Satoshi-Era Bitcoin Keeps Waking Up, but the Patoshi Coins Stay Silent
Nearly every day, so-called sleeping bitcoins move—and every so often, Bitcoin produces a ghost story. This happens when a wallet from 2010 or 2011 suddenly moves, and headlines start appearing from newsdesks and across social media.
In the industry, when the mined $BTC dates close to the period when Satoshi Nakamoto was mining, it is typically referred to as “Satoshi-era” bitcoin. When stories like these go viral, someone inevitably asks whether Bitcoin’s creator has returned.
Bitquery Rebuilds Bitcoin’s Most Famous Mining Fingerprint
In a recent report, researchers from Bitquery Research decided to reconstruct the so-called Patoshi pattern and graded all 54,316 blocks from Bitcoin’s earliest mining days. “Bitquery indexes the complete Bitcoin chain, so instead of quoting the literature we rebuilt the fingerprint from the raw blocks and graded every block of the era by how confident the pattern is,” Bitquery researchers wrote.
The team added:
“We locked that answer, committing its file hash before comparing it with anyone else’s. Then we audited every coin the pattern covers, down to the satoshi (the smallest slice of a bitcoin), as of this month.”
The report showcases a timeline of historical guesses on how much bitcoin ($BTC) was mined by Satoshi. Bitquery did not use these research papers as evidence and instead leveraged the team’s own classifier. “Reproducing someone’s conclusion by copying their block list proves nothing,” the authors explain. Estimates include Sergio Demian Lerner’s initial 2013 guess of 1 million and a more refined estimate from Lerner’s 2019 report, which upped the ante to 1.10 million.
Alongside this, BitMEX Research’s 2018 estimate was lower, at 0.6 million to 0.7 million $BTC, while Whale Alert’s 2020 estimate stood at 1.13 million $BTC, and Jameson Lopp’s 2022 figure came in at 1.10 million $BTC. Three other estimates ranged from 0.97 million $BTC to 1.11 million $BTC.
Bitquery’s conclusion is the largest to date, with 1.17 million total bitcoin tied to Satoshi Nakamoto—nearly $100 billion worth. The researchers further note that 99.86% of this stash has “never moved.”
“Through year after year of bull markets, crashes, hacks, forks and repeated waves of ‘Satoshi is moving’ headlines, the catalogued fortune has not gone anywhere,” the report emphasizes.
1 Million Bitcoin and 15 Years of Silence
Crypto proponents know that the pseudonymous Satoshi sent coins to Hal Finney and possibly others before disappearing from the internet in 2011. In its report, Bitquery found only 1,550 $BTC that ever left the public Patoshi pattern, and much of that activity happened when the Bitcoin network was still effectively an experiment.
“Nothing on that list has moved since December 2017,” Bitquery said, adding that of the other Satoshi-era coins that woke up since 2020, none cleared the bar the researchers set in advance “for calling a coin Satoshi’s.”
Bitquery wrote:
“Our audit of the Patoshi pattern found 1,023,352 $BTC that had provably not moved as of block 965,051, on 1 September 2026.”
Bitquery researchers say the team rigorously tested these grades to ensure its measurement method was completely objective and highly reliable. With this report, there are now 10 total estimates from several analysts covering the Patoshi pattern. Bitcoin’s creator and the lore surrounding Satoshi remain among the project’s most fascinating stories, and to many, Satoshi’s enduring silence is the ultimate proof of Bitcoin’s decentralized, open-source design and the commitment behind it.