Bitcoin is on a tear, likely to hit $100,000 any day and the entire crypto market is up 90% in 2024 according to CoinGecko. Who is the richest crypto owner? According to Forbes’ reckoning it is Binance founder Chengpeng Zhao, who was recently released from prison, has a net worth of $61.6 billion ranking him 24th among the world’s billionaires.
However, what about bitcoin’s elusive pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto?
At today’s current price of $96,352, up from just $300 a decade ago, the creator’s fortune could be worth as much as $106 billion. Satoshi’s wealth is not ranked by Forbes because it’s unclear if he even exists. However, the amount estimated to be held in wallet addresses purported to be owned by bitcoin’s founder would put him in 15th place, one spot ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ $104.9 billion.
It is almost impossible to determine an exact accounting of his bitcoin addresses or total holdings since the network is pseudonymous, but they are certainly substantial. Most estimates range between 600,000 and 1.1 million tokens, which accounts 15-28% of the total bitcoin created in those early years.
Satoshi started accumulating the asset when the network first launched in January 2009 as likely its first miner. In fact, that is the only way that he could have obtained bitcoin. New bitcoin is created every ten minutes when a block gets added to the network by supercomputers racing to solve an arbitrary, but mathematically complex problem. The rate of issuance has decreased by 50% every four years (right now a new block yields 3.125 bitcoin) until the 21 millionth gets mined in the year 2140. At the time of Bitcoin’s genesis, each new block yielded 50 tokens. There were very few miners in those early days, so Satoshi faced little competition in receiving block rewards until he stopped in May 2010.
Even as creator he did not pre-allocate any tokens for himself, and there were no exchanges like Coinbase or Binance where he could have bought tokens back when they were ultracheap.
Despite the identities being hidden on bitcoin’s blockchain network, Bitcoin historian and former Coindesk editor Pete Rizzo says that there are some clear patterns in how data in the blocks are constructed to suggest that they were built by the same team or person. Additionally, Rizzo says that “Satoshi scaled down his mining over time, behaving in a way over time that was altruistic by not wanting to have a monopoly on mining.” This behavior dovetails with Satoshi’s eventual withdrawal from any public role in the network in December 2010, less than two years after launch.
A big question remains if Satoshi will ever come forward and reveal his or her identity. Virtually every key actor from those early days such as Hal Finney, Adam Back, Nick Szabo, and Len Sassman have been raised as the real Satoshi Nahamoto. Sassman died in 2011 and Finney passed away in 2014. The others have issued denials. An Australian computer scientist named Craig Wright tried to assume the Satoshi identity, but his claim was disproven in a British court. Most recently, an HBO documentary claimed a Canadian software developer named Peter Todd of being Satoshi. Todd has refuted the documentary’s assertion, and the crypto community has largely dismissed the claims.