Blockchain data and analytics firm Bitquery Research has completed a reconstruction of Bitcoin's earliest mining activity, tracing approximately 1.17 million BTC to Satoshi Nakamoto. The estimate represents the largest figure attributed to Bitcoin's creator to date, and Bitquery's analysis shows that 99.86% of this holdings remain untouched.
Bitquery indexed the complete Bitcoin blockchain and analyzed all 54,316 blocks from Bitcoin's earliest mining days to identify the so-called Patoshi pattern—a distinctive mining fingerprint believed to represent Satoshi's work. Rather than relying on previous research papers, the team built its own classifier and graded each block independently before auditing the associated coins.
Comparison With Previous Estimates
Bitquery's 1.17 million BTC figure is the highest among multiple analyses conducted over the years. Previous estimates include Sergio Demian Lerner's 2013 figure of 1 million BTC and his 2019 refined estimate of 1.10 million BTC. Other estimates include BitMEX Research's 2018 figure of 0.6 to 0.7 million BTC, Whale Alert's 2020 estimate of 1.13 million BTC, and Jameson Lopp's 2022 figure of 1.10 million BTC.
Minimal Movement Detected
Bitquery found that only 1,550 BTC from the Patoshi pattern has ever left the public set, with most of this activity occurring during Bitcoin's early experimental phase. The firm noted that nothing from this transferred set has moved since December 2017.
The research also examined so-called Satoshi-era coins that have awakened since 2020. According to Bitquery, none of these movements met the criteria the researchers established in advance for confirming they were Satoshi's coins.
Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to early Bitcoin participant Hal Finney and possibly others before withdrawing from public involvement in 2011. Bitcoin's creator remains pseudonymous, and the enduring immobility of the associated holdings continues to be noted by the cryptocurrency community.
