Satoshi's 1.1 million bitcoin: why a freeze looms

Around 1.1 million bitcoin are attributed to Bitcoin's inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. At Sunday morning's price of $83,045 that is a good $91 billion, or roughly 81.5 billion euros, spread across early addresses from the network's first year. The coins are regarded as untouched. They sit nonetheless at the centre of one of the fiercest debates among Bitcoin developers: a draft numbered BIP-361 would freeze them before a quantum computer can one day steal them.

The question of what happens if Satoshi returns is as old as Bitcoin itself. New is the question of whether his coins could be moved at all once the network hardens itself against quantum attacks. There is a practical lesson in that for your own addresses too.

How many bitcoin belong to Satoshi Nakamoto?

Nobody knows exactly, because Satoshi never disclosed his addresses. The usual figure goes back to the computer scientist Sergio Demian Lerner. In 2013 he found a pattern in the early blocks of the Bitcoin blockchain that points to a single, very early miner. Later analyses of this so-called Patoshi pattern arrive at around 1.1 million bitcoin. That is about 5.5 percent of the 20.10 million bitcoin in circulation today.

Satoshi published the white paper on October 31, 2008 and started the network on January 3, 2009. He withdrew in the spring of 2011. The coins attributed to him sit in an early address format called pay-to-public-key, P2PK for short, and it is precisely that format which makes them a special case today.