>they certainly have not been able to make any use of them.
That cannot be said with 100% certainty since transfer of ownership doesnt require an onchain transaction and secondly, funds aside, signing with his keys (aka proof of identity) is extremely valuable to a large % of the Bitcoin whale community.
Many whales would send Satoshi millions of dollars just for the act of signing with those keys, no strings attached.
>so no, they certainly have not been able to make any use of them.
>This sounds extremely speculative.
My statement is less speculative than the parent's claim. Did Satoshi already receive 10s of billions $ of coins just for owning his keys? Yes.
Off-chain transactions and proof-of-keys based value transfer are far from exotic in the space we are discussing. Countless airdrops and fork coins have been sent to offchain wallets controlled by Satoshi using these two methods over the last 13 years.
