How much bitcoin does Satoshi Nakamoto have?

Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, is estimated to have about 1.1 million bitcoin. Nobody can confirm this, because Satoshi never published a list of addresses. The estimate rests on patterns in the earliest blocks that point to one dominant miner. For the background on Satoshi, see who created bitcoin.

What is the Patoshi pattern?

In bitcoin's first year, very few people were mining, and each block paid 50 BTC. Security researcher Sergio Lerner noticed in 2013 that many early blocks shared an unusual fingerprint in two fields miners change while searching for a valid block, the nonce and the extranonce. The way these numbers were used suggested one machine running its own modified setup.

Lerner called the miner Patoshi. Because the pattern starts at the very first block, he suggested Patoshi was probably Satoshi, though Decrypt notes this is not certain. His 2019 follow-up counted about 22,000 blocks in the pattern. In 2020, Cointelegraph reported that the pattern was a side effect of how the miner split work across processor threads, not a deliberate signature.

The pattern also shows the miner sometimes slowed down or paused, which some researchers read as leaving room for others to mine.

How many bitcoin does Satoshi Nakamoto have, by the numbers?

About 22,000 blocks at 50 BTC each works out to roughly 1.1 million BTC. Arkham, a blockchain analytics firm, attributed about 1.096 million BTC to Satoshi in a September 2025 report, mined during 2009 and 2010. That is more than 5% of all bitcoin that will ever exist.

The first block, called the genesis block, is a special case. Its 50 BTC reward cannot be spent because of a quirk in how it is written into bitcoin's code, according to the Bitcoin Wiki.

Have the Satoshi coins ever moved?

No coins in the Patoshi pattern have moved, apart from a few early test payments to other users in 2009 and 2010, according to Arkham. Claims that Satoshi's coins moved come up from time to time. In 2020, a reported transfer of 50 BTC turned out to come from a different early miner, Decrypt reported.

People also send small amounts to the genesis address as a tribute. In February 2026, Arkham reported someone sent 2.5 BTC to it. Incoming payments say nothing about who controls the keys.

Could Satoshi's coins be lost?

Possibly. Arkham notes that Satoshi may have destroyed the keys, chosen to leave the coins alone, or died. Some lost-coin studies count these coins as gone, as explained in how many bitcoins are lost. Long-dormant coins like these also feature in the debate over quantum computers and bitcoin, since some proposals would freeze coins whose owners never upgrade.