Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant Bitcoin holdings have drawn renewed attention after a viral claim suggested the fortune could be seized by randomly guessing a private key. Arkham Intelligence says the wallets hold 1.096 million BTC worth about $70.43 billion at a Bitcoin price of $64,245. Researchers rejected the idea as mathematically implausible, saying that even a machine generating one trillion combinations per second would need about 1.8 octodecillion years to reach a 50% chance of finding a specific 24-word seed phrase. The claim also rests on a technical error: Nakamoto’s coins were not set up under the modern BIP-39 mnemonic standard, but were spread in 2009–2010 across more than 22,000 old-style P2PK (Pay-to-Public-Key) addresses, meaning an attacker would need to compromise thousands of separate wallets. Because the coins have not moved for more than 15 years, any transfer would likely have an outsized market impact. The discussion also broadened into self-custody practices, with Adam Back arguing that Bitcoin-only hardware wallets offer stronger protection because they avoid the added complexity and weaker security assumptions that can come with supporting thousands of altcoins.