Analyst counts the number of bitcoins held by cryptocurrency founder Satoshi Nakamoto

Cryptographer and Blockstream founder Adam Beck shared his thoughts on Satoshi's coins, and immediately put up important warnings.

According to his estimates, the anonymous bitcoin developer could have owned about 500 thousand BTC, although the real figure is unknown. In the first year of the network’s existence, approximately 2.5 million coins were mined, and Satoshi’s share is usually estimated to be in the range of 500 thousand to a million — but these figures are based on an analysis of early mining patterns and nothing more. Beck explicitly noted that no one knows for sure whether these coins belonged to Satoshi and not to some other early member of the network.

The fact that the coins have not moved so far is also not proof of intentional withholding. Beck suggests a simpler explanation: access could have been lost. In the early years, the key storage infrastructure was extremely unreliable — users manually stored a file with private keys and had to update it after each transaction. One crash, one lost disk, and the coins were gone forever.

Beck also spoke about the prospects for the wider distribution of bitcoin. In his opinion, the process has already begun, but it is slow — not because of a lack of interest, but because of internal procedures in financial organizations. Much of the capital is concentrated in pension funds and insurance products, where decisions take years to be made. When these processes are completed, access to bitcoin for a wide range of investors could expand significantly.