two bitcoins
1,100,000
Estimated Amount of Coins Owned by Satoshi
bitcoin calendar

$

Estimated USD value of Satoshi’s Bitcoins

Satoshi's Net Worth

Satoshi Nakamoto's net worth is $.

We know that Satoshi mined the first bitcoin. He proved it by telling others in his email group that he would provide the following message in the genesis block and he did:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.


3rd january 2009 times chancellor on brink
The genesis block message was quoted from that day's newspaper headline

Key Takeaways

  • If Bitcoin reaches $114,000 per coin, Satoshi will be the richest man on Earth.
  • If bitcoin reaches gold's market cap, Satoshi will be the first Trillionaire in history.
  • Satoshi has never moved these coins, and moving them now might send the price down.

Given his early days mining Bitcoin, have you ever considered how rich Satoshi would be if he wanted to spend everything he or she mined back in the very early days of Bitcoin?

How do we work out how rich Satoshi is?

In 2013, Sergio Demian Lerner, the designer of RSK, did some detective work to find out just how much bitcoin Satoshi probably mined, and how much of it was still sitting in those wallets. The answer, which has been supported by several researchers since was:

Quite a lot.

Sergio’s initial assumption was based on the logic that throughout almost all of 2009 the hash rate stayed at the low level of 7 million hashes per second. This seems consistent with the idea that a lone miner was the only one contributing to the network at that time.

To try and put into perspective how little hash power 7 million hashes per second is, consider how much more computing power is now dedicated to the Bitcoin network. These days, miners contribute 1.2e+18 (that’s 12 million with another 12 0s on the end) hashes per second toward mining Bitcoin.

Sergio also noted that this 7 million hashes per second was the same amount of hash rate in the first 14 days of Bitcoin’s life and he adds to the assumption that at this time Satoshi was surely the only miner.

Where is Satoshi’s Bitcoin Now?

A few days after Sergio made his idea public, he returned with some even more compelling technical analysis as to why Satoshi probably was the dominant miner in 2009, as well as an indication of which wallet Satoshi was mining to.

Sergio’s analysis, which has been picked over by other researchers including the team at BitMex, indicates that there are around 1 million BTC still in the wallets belonging to the dominant 2009 miner that is now assumed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

satoshi net worth

Satoshi sent some of the bitcoin he mined to other people. Notably, Satoshi made the very first transaction on January 12 2009 when he sent 50 BTC to the now deceased, Hal Finney.

satoshi net worth

Those 50 BTC were sent to Finney one day after his now famous Tweet, which simply stated 'Running bitcoin'. 50 BTC at 2021 prices is around $2.5 million, and we can start to see how much value Satoshi was creating, in retrospect, as one of the first and at some times only bitcoin miners on the network.

satoshi net worth


satoshi net worth

How rich would you be if you had 1 million BTC?

Even if you exclude the Bitcoin Cash and other coins that Satoshi’s Bitcoin would have collected from forks in the past few years, 1 million BTC is worth a lot of money these days.

Satoshi is a billionaire. In mid-2020 prices, Satoshi’s net worth is around 8.8 billion dollars.

At its all-time high on December 18, 2017, when 1 BTC peaked at 19,498.63 USD, Satoshi’s bitcoin was worth around 20 billion dollars. This made Satoshi the 56th richest person in the world.

How long do we have to wait until Satoshi is the richest person in the world?

If Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high of $114,000 per BTC, with all other things staying equal, Satoshi will be the richest person on the planet.

For most Bitcoin maximalists, it’s not unreasonable to predict a bitcoin price above $100,000. If Bitcoin replaces the role of gold as a store of value we would expect the BTC market cap to grow to the $7 trillion cap that gold is currently at.

That is around 50 times the current market cap of Bitcoin, and at that point, one bitcoin would be worth around half a million dollars. Satoshi would become close to twice as rich as Jeff Bezos.


global rish list
Current global rich list.

If Bitcoin grows even more than gold and becomes a global reserve currency, then Satoshi could well be the first trillionaire on earth. That’s if Elon Musk or some other entrepreneur doesn’t get their first.

Satoshi’s Privacy

Satoshi created Bitcoin and was well aware that it is not a fully anonymous financial system. Satoshi compromised on anonymity to implement a fully decentralized system. The research of Sergio Lerner highlights that the data connected to transactions, mining, and Bitcoin wallets in general is permanent.

Satoshi has likely chosen not to spend his Bitcoin for a reason. Or perhaps the creator of Bitcoin is already dead. Part of the strength of Bitcoin is that there is currently no single point of failure, no CEO, and no board of directors.

If Satoshi suddenly reveals themselves to be alive or active it will be international news.

Article Sources

BuyBitcoinWorldWide writers are subject-matter experts and base their articles on firsthand information, like interviews with experts, white papers or original studies and experience. We also use trusted research and studies from other well-known sources. You can learn more about our editorial guidelines.

  1. Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto - Bitslog, https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
  2. Jeff Bezos Profile - Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/
  3. Real Time Billionaire List - Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#2b9f95703d78
  4. Sergio Demián Lerner Profile - Crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/person/sergio-demi%C3%A1n-lerner