A social media post recently made some noise within the cryptocurrency community by suggesting that it would take just 24 words to unlock roughly $112 billion worth of Bitcoins owned by mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
"That fact should scare you," the user said in a rather unsuccessful attempt to generate engagement.
"Fake news, dumb slop"
The sensational claim has caught the eye of Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Mike Novogratz's crypto giant Galaxy Digital. The analyst has slammed the post as "fake news" and "dumb slop."
As explained by Thorn, early wallets did not even generate 12- or 24-word phrases since the BIP-39 standard, which made it possible to encode a single master seed into a list of words (either 12 or 24), was introduced only in 2013.
Moreover, contrary to some misconceptions, there is no single Satoshi stash with more than a million coins.
The fabled fortune of the Bitcoin creator is actually spread out across many pay-to-public-key (P2PK) addresses.
Hence, there is no single seed phrase that could unlock Satoshi's riches, and you shouldn't even attempt to guess it.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team