ABC Company, XYZ Company, Noah Doe, lawsuit against John Does holding 39,069 BTC. Source: ilawconotices.com
The 901-page lawsuit lists 39,069 total Bitcoin wallet addresses, including wallet address "12c6D" associated with Satoshi Nakamoto and address "1Feex" linked to the Mt. Gox exchange hacker.
ABC Company, XYZ Company, Noah Doe, lawsuit against John Does holding 39,069 BTC, Bitcoin wallets. Source: ilawconotices.com
The listed addresses hold an estimated 3.7 million BTC, valued at about $285 billion, according to Sani, the founder of Bitcoin onchain analytics platform Timechain Index.
The founder also noted that most of the old Satoshi-era tokens are currently sitting in Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) output formats, while the plaintiffs only sent legal notices to the corresponding hashed public key under Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) formats, which often hold no value.
This could undermine the claim that proper notice of abandonment was given to the holder, since plaintiffs sent the legal notices to the empty P2PKH addresses, while the actual BTC balance sits in unnotified P2PK scripts.
Castle Labs' lead research analyst agreed, adding that the messaging attempt was “structurally defective” because it was sent to the address formats no longer used by the targeted wallets. Sending a small transaction via the OP_RETURN function would be “similarly ineffective” as it only works with active recipients monitoring their wallets.
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The over 39,000 wallets named in the lawsuit hold Bitcoin that are considered dormant, or lost, meaning that they haven’t been circulating onchain for multiple years.
The supply of Bitcoin dormant for the past five and 10 years. Source: Bitbo
There are currently 3.5 million Bitcoin, worth about $271 billion, that have been dormant for the past 10 years and another 6.6 million coins, worth around $577 billion, that have been dormant for over five years, Bitbo data shows.
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