Satoshi's Bitcoin: 'Noah Doe' Sues to Own 3.8 Million Dormant BTC, and a $33M Wallet Wakes Up

At 18:23 UTC on Sunday 18 October 2026, a bitcoin address that had not spent a coin in 13 years emptied itself. The address, beginning "13Coop", had received its 411.45 bitcoin on 11 September 2013, when they were worth a little over $50,000. All of it went in one transaction to a brand-new address. Galaxy Research, the research arm of Mike Novogratz's crypto firm Galaxy, valued the transfer at $33.44 million.

Galaxy's alert gave the sender a second name: "Noah Doe #970". The address is number 970 on a list of 39,069 that an anonymous plaintiff calling himself Noah Doe has asked a New York court to declare abandoned, and his. Together they hold about 3.8 million bitcoin, nearly a fifth of all the bitcoin that will ever exist, including coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's unknown creator, and coins stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange in 2011.

What Noah Doe is claiming

The case is ABC Company, XYZ Company and Noah Doe v. John Does 1-39,069, index number 153119/2026, in New York County Supreme Court, which despite its name is the state's ordinary trial court. It was filed on 11 March 2026 and amended on 1 May in a 901-page filing, mostly the list of addresses. The two companies are Wyoming LLCs. The complaint says Noah Doe lives in New York. It does not say who he is, and nothing in the public record does. The plaintiffs' lawyers are Lewis & Lin LLC of Brooklyn.

Galaxy counted 3,799,629 bitcoin on the list. At about $82,700 a coin on 22 October 2026, CoinGecko's price, that is about $314 billion. Some 21,923 of the addresses carry the "Patoshi pattern", a mining fingerprint from Bitcoin's first year that the researcher Sergio Demian Lerner identified in 2013 and that is widely, though not provably, attributed to Satoshi. They hold 1,096,134 bitcoin, about $91 billion. John Doe number 1 is the "1Feex" address, holding 79,957 bitcoin from the 2011 Mt. Gox theft, the coins that Mark Karpelès, who ran Mt. Gox, proposed in February 2026 to recover for its creditors through a one-off change to Bitcoin's rules. The plaintiffs hold the keys to none of it.

A safe with a glass door

Bitcoin is not kept by a bank. Each address works like an account number on a public ledger, the blockchain, so anyone can see what it holds and when it last moved. Spending the coins needs a private key, a secret code that acts like the signature on a withdrawal slip. Whoever has the key can move the coins. Nobody else can: not a court, not the police, not Bitcoin's developers.

So coins sit still for years. Some owners lost their keys; the Welsh engineer James Howells threw away a hard drive holding about 8,000 bitcoin in 2013. Some died without passing the keys on. Some simply never sell. Some are thieves who dare not touch coins every analyst is watching, the usual reading of 1Feex. And Satoshi stopped writing to other developers in 2011; almost none of the coins attributed to Satoshi has ever been spent.

Finders keepers, by USB stick

New York already has a law for money nobody claims, and Noah Doe is not using it. Under escheat, as it is called, a New York bank must hand an account left untouched for three years to the State Comptroller, who holds it with no deadline for the owner to claim it. Since 2022, crypto held for New Yorkers by a bank or crypto business goes the same way after five years, and the owner can claim the proceeds. That system works because a custodian, a bank or an exchange, can actually hand the money over, and it sends the money to the state, not to a stranger. Bitcoin kept in its owner's own wallet has no custodian.

The plaintiffs rely instead on Article 7-B of New York's Personal Property Law, the lost-and-found statute. A finder takes found property to the police, who hold it for three months to three years depending on its value; if nobody claims it, it belongs to the finder. Property worth under $10 belongs to the finder a year after the finding, if the finder tried to locate the owner.

The complaint says Noah Doe "identified a security issue" in October 2024 that left owners unable to withdraw their coins, without saying what it is. He wrote an "Algorithm" to pick out wallets inactive for at least five years, leaving out any held by exchanges. He "found" them on his computer in New York City in three batches between December 2024 and April 2025, copied the addresses onto USB drives and handed the drives to the NYPD's 17th Precinct, which issued property receipts and, months later, gave the drives back. An expert he hired valued each wallet "as is" at under $10, because the coins cannot be recovered without the key. That valuation is what lets the plaintiffs use the one-year rule.

Notice came by blockchain. Between 30 June and 10 July 2025 every address received a tiny payment carrying a text note. On address 970 it read "NOTICE TO OWNER: see www.salomonbros.com/owner_notice", a page run by Noah Doe's consultant, Salomon Brothers Strategic Advisors Inc. Owners had until 10 October 2025 to respond. The complaint says 424 did so by making a transaction, 2,932 addresses were dropped in all, and the other 39,069 are "deemed abandoned", on the reasoning that any owner watching bitcoin's price climb would have moved something in five years. A court-approved "COURT-ORDERED LEGAL NOTICE" followed on 22 May 2026. Address 970 had been receiving junk notes since 2018, including one offering to "Buy your empty private key".

The objections

Ian R. Cohen, a lawyer in Mineola, New York, with no stake in the case, asked to file a brief opposing it. "Mere inactivity, no matter how long, is not abandonment," he argued, adding that New York's legislature had already sent dormant crypto to the Comptroller in 2022. The Digital Chamber, the largest US trade group for the crypto industry, warned of a "pervasive cloud on title across self-custody wallets". The Bitcoin Policy Institute, represented by White & Case, asked to join as a defendant, saying the bitcoin reserve it keeps in its own custody looks exactly like the "abandoned" wallets, and that finding an address is like finding a bank account number, not the money. Galaxy's head of research, Alex Thorn, wrote that "Dormancy is a feature of Bitcoin, not a sign of abandonment."

Even a win could not move a coin. David Zaslowsky, a litigation partner at Baker McKenzie, wrote that any judgment "would likely be symbolic rather than self-executing". Its practical use would be to get an exchange to freeze coins if they ever arrived there. The plaintiffs say they need the ruling because "prospective transaction counterparties and third parties will continue to question Plaintiffs' ownership". In June their lawyer, David D. Lin, argued that the wallet holders should answer on normal deadlines and that no defendant had appeared.

The stay, and the wallets that keep waking up

On 4 June 2026, after Cohen asked to be heard, Justice Kathy J. King stayed the case, "including any application for an inquest or a default judgment", the judgment a plaintiff wins when the other side never turns up. Cohen later told the court that "The stay is the Court's order, not mine." On 30 June a holder signing as John Doe 33, who says he controls one of the listed wallets, moved without a lawyer to dismiss the case, calling himself "a natural person and a real human being". After a hearing on 14 July, the court kept the stay and the bar on default judgments in orders of 16 July, and set 8 September to hear the Bitcoin Policy Institute and the Digital Chamber. No ruling had been reported by 22 October.

The "abandoned" wallets keep moving. By mid-June Galaxy counted 52 listed addresses that had moved 34,335 bitcoin since the suit was filed. Then came address 970. On 22 October its coins sat untouched at their new address. Nothing on the public record says who moved them, why, or whether the lawsuit played any part. The transfer shows only that someone still holds the key. The 1Feex coins and those attributed to Satoshi have not moved this year.