Despite being widely claimed on social media in 2025, Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated 1.1 million Bitcoin holdings cannot be unlocked using a 24-word seed phrase. This is because the BIP39 standard was introduced several years after the pseudonymous author ceased his work.
BIP39 and Satoshi Nakamoto: Why modern seed phrases don’t apply
Viral posts on X (formerly Twitter) fueled speculation throughout 2025 that a simple sequence of 24 words could grant access to Satoshi Nakamoto’s vast Bitcoin fortune. The value of Bitcoin was valued at approximately $111 billion as of November 12, 2025, and Bitcoin was trading at approximately $101,702 per coin.
For example, a post from November 10, 2025 emphasized the supposed vulnerability by saying, “Fun fact: If you type 24 words in the right order, you can unlock 111 billion. That fact should scare you.”
This post by X is one of many that claim 24 words can confiscate Nakamoto’s wallet.
These memes often resurface during Bitcoin price fluctuations, garnering thousands of views and engagement by highlighting the dramatic size of Satoshi’s holdings, estimated at 1.1 million BTC based on early mining patterns like the Patoshi block. The problem is that they aren’t true.
This same X post caught the attention of Alex Thorn, Principal Researcher at Galaxy Digital, and Sani, an on-chain analyst and operator of timechainindex.com. “Fake news, stupid vulgarity,” Thorne said of the person who posted the “fun fact.” “Satoshi’s coins are spread across many public-key payment (P2PK) addresses; that is, not one, but many public-private key pairs,” Thorne quipped.
The galaxy researcher added:
“But to make matters worse, hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets (BIP-32) and mnemonic seed phrases (BIP-39) were not invented until 2012/2013.”
Timechainindex founder Sani agreed. “22,471 private keys to be exact can unlock 1,123,540 BTC,” he said. “Good luck to all you brave retarded souls out there who think you can break through even one of them.” Sani is often seen debunking overhyped X posts talking about massive on-chain moves with no substantiation.
Although blockchain analytics platforms such as Arkham Intelligence publicly track these addresses and show that Nakamoto has not made any transactions since 2010, the posts persist as misinformed clickbait. The core of these claims revolves around BIP39, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that standardizes mnemonic seed phrases (groups of words representing cryptographic keys) to simplify wallet recovery.
BIP39, proposed on September 10, 2013, allows users to generate deterministic wallets from 12- or 24-word phrases derived from a list of 2,048 words, yielding 128 to 256 bits of entropy. This system is widespread in modern cryptocurrency wallets and allows secure backups without exposing raw private keys. However, Satoshi, who mined Bitcoin from January 2009 to 2010 and was last publicly active in December 2010, was active before this standard existed.
read more: Satoshi Nakamoto predicts Bitcoin’s scalability will surpass Visa’s, historic email revealed
Mr. Nakamoto’s last public message on December 12, 2010 addressed the denial of service vulnerability in the Bitcoin software and indicated that he had ended their involvement with mnemonic phrases long before they became a feature. As a result, retroactively applying BIP39 to Satoshi’s wallet would misrepresent the technology’s timeline and applicability. Essentially, the early version of Bitcoin software used by Satoshi generated raw private keys (256-bit numbers represented in hexadecimal or other formats) without the user-friendly mnemonic transformations introduced later.
These keys were stored directly in the wallet file, and accessing the funds required precise knowledge or ownership rather than a derivable word list. Satoshi’s address, identified through blockchain analysis, has held coins since the Genesis block, but modern seed phrases cannot reconstruct the coins because the underlying generation method predates BIP39 by many years. This historical disconnect means that even if someone has a hypothetical 24-word phrase, it won’t work with the original key structure.
Source: Arkham Intelligence, November 12, 2025.
Blockchain explorers such as Blockchair, mempool.space, and Arkham have confirmed that these addresses are dormant, with no outbound transactions recorded before 2025, highlighting the irrelevance of mnemonic-based attacks in nature. Even if Satoshi’s key were compliant with modern standards, or any standard for that matter, a brute force attack on a 256-bit private key would still be mathematically infeasible, with 2^256 possible combinations corresponding to approximately 1.1579 x 10^77 unique possibilities. Try “Mnemonic Slots” for yourself here.
You won’t win the lottery. This is because the unique probability number is smaller than the estimated 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the observable universe (often quoted as about 10^80), making random guessing equivalent to searching for a specific atom on a cosmic scale. With today’s global computing power, it would take an average of 1.8 x 10^48 years to crack such a key, even at 10^21 operations per second. This is significantly longer than the age of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years.
Social media posts often invoke this “fear factor” to increase engagement, but what is overlooked is that proper key management can make such attacks theoretical at best. Public blockchain data provides irrefutable proof of successful access attempts, as all transactions are transparently recorded and monitored by services such as blockchain explorers and full nodes.
These persistent myths highlight widespread gaps in crypto education, where simplistic narratives on platforms like X feed fear without validity or context, even though Bitcoin’s design ensures long-term security through cryptographic principles established in 2009. The effort shows that while X’s post, which provided incorrect information, received more than 1,200 likes, Mr Thorne received only 389 replies and Mr Sani received only about 77 replies.
Frequently asked questions ❓
- When was the BIP39 standard for mnemonic seed phrases introduced? The BIP39 standard was proposed on September 10, 2013 to standardize word-based recovery for Bitcoin wallets.
- What type of key did Satoshi Nakamoto use in early Bitcoin? Satoshi used a raw 256-bit private key generated by early Bitcoin software, rather than a mnemonic word phrase.
- How many possible combinations of 256-bit encryption keys are there? A 256-bit key has 2^256 possible combinations, or approximately 1.1579 x 10^77.
- Does Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet show any activity in 2025? According to public blockchain data, no transactions have occurred from Satoshi’s putative address in 2025.
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