Imagine that you find Satoshi's private key and start trying to sell his million bitcoins.
Approximately one minute after you start this process, someone will figure out that either (1) bitcoins no longer securely belong to anyone or (2) Satoshi thinks selling off all his bitcoin is a good idea.
Approximately two minutes after you start this process, the price of bitcoin will plummet.
Anyone can sell bitcoins and make money. But if you have the power to destroy bitcoin, well then you can short the entire bitcoin market and clean up.
Frankly, I would just walk into the door of a large hedge fund and sell them to the key for $5B. They'll do far better than I ever could, and $5B is more money than I can possibly use in my lifetime, while being a tiny cost of business for them.
Following the progress of computations, even if there is a whiff of it getting close (1year) away, Bitcoin would have suffered runs based on theory possibly becoming reality alone
There is a theory that the key to satishi's wallet is hidden somewhere in the beginning of the blockchain. So it might not be too wild if coins started moving
I'm not sure of the details and my understanding of it is limited. But it seems there is some kind of statistical anomaly in the nonces of early blocks, and some people suspect that he purposely formed this anomaly the leave a clue or encode the private key for the wallet.
Approximately one minute after you start this process, someone will figure out that either (1) bitcoins no longer securely belong to anyone or (2) Satoshi thinks selling off all his bitcoin is a good idea.
Approximately two minutes after you start this process, the price of bitcoin will plummet.
Sorry, you will not be taking home $50B today.