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.

The blockchain traces coins, not people

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.

Related: Bitcoin treasury firms can outperform BTC... but is the risk worth taking?

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

“What the chain cannot say is whether the hand in 2026 belongs to the person who ran the machine in 2010.”

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.”

The spending transactions used modern wallet software, which the 2010 client could not have produced, so “at the very least, the keys were loaded into something new.”

The Patoshi pattern behind the fortune

If the blockchain can’t tell us who owned those OG coins, how do we know the 1.1 million BTC actually belonged to Satoshi? Circumstantial evidence is the best evidence we have.

In 2013, researcher Sergio Demian Lerner identified a distinctive fingerprint in Bitcoin’s earliest blocks, suggesting one miner operated a machine differently from the other miners on the network that could be traced across thousands of blocks.

Lerner estimated that the miner had amassed around 1.1 million BTC, and more than a decade later, he still stands by his calculations.

Sergio Dermian Lerner identified the Patoshi pattern. Source: Bitslong

“It is accurate,” he tells Magazine, “with a disclaimer that the evidence is circumstantial; there is no math proof or direct witness.”

He says the case for connecting Patoshi to Satoshi goes beyond the mining fingerprint, however, since several early Bitcoin users, including Hal Finney, Dustin D. Trammell, Nicholas Bohm and Mike Hearn, received transfers that exhibited the Patoshi pattern:

“All those transfers were made from coinbases in the Patoshi pattern: that provides compelling reasons that Patoshi and Satoshi are the same person, although not proof.”

Lerner also says the miner appears to have been using specialized mining software rather than the standard client, which was likely created before Bitcoin launched. That makes it “highly improbable” that another miner developed a working specialized setup in the few hours between the Bitcoin v0.1 announcement and the mining of the first block. He says:

“Whoever was mining the Patoshi pattern started right at the earliest beginning.”

Bitquery rebuilt the fortune from scratch

13 years after Lerner identified Patoshi, Bitquery rebuilt the fingerprint from raw blocks, grading 54,316 blocks from Bitcoin’s early era and following every coin through Sept. 1, 2026.

Their “highest grade” reconstruction agrees with the public Patoshi list on 99.2% of blocks, and the firm also found zero exceptions in a timestamp-ordering test across 5,836 adjacent block pairs.

“I don’t know of a stronger test for this,” Agrawal says.

Bitquery’s estimate of the total fortune. Source: Bitquery.io

But the analysis casts some doubt around the famous 1.1 million BTC figure itself, since the number Bitquery found varies depending on how strictly the pattern is applied.

Related: Is Bitcoin too volatile to risk your retirement on?

“Run strictly, the fingerprint covers just under 0.9 million BTC,” Agrawal says, with the “most generous reading” at around 1.17 million.

That isn’t to say Bitquery disproves Lerner’s estimate, but it shows how the size of the Patoshi stash depends on how the mining pattern is applied.

“The published estimates of 1.0 to 1.13 million sit inside that range, so we did not move the number,” Agrawal says.

What links Satoshi to the 1.1M BTC

Agrawal says the claim that “Satoshi owns 1.1 million BTC” is really three claims stacked on top of each other.

“Satoshi Nakamoto” is the largest BTC holder. Source: Arkham

The claim that the coins came from one machine is supported by strong evidence. The claim that the machine belonged to Satoshi is circumstantial, and the claim that the keys still remain under his control can’t be proved simply because the coins have never moved.

Bitquery also discovered a 2010 transaction that it could not find reported “in any published study.”

On May 17, 2010, 600 BTC from early mining rewards moved in two transactions about an hour apart. The first, at 22:04 UTC, spent 10 block rewards worth 500 BTC, and the second, at 23:07 UTC, spent another two block rewards worth 100 BTC.

Those coins had been mined at different points throughout 2009, including rewards from near the beginning, and end, of Bitcoin’s first year.

“It matters, I think,” Agrawal says, “because it is the clearest moment where the chain itself, and not a statistical pattern, says these blocks belong together.” He says that is “as close as the chain gets” to confirming that blocks from all over 2009 sat in one wallet, “which is what the pattern claims for the whole set.”

So we know whoever controlled those keys had access to block rewards mined across 2009, but we don’t know who was behind them.

Unlike the May 2010 transaction, the 600 BTC that moved this September don’t belong to the Patoshi miner, and there’s no new evidence connecting them to “Satoshi’s” stash. As Agrawal says, “nothing in the math settles it, so we will never be sure.”