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Somewhere between 900,000 and 1.17 million Bitcoin sit in wallets that haven’t budged in years. And there’s a decent chance they belong to the person who invented the entire network.
Bitquery, a blockchain data analytics firm, has published a comprehensive reconstruction of the so-called Patoshi mining pattern, the on-chain fingerprint first identified by researcher Sergio Demian Lerner back in 2013. The new analysis confirms what the crypto world has long suspected: a single mining entity dominated Bitcoin’s earliest days and accumulated a staggering fortune that remains almost entirely untouched.
The fingerprint in the blockchain
The Patoshi pattern gets its name from a portmanteau of “pattern” and “Satoshi.” It refers to a distinctive signature found in Bitcoin’s coinbase transactions, the special transactions that reward miners for adding new blocks to the chain. The pattern’s origins stem from an unintended privacy flaw in Bitcoin’s original software, where sequences in coinbase transactions produced detectable patterns — specifically, tightly controlled nonce values that stood out from every other miner’s output.
Bitquery’s analysis covered the first 54,316 blocks ever mined. Within that dataset, the firm identified approximately 22,000 to 23,500 blocks attributable to a single entity. That’s roughly 22% of those early blocks, a lopsided share that suggests this miner was running custom mining software while most other participants were using off-the-shelf tools.
The reconstruction correlates at 99.2% with previously compiled public Patoshi address lists drawn from Lerner’s original work. That level of overlap is significant. It means independent analyses, conducted years apart with different methodologies, are arriving at essentially the same conclusion about who mined what.
Over a million BTC, gathering dust
As of September 1, 2026, an estimated 1,023,352 BTC linked to the Patoshi pattern had never been spent. Separate analysis from Arkham Intelligence and Galaxy Research clustered around 21,900 to 22,000 addresses estimated to hold about 1.096 million BTC, all remaining dormant. The last known transaction from Patoshi-era block rewards occurred in December 2017, and even earlier movements in 2009 and 2010 totaled only about 1,550 BTC.
Bitcoin’s total supply is capped at 21 million coins, with roughly 19.7 million mined so far. The Patoshi coins represent somewhere around 5% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist.
The mining pattern began with the genesis block, Bitcoin’s very first block mined on January 3, 2009, and ceased around block 54,000 in mid-2010. Satoshi Nakamoto’s known public communications — forum posts, emails, and code contributions — trailed off around the same period, with the last confirmed messages coming in late 2010.
Circumstantial, not cryptographic
What exists is a pile of circumstantial evidence. The mining started at block zero, the literal beginning of Bitcoin. The software used appears custom-built. The timing of the pattern’s end matches Satoshi’s disappearance from public life. And whoever controls these coins has shown zero interest in spending them, with the last movement occurring in December 2017.
No cryptographic proof ties these addresses to any specific individual. Lerner himself has been careful about the distinction. His original 2013 analysis identified the pattern and noted its unusual characteristics but stopped short of claiming definitive attribution to Satoshi.
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