An estimated 900,000 to 1.17 million bitcoin have sat unmoved in on-chain wallets for years, and a substantial share of that supply may belong to the person who created the network. Bitquery, a blockchain data analytics firm, has published a comprehensive reconstruction of the so-called Patoshi mining pattern, the on-chain fingerprint first identified by researcher Sergio Demian Lerner in 2013. The analysis reinforces a long-standing suspicion within the industry: a single mining entity dominated Bitcoin's earliest days and accumulated a fortune that remains almost entirely untouched.

The fingerprint in the blockchain

The Patoshi pattern takes its name from a portmanteau of "pattern" and "Satoshi." It refers to a distinctive signature found in Bitcoin's coinbase transactions, the special transactions that reward miners for adding new blocks to the chain. The signature originated in an unintended privacy flaw in Bitcoin's original software, where sequences in coinbase transactions produced detectable patterns — most notably, tightly controlled nonce values that stood apart from every other miner's output.

Bitquery's analysis covered the first 54,316 blocks ever mined. Within that dataset, the firm identified approximately 22,000 to 23,500 blocks attributable to a single entity, a share of roughly 22% of those early blocks. The lopsided dominance suggests this miner was running custom mining software while most other participants relied on off-the-shelf tools.

The reconstruction correlates at 99.2% with previously compiled public Patoshi address lists drawn from Lerner's original work. That degree of overlap is significant: it means independent analyses, conducted years apart with different methodologies, are arriving at essentially the same conclusion about which early blocks this single miner produced. The question of who created Bitcoin has never been definitively answered, and reconstructions like this one are how researchers study the network's earliest period using only the blockchain's own records.

More than a million BTC, still dormant

As of September 1, 2026, an estimated 1,023,352 BTC linked to the Patoshi pattern had never been spent. A separate analysis from Arkham Intelligence and Galaxy Research, which clustered around 21,900 to 22,000 addresses, estimated holdings of about 1.096 million BTC — all of it remaining dormant. The figures differ modestly in scope but point to the same picture: a vast store of early-mined bitcoin has never circulated.

The last transaction from Patoshi-era block rewards occurred in December 2017, and even earlier movements in 2009 and 2010 totaled only about 1,550 BTC. Bitcoin's total supply is capped at 21 million coins, with roughly 19.7 million mined so far, meaning the Patoshi-linked coins represent somewhere around 5% of all bitcoin that will ever exist. That scale — roughly one in twenty coins under a fixed cap — is a large part of why the cluster draws continued attention, and because every bitcoin transaction is recorded on a public ledger, the reconstructed address lists give observers a standing way to see whether any of this supply ever moves.

The mining pattern began with the genesis block, Bitcoin's very first block, mined on January 3, 2009, and ceased around block 54,000 in mid-2010. Satoshi Nakamoto's known public communications — forum posts, emails, and code contributions — trailed off around the same period, with the last confirmed messages coming in late 2010.

Circumstantial, not cryptographic

The evidence assembled to date is circumstantial rather than cryptographic. The mining started at block zero, the literal beginning of Bitcoin. The software used appears to have been custom-built. The timing of the pattern's end matches Satoshi's disappearance from public life. And whoever controls these coins has shown no interest in spending them, with the last movement occurring in December 2017.

No cryptographic proof ties the addresses to any specific individual. Lerner himself has been careful about that distinction: his original 2013 analysis identified the pattern and noted its unusual characteristics but stopped short of claiming definitive attribution to Satoshi. The question of who controls the coins remains open; what the on-chain record can settle on its own is whether the dormant supply stays that way, since any future movement from the reconstructed addresses would be publicly visible the moment it occurred.