Big Questions: Does Satoshi actually own 1.1 million Bitcoin?

Researchers can trace an estimated 1.1 million BTC to a distinctive early mining operation. The harder question is whether that miner was actually Satoshi.

One of the first things anyone learns about Bitcoin is that it has a pseudonymous creator — and they’re a billionaire multiple times over.

Nearly 1.1 million BTC is widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, but it’s a number that rests on a forensic trail identifying a mining operation, not a person. The estimate also varies by more than 200,000 Bitcoin depending on how strictly a certain “fingerprint” test is applied.

When 600 BTC mined in 2010 suddenly moved after 16 years, triggering speculation that “Satoshi’s coins” had awoken, that distinction became more important.

The coins came from 12 long-dormant block rewards that had been mined over four days in March 2010 and sat untouched until Sept. 5 this year, when someone controlling the private keys spent them one by one within half an hour.

But that doesn’t mean that the person spending that $46 million in Bitcoin was Satoshi.

Onchain tracker Whale Alert found no connection between the 600 BTC and the mysterious Bitcoin creator’s stash.

Blockchain research firm Bitquery found that 10 of the 12 blocks didn’t match the distinctive mining pattern that’s come to be associated with Satoshi’s mining operation, known as “Patoshi.”

And the two remaining blocks only showed weak matches that could occur by chance according to Bitquery researcher Gaurav Agrawal.

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The rewards were mined by a single machine however, and whoever spent them this month controlled the private keys, but as Agrawal points out:

It’s a mystery that’s likely to remain unsolved since private keys can be inherited, sold, stolen, or recovered from an old drive found in a secondhand store. Agrawal notes that “the chain only records that someone had it.”