TL;DR:
- The head of research at crypto fund Bitwise, André Dragosch, confirmed that Satoshi Nakamoto intentionally distributed 1.1 million coins across 22,000 independent addresses.
- Each of the wallets linked to Bitcoin’s creator contains exactly 50 BTC, based on the mining structure known as the Patoshi pattern.
- The current technical debate revolves around the BIP-361 proposal, which suggests permanently freezing inactive funds that do not migrate to post-quantum signatures.
The head of research at the cryptocurrency fund Bitwise, André Dragosch, published historical data supporting an investigation into how Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2010 strategy mathematically neutralizes the quantum threat.
INSIGHT: Satoshi was aware of potential quantum risks for #Bitcoin in 2010 already.
He also split his roughly 1M BTC across 22,000 different addresses, probably to mitigate such a risk. https://t.co/s8ShavnIDx pic.twitter.com/Ex6iYcYsFV
— André Dragosch, PhD⚡ (@Andre_Dragosch) June 25, 2026
The detailed analysis by Dragosch validates the previous work of analyst Marco Battistoni, who determined that the fragmentation of the initial capital was not an accidental occurrence. This decentralized structure within the creator’s own fortune, valued at billions of dollars, is presented as a defense mechanism designed to exhaust the resources of any future cyber attacker.
The research uses the so-called Patoshi pattern as its technical basis, which describes the mining footprint of the network’s earliest blocks. According to blockchain records, the estimated fortune of 1.1 million coins remains divided to this day into wallets of 50 BTC each.
In the earliest versions of the protocol, the public keys of the addresses were visible from the moment of their creation in the ledger. Analysts suggest that a single address containing Nakamoto’s entire balance would have constituted a highly lucrative target for a quantum computer. The implemented fragmentation drastically reduces the financial incentives to execute such an attack.
The computational cost of fragmentation
To compromise the entirety of these funds, an attacker would need to break the cryptographic security of each wallet individually. This process forces the advanced calculation cycle to be repeated more than 22,000 consecutive times.
The research data indicates that the costs of energy, time, and hardware required to complete this computational marathon would invalidate the gains obtained. Extracting small portions of Bitcoin sequentially would not justify the technological investment required by attackers in the current scenario.
This technical perspective emerges amidst regulatory debates within the developer community regarding the future of the protocol.
The discussion intensified due to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal known as BIP-361. This document proposes establishing a time limit on the validity of legacy digital signatures. According to the text of the proposal, inactive Bitcoins whose owners do not migrate to wallets with post-quantum security would be permanently frozen and removed from commercial circulation.
Developers reject the forced freezing of funds
The initiative received objections from industry figures such as Blockstream CEO Adam Back. Critics argue that depriving users of access to their coins violates the fundamental principle of the inviolability of private property on the network.
As an argument against mandatory freezing, André Dragosch recovered a message from Satoshi Nakamoto published in a forum in July 2010. In that post, the protocol’s creator noted that if the advancement of cryptographic threats occurred gradually, the community would have sufficient time to transition to stronger encryption algorithms.
Under this approach, the early-era wallets act as an early warning system within the blockchain. The first attempt to compromise even a single one of these historic addresses would serve as immediate evidence that a quantum computer with operational attack capabilities has been developed. The activation of this global sensor would allow for a coordinated network upgrade without the need to implement forced freezing measures.
