The big question: does Satoshi Nakamoto really own 1.1 million of the Bitcoin ?

Almost everyone who knows about Bitcoin will know at first glance: its founder is addicted, but he owns a million homes. According to widely circulated rumors, there are around 1.1 million copies of Satoshi Nakamoto under the name Bitcoin , but this number is actually based on some crypto miner actions identified by on-chain for verification, rather than directly pointing to an individual person.

On September 5th of this year, 600 dormant Bitcoin coins unexpectedly moved 16 years later and the above distinction became especially important. These coins came from 12 long-time untouched block reward s that were excavated in March 2010 for four days without being blocked until September 5, when the owner of private key removed them one by one within half an hour.

blockchain records coins, not people

on-chain Monitoring agency Whale Alert verified that the 600 Bitcoin had nothing to do with the mystery founder's holdings. An analysis by research company Bitquery showed that 10 of 12 blocks did not match the Patoshi pattern, which is specific for Satoshi Nakamoto and mining rig , while the remaining two were only weak matches, according to Gaurav Agrawal, a researcher at Bitqueries.

However, these rewards were indeed mined by a single device and the person who used them this month was clearly in possession of private key .

The riddle may never be solved, as private key can be inherited, sold, stolen or recovered from an old hard drive bought at a thrift store. In Agrawal's words, the coin on-chain only records someone who owned it at some point in time. Furthermore, these transfers use modern wallets like software , and the 2010 client could not generate such transaction coins so at least it is possible to determine that the new tool was imported into private key .

Patoshi model: the chain of evidence for enormous wealth

Since blockchain cannot tell us who these early coins belonged to, where did the claim that 1.1 million of them were Bitcoin come from? The best evidence so far is still indirect. In 2013, researcher Sergio Demian Lerner found a unique nickel fingerprint in one of the earliest blocks of Bitcoin , suggesting that there was an earlier network operating differently than mining rig , whose traces can be traced back thousands of blocks.

Lerner estimated that crypto miner had excavated about 1.1 million pieces of BTC , and more than a decade later he still held to this conclusion. He said: "This result is accurate, but with one caveat: the evidence was circumstantial in nature; there were no mathematical proofs or direct witnesses".

In his view, Patoshi's association with Satoshi Nakamoto is no more than a fingerprint of crypto mining , as several early users including Hal Finney, Dustin D. Trammell, Nicholas Bohm and Mike Hearn had received transfers bearing the characteristics of the Patoshi pattern.[citation needed] "All these transfers were from Coinbase transactions that conformed to the Pathoshi model", he said. This provides strong arguments for both being made by the same person, though not conclusive evidence.

Lerner also points out that the crypto miner seems to have used a dedicated crypto mining software instead of the standard client, and it is likely that this one was written before Bitcoin went live. There are only hours between announcing the release of v0.1 and excavating the Genesis block, so it's almost impossible for another crypto miner , in the meantime, to develop an available set of custom systems. He emphasizes: Anyone who clicks on Patoshi mode crypto mining , has been involved from the start.

Bitquery reconstructs fingerprints, but the numbers are resilient

Thirteen years after Lerner identified Patoshi, Bitquery reconstructed the fingerprint from its original block data, grading each of the 54316 blocks in Bitcoin 's early days and tracking where each coin went until September 1, 2026. The reconstruction results for its highest-rated coins matched publicly available Patoshi listings on 99.2% of blocks; zero exceptions were also found during a time stamp sort check against 5836 adjacent blocks. Agrawal said: "I don't know if there is any stronger proof than this".

But this analysis also raises some questions about the famous figure of 1.1 million: Bitquery's results vary depending on how strictly fingerprints are judged. Agrawal said that under a strict caliber, there were fewer than 900,000 coins covered by fingers, while the loosest reading was around 1.17 million.

This is not a reversal of Lerner's estimate, but rather an indication that the elasticity of Patoshi's coin holdings depends on how crypto mining models are used. Agrawal explains: "The 1 million to 1.13 million publicly disclosed coins fall within this range, so we haven't changed it".

In Agrawal's view, the claim that Satoshi Nakamoto had 1.1 million coins and BTC coins actually overlapped three arguments: there was strong evidence that these coins came from the same machine; this machine belonged to Satoshi Nakamoto , which is an indirect inference; and those private key coins are still in his possession. This cannot be proved simply by the fact that the coin has never been filtered.

A neglected transfer from 2010

Bitquery also discovered a 2010 transaction that had not been previously reported in any public research. On May 17, 2010, 600 Bitcoin coins from an earlier crypto mining reward were transferred through two transactions within about one hour: the first at 22:04 (UTC) cost 10 block reward s for 500, and the second at 23:07 cost another 2 block reward , for 100.[citation needed] These coins were mined at different times during 2009, both at the beginning of year Bitcoin , as well as near-end awards.

Agrawal considers this transaction to be important: "It is the on-chain data itself, rather than a statistical model, that most clearly indicates these blocks belonged to the same wallet". He says it's already the closest confirmation of what on-chain can give as proof that blocks scattered throughout 2009 did indeed exist in the same Wallet.

In other words, we can only know: whoever had the private key at that time could have controlled block reward for all of 2009, but it is unknown who this person was. Unlike the 600 moved in September this year, which did not belong to Patoshi crypto miner , there is no new evidence linking them with a holding of coins worth £ Satoshi Nakamoto . As Agrawal said: "Mathematics cannot solve this problem so we will never be 100% sure".