashes

Interestingly, it's hypothesized that Satoshi did this:

> He suggested that Satoshi had access to 58 machines for mining, so to avoid checking the same nonce twice he gave each machine a different id, which was stamped in the LSB of the nonce.

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/