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Bitcoin's mysterious creator, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, became $5,000 richer over the past 24 hours. But not because of a rise in the cryptocurrency's price. Someone using Revolut sent that amount directly to wallets from his legendary network.
The transactions on the Arkham platform look like a planned sequence in which an unknown user first cautiously tested the waters with transfers worth just a few cents and then sent a final tranche of 0.033 BTC, or about $2,170. All the funds came from Revolut's shared hot wallet, meaning the sender's identity is hidden among millions of the fintech service's customers.
The recipient was the famous network of Patoshi addresses — a vast structure consisting of thousands of interconnected wallets that Satoshi Nakamoto used for mining during Bitcoin's earliest days.
These addresses currently hold 1.11 million BTC untouched. At the current price of around $64,364 per coin, that fortune is worth approximately $71.1 billion. During the market rallies of 2024–2025, the figure even exceeded $110 billion, making Satoshi one of the richest people on the planet.
The irony is that the $5,000 transfer was effectively sent one way. Because of the way Bitcoin's early blocks were encoded and the fact that the private keys linked to this network of addresses have not been used since Satoshi disappeared, recovering the coins is technically impossible.
Any transfer to Satoshi's wallets amounts to permanently burning one's own money.
Why send $5,000 to Satoshi's long-dormant wallets?
Blockchain logic and the history of similar transactions point to three possible explanations:
- A symbolic gesture: People regularly send "donations" to the creator's addresses as a sign of gratitude. This is far from the first such case: in 2024, a $1.2 million transfer was sent to Satoshi's addresses, followed by another $150,000 in February this year.
- An attempt to attract attention: Satoshi's network of wallets is monitored around the clock by automated trackers, and such a transfer is a guaranteed way to instantly highlight the transaction in news feeds and push it to the top of Arkham's algorithms.
- A simple mistake: The most mundane explanation is an ordinary error made while copying an address to the clipboard during a manual transfer.
The incident had no impact on the industry itself. For the market, only one thing matters: that Satoshi does not begin spending the billions that have remained untouched since 2009.
As long as his fortune stays dormant, incoming transfers from users remain nothing more than an amusing blockchain anomaly.
Dan Burgin
U.Today Editorial Team
