Lawsuit claims $285M dormant Satoshi-era Bitcoins as abandoned property

The rush for Satoshi’s Bitcoins and long-dormant tokens from that era has taken on a new dimension as a pseudonymous plaintiff called “Noah Doe” filed a lawsuit in a New York court asking to assume ownership of the tokens in wallets that include Satoshi Nakamoto and the Mt. Gox hacker addresses.

Early estimates of the tokens in those 39,069 wallets come up to about 3.7 million BTC valued close to $290 billion at current prices.

Who is suing to claim Satoshi’s Bitcoins?

In what has drawn comparisons to the logic behind the childhood saying “finders keepers, losers weepers,” two Wyoming-based shell companies, listed as ABC Company and XYZ Company, filed a 901-page suit on May 1, arguing that the coins in Satoshi’s and other dormant wallets qualify as legally abandoned property under New York lost-property law.

The plaintiffs say they reported the addresses to the NYPD, posted on-chain notices, and published press alerts before filing their claim.

This is not the first time Satoshi-era coins have drawn unnecessary attention. Cryptopolitan has previously reported on the growing hacker pressure on those tokens as quantum computing researchers make progress. Those tokens were also top of mind for Bitcoin developers as they drafted protective proposals like BIP-361.

And now, add a civil lawsuit to the growing list of rationale that people have presented for why the same pool of long-idle tokens should move or be frozen.

The lawsuit is technically flawed

Sani, the founder of onchain analytics platform Timechain Index, flagged a core problem with the filing. Most Satoshi-era coins sit in Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) output formats. The plaintiffs, however, sent their legal notices to the corresponding Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) addresses, which in many cases hold no balance at all.

That mismatch means the notification effort may have reached the wrong addresses entirely.

But that’s just one hole in the obviously flawed ship’s hull. Even if Noah Doe and his proxies, ABC Company and XYZ Company, get favorable court rulings, it would be little more than academic because there’s no way to reassign funds on the Bitcoin network without holding the private keys for the wallets. 

Ripple CTO David Schwartz agreed that the ruling would carry no practical weight on Bitcoin’s network. 

While Schwartz’s agreement with the court’s ruling on the Bitcoins was more subtle, his jab at Bitcoin SV was not. His “BSV might honor it” comment drew a few giggles based on his running joke that the Craig Wright-linked fork has historically adopted governance positions that critics say make it more open to external legal pressure than the main Bitcoin network. 

What will happen to Satoshi’s tokens when quantum arrives?

Noah Doe is the latest to stir the debate over what should happen to long-idle Bitcoin, particularly coins in older wallet formats where public keys are already exposed onchain.

BIP-361, a draft Bitcoin Improvement Proposal introduced in April 2026 by Jameson Lopp and five other contributors, would freeze quantum-vulnerable P2PK addresses and phase out legacy signature types over a multi-year timeline. The proposal targets roughly 6.7 million BTC (about 34% of total supply) held in legacy formats, including an estimated 1.1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, according to Cryptopolitan’s previous reporting.

Separately, Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson published a competing concept on May 1 called Provable Address-Control Timestamps, or PACTs, which would let holders prove control of a private key without moving their coins or revealing their identity, Cryptopolitan reported.

The Noah Doe lawsuit faces steep odds. Bitcoin’s decentralized architecture makes court-ordered fund transfers functionally impossible without private keys, and the notification method used by the plaintiffs may not survive judicial scrutiny.

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