In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin is back in the news in a major way. As I type this article, the price of a single bitcoin is $100,000. At that level, the mysterious creator of the cryptocurrency is sitting on an absolutely insane fortune. A fortune that is just sitting in an electronic wallet, totally untouched and untapped…
It's generally accepted that a "person" named Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin. Though, it should be noted that he's never been identified officially, spoken publicly or been seen in person. There have been many, many, many attempts at finding him. We're not sure Satoshi Nakamoto exists, or at least exists as a living, breathing person walking the earth. He might be dead. He might be a she. It may be a pseudonym.
If you put all the mystery aside, we do know two things for certain about Satoshi Nakamoto:
- He's an incredibly brilliant programmer
- He's sitting on an extremely enormous personal fortune.
OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images
Bitcoin Origins
The domain name Bitcoin.org was registered in August of 2008. Two months later, someone going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and submitted it to a cryptography mailing list. This paper is the first time Satoshi Nakamoto's name appeared on the internet related to cryptocurrency.
Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software on January 3, 2009. On that date, he mined what is now called the "genesis block of bitcoin".
His reward? 50 bitcoins. Today's value? $5 million.
One of the most innovative features of bitcoin is that its total circulation is strictly capped at 21 million "coins." That gives the currency an inherent scarcity which has become very attractive to investors today. As governments of the world print trillions and trillions of dollars of paper money that is not actually backed by any real value, having something that can't ever be diluted is powerful. Not that bitcoin has much real value on its own today. It is essentially a very speculative series of ones and zeroes that 99% of its holders don't actually use to make transactions. That will change.
In its first few months of being online, the price of a single bitcoin was basically zero. Like, literally $0.0008 per BTC. You could have bought all the BTC in existence for $16,800.
In March 2010, when the price was less than $.01, a trader using the username "SmokeTooMuch" held an auction for 10,000 BTC (the symbol for bitcoin). He was seeking $50. No bidders came forward. Had you decided to pay "SmokeTooMuch" his $50, today you would be sitting on $1 billion.
Bitcoin's price journey over the past decade has been marked by dramatic volatility and several historic milestones. After trading below $1 in its earliest days, Bitcoin first captured mainstream attention when it surged to around $1,000 in late 2013, before declining throughout 2014. The cryptocurrency entered its next major bull run in 2017, climbing from about $1,000 to nearly $20,000 by December of that year – a peak that would become legendary in crypto circles. This was followed by a brutal bear market throughout 2018, with prices falling below $4,000. After a period of relative quiet, Bitcoin began another meteoric rise in late 2020, driven partly by institutional adoption and inflation concerns during the pandemic. It shattered its previous record, soaring past $60,000 in early 2021 and eventually reaching an all-time high near $69,000 in November 2021. However, 2022 brought another stark reversal, with prices plummeting below $20,000 amid a broader crypto market crash, high-profile bankruptcies like FTX, and macroeconomic headwinds.
If you thought Bitcoin was down for the count, you were wrong. With the election of Donald Trump especially, Bitcoin is on yet another insane tear. Earlier this week, the price broke $100,000 for the first time.
Satoshi Nakamoto's Untouched Fortune
As the creator and predominant first Bitcoin miner, Satoshi set aside 1 million coins for himself at inception. That's 4.8% of all Bitcoins in circulation. You can see those 1 million coins sitting in his public wallet. They have not been accessed or spent since January 2009. And that's a very strange situation.
As we mentioned previously, bitcoin is trading at around $100,000 per coin. That means Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet is worth $100 billion.
$100 billion
At $100 billion, by our count of the richest people in the world, Satoshi is currently the 17th richest human being walking the earth.
Now, isn't it at least a little suspicious and strange that someone would launch bitcoin in January 2009, give themselves 1 million coins, and then never access those coins again (or at least not over the last 11 years)? Especially as the value of bitcoin grew from 6 cents to 25 cents to $10 to $100… and onward. How could he have not sold SOME along the way?
One simple theory that explains why Satoshi Nakamoto's bitcoins haven't been touched in 11 years is that he is dead. More specifically, he likely died not long after creating bitcoin. I mean, how else to explain $100 billion worth of bitcoins sitting there collecting digital dust for more than a decade?
And here's the thing, if Nakamoto is dead, that $100-ish billion is probably lost forever. Bitcoin is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have the password to the account. Since not a single coin has been sold in 11 years, it stands to reason that Satoshi Nakamoto never told anyone his true identity, so no one would know the password to Nakamoto's private bitcoin wallet. Once the password to the wallet is gone, so are the bitcoins.
Whatever the case, or wherever Satoshi Nakamoto is, we do know this: two years after launching bitcoin, Nakamoto disappeared from the internet. On April 23, 2011, Nakamoto sent bitcoin developer Mike Hearn an email saying: "I've moved on to other things." He wrote that he felt the future of Bitcoin was in good hands. Nakamoto left behind a vast collection of writings, the most influential cryptocurrency ever created, and a mystery for the ages.
