Traders have bet $4.5 million on $71 billion staying still

About 1.1 million Bitcoin have sat completely untouched since 2009 and 2010. They belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever invented Bitcoin and then walked away from it. At today's price of roughly $65,300 a coin, that pile is worth about $71.6 billion. Bettors on Polymarket's Satoshi market give a 6% chance that any of it moves before the year ends.

How does anybody know which coins are his? A researcher named Sergio Lerner found a fingerprint in the earliest blocks, a quirk in how one miner's software counted, and it appears in roughly 22,000 of the first 36,000 blocks ever mined. Arkham, the blockchain research firm that settles this market, labels those addresses as Satoshi's. One coin leaving any of them resolves the market yes.

But not one ever has. Satoshi's last known payment was 32.51 Bitcoin sent to the developer Mike Hearn, in 2010.

Twice this year, the internet decided otherwise and was wrong both times. In February, somebody sent 2.5 Bitcoin into Satoshi's original address, which is money going in, and only money going out counts. In July 2025, 80,000 Bitcoin moved out of wallets dormant since 2011, the largest transfer of its kind ever recorded, and Arkham read it as an old holder upgrading his security.

This market has never actually traded on Satoshi. It spiked to 12.3% on February 5, the day Bitcoin fell 14%. It ran to 10.35% in April after Google researchers published work on quantum computers deriving a Bitcoin key in about nine minutes. It collapsed to 4.25% inside one hour on a Sunday in June with no news at all.

There are only two real ways the no side loses. Bitcoin developers are arguing over BIP-361, a proposal to eventually freeze coins that a quantum computer could steal, and Satoshi's are first in that queue. Changpeng Zhao suggested in June giving him 6 to 12 months to move them before any freeze. Separately, a suit filed in New York in March claims 3.8 million dormant Bitcoin under lost property law and names 39,069 wallets as defendants. Either one hands a living Satoshi a reason to prove he still holds the keys.

The good news is that neither is close. BIP-361 is a draft Bitcoin Core has not adopted, and its own text puts the earliest enforcement in 2030. The lawsuit case is even weaker. Owning Bitcoin means holding the private key, a string of characters that is the only thing on earth capable of moving a coin. No judge can produce one. The plaintiff can win every hearing and still be standing outside a locked door, because a court can award him the coins and nobody alive can open them. Not to mention that Satoshi may simply be dead. The most cited candidate has always been Hal Finney, who died of ALS in 2014.

Which turns the question around. Traders spend each year asking whether Satoshi comes back, when the likelier answer is that there is simply nobody left to come back. And that side trades at 94 cents, returning 6.38% on December 31