The laughingly audacious legal attempt to claim legal ownership over billions of dollars worth of early-mined Bitcoin, including the legendary fortune of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is currently unraveling.
According to updates shared by Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, the pseudonymous plaintiffs behind the controversial “abandoned bitcoin” lawsuit have “just quietly dropped 44 of its 39,069 defendants” after on-chain data proved the wallets are actually active.
Thorn noted that “every single one had moved coins onchain since the case was filed.”
Debunking “dormancy” claims
As reported by U.Today, the lawsuit was recently filed in the New York County Supreme Court by an anonymous individual going by “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming entities.
It originally sought to “seek to claim quiet title to over 3.7 million $BTC (roughly $274 billion) associated with 39,069 bitcoin addresses”.
They attempted to exploit New York’s highly unusual lost-and-found property statute.
However, the 44 recently dropped addresses alone held an impressive 21,443 $BTC (worth roughly $1.37 billion) when the case began.
These addresses have since moved 46,334 $BTC on-chain. For instance, the largest address among the dropped group held roughly 2,100 $BTC at the time of the initial filing but pushed 20,405 $BTC through the address across 10 distinct spends between March and July.
“There’s no evidence any of the 39K addresses are ‘lost,’ but there’s definitely evidence ‘Noah Doe’ never ‘found’ them,” Thorn remarked.
A flawed $10 valuation
Doe’s legal team relied on an unnamed expert’s opinion that valued the “as-is” state of each multi-million dollar address at “under $10” on the theory that cracking the keys was uncertain.
The plaintiffs have admitted that their automated algorithm cannot accurately determine whether a wallet is truly abandoned.
Notably, 39,025 defendants still remain active in the lawsuit. including thousands of early “Patoshi” addresses holding Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated 1.1 million $BTC, but analysts believe the entire litigation is effectively dead in the water.
