The faceless man who is worth over R1.9 trillion

Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive architect of Bitcoin, saw his estimated fortune, presumed lost, soar past $102 billion (R1.9 trillion) this week as the cryptocurrency’s value surged.

As the first Bitcoin miner, Satoshi created and was rewarded with a large amount of the cryptocurrency’s initial supply.

Determining exactly how many bitcoins Satoshi mined in the early days is difficult because he used a fresh wallet address to receive each block reward.

Because only 21 million bitcoins can ever exist — unless a major change is somehow approved for the Bitcoin protocol — analysts have spent years trying to determine just how many are in Satoshi’s hands.

Argentinian crypto researcher Sergio Damien Lerner, who co-founded Rootstock Labs, estimated that Satoshi mined approximately 1.096 million bitcoins — over 5% of the total supply.

Lerner obtained this estimate by identifying a pattern in the way Bitcoin blocks were being mined in the era when Satoshi was active.

This allowed him to differentiate between blocks likely mined by Satoshi and others with a high degree of confidence. He dubbed the pattern that most likely belonged to Bitcoin’s creator the “Patoshi”.

According to Arkham Intelligence, the cryptocurrency analytics platform of Arkham Exchange, Satoshi’s holdings exceeded $100 billion this week. This was after the Bitcoin price surged past $91,250 (R1.7 million).

After Satoshi, the single biggest known Bitcoin holder is Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy. This excludes the bitcoins held by cryptocurrency exchanges, as many of these are customer funds.

MicroStrategy, which now simply calls itself “Strategy,” has transformed itself from a software provider into the world’s first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company.

It has bought up bitcoins by the thousands, with Saylor announcing their most recent acquisition of 6,556 BTC for around $555.8 million at an average of $84,785 per bitcoin on 21 April 2025.

Saylor said Strategy now holds 538,200 BTC, which it acquired for $36.47 billion at an average of $67,766 per bitcoin. That is over 2.56% of the maximum supply.

Behind Saylor, the next biggest Bitcoin holder, based on public data, is the U.S. government, which has seized over 198,000 BTC in various criminal investigations. China is a close fourth, with an estimated 190,000 BTC.

In fifth place, ahead of the UK, are the Winklevoss twins, who are estimated to have around 70,000 BTC.

The Winklevoss brothers became famous after accusing Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook from them. They went on to found Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange.

Lost Bitcoin

Another factor to consider when comparing individual Bitcoin holdings to the maximum supply that can ever be mined is the “lost bitcoins”.

These are the coins that have been mined, but for which the private keys to access the wallets they are stored in have been lost.

Chainalysis estimated in 2020 that around 3.7 million bitcoins had been lost. However, it simply considered all bitcoins that hadn’t moved in five years “lost”.

BitMEX Research and Bitcoin-only financial institution River have calculated much more conservative estimates.

They pegged the number of “Patoshi” bitcoins at 938,000 and estimated that 1.57 million bitcoins have been lost over the years.

Using their estimates, adding the Patoshi wallets to the number of lost bitcoins, and considering the bitcoins that must still be mined, Strategy’s holdings of the maximum available supply becomes 3.1%.

The table below summarises the top 5 known Bitcoin holders.

The Satoshi risk

Should Satoshi’s coins show any signs of activity, analysts have predicted that it could significantly impact the cryptocurrency market.

His significance is even embedded in the nomenclature used to talk about Bitcoin, as his nom de cyber was appropriated to denote the cryptocurrency’s most basic unit of 0.00000001 BTC.

A satoshi, or one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, is currently worth just more than one South African cent.

Many people have tried to unmask Satoshi over the years, with early contributors in the cypherpunk community and close collaborators among the primary candidates.

However, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin remains one of the most mysterious figures in the digital age.

Despite authoring the Bitcoin whitepaper and developing the cryptocurrency’s foundational code, Satoshi’s true identity is unknown.

This has only fueled speculation and intrigue, adding to the legend of Bitcoin’s enigmatic founder.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto

Some of the contenders include Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash, and Hal Finney, who received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

Gavin Andresen, whom Satoshi had designated as the leader of the Bitcoin project after he stepped down, was also a candidate.

Another contender is Len Sassaman, a technologist and information security professional who committed suicide in July 2011.

Finney died in Phoenix, Arizona, on 28 August 2014, as a result of complications of ALS and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Satoshi’s last public message on the Bitcoin Talk forums was on 11 December 2010, and his last confirmed email was to Bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn on 23 April 2011.

However, a controversial new “final email” from someone purporting to be Satoshi Nakamoto was sent to the Bitcoin developer email list on 15 August 2015.

The email was sent during the early stages of the Bitcoin blocksize war that raged from 2015 to 2017. Assuming the email was authentic, it would rule out Finney and Sassaman as candidates.

Satoshi’s dormant account on the P2P  Foundation forum also “woke up” on 7 March 2014 to post a single sentence: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

This was after a Newsweek published an article claiming that the creator of Bitcoin was a Japanese-American living in California who went by Dorian Nakamoto, and whose birth name was Satoshi.

As with the mailing list message, the authenticity of the P2P Foundation forum post is in dispute.

Then there is Craig Wright, an Australian academic who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. To support his claim, Wright posted a form of cryptographic proof on his blog.

However,  Bitcoin developers and security researchers denounced it, with one going so far as to call it a scam.

In 2019, Wright registered the US copyright for the bitcoin white paper and the code for Bitcoin version 0.1. That same year, he also began using British libel law to sue people who called him a fraud.

However, in 2024, the UK High Court ruled that Wright was not Satoshi, stating that documents submitted as evidence were forgeries and that he had lied “extensively and repeatedly”.

Another left-field contender for Satoshi is Paul Calder le Roux, a Zimbabwean-born South African citizen who built a criminal empire in the early Internet.

Le Roux is not only a competent programmer, he specialised in cryptography. The journalist who first told Le Roux’s story argued that he could be Bitcoin’s creator, citing one of the drug lord’s former employees.

Le Roux was arrested on 26 September 2012 after being lured into a trap by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) — roughly 18 months after Satoshi’s last email to Hearn.

The HBO documentary

Most recently, an HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, strongly suggested that Canadian programmer Peter Todd could be Satoshi. The documentary can be viewed on MultiChoice’s Showmax streaming service in South Africa.

The youngest of the contenders, Todd said that he began communicating with Back and Finney when he was a teenager. He was in graduate school for physics when Bitcoin was created.

The documentary director, Cullen Hoback, argued that Todd may have adopted a pseudonym partly to hide how young and unknown he was.

To substantiate his conclusion, Hoback highlighted an early forum post by Todd in response to Satoshi just months before Bitcoin’s creator went offline.

In it, Hoback says it’s almost like Todd is completing Satoshi’s thought about a complex topic called replace-by-fee.

The forum post was especially curious because it was Todd’s second-ever on the forum, and he would not post again for nearly two years. Todd would also go on to implement Bitcoin’s replace-by-fee functionality years later.

However, there are parts of the theory that do not track.

For example, commentators have noted that Satoshi double-spaced after full stops — a practice only common among older people who grew up using typewriters.

Hearn also noted in the documentary that Satoshi’s coding style did not match the profile of a young developer like Todd. He said it was antiquated for its time.

“It suggested he came of age as a developer in the ’90s and then stopped. He did not keep up with the evolution of the industry,” said Hearn.

Hearn also said Satoshi referenced an obscure 1979 financial event as if he remembered it — the Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market.

Despite these problems with the theory, Hoback remained convinced that Peter Todd was the most likely candidate for Satoshi.