Twelve coinbase outputs from March 2010 moved in one night, 16 years late. Was it Satoshi?
On 5–6 September 2026, 600 BTC mined when a block paid 50 coins woke up and walked into native SegWit. Whale Alert ran the Patoshi patterns. They did not match.
The appearance
Satoshi-era coinbases are radioactive. When they move, every watcher assumes the founder is alive or the keys were stolen. Twelve P2PK addresses, each holding a 50 BTC block reward from March 2010, spent in a tight window across blocks 965,639–965,646, into fresh P2WPKH wallets. Combined value about $48 million. No prior spends. No OP_RETURN. No announcement.
Case file sealed
Investigation notes, the reconstruction, and sources sit behind this seal. Open it when you have sat with the raw transaction.
Open the case file
The investigation
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01 The blocks
Lookonchain listed rewards from heights including 43,361, 43,452, 43,647, 43,680, 43,765, 43,855 and 43,871. Those blocks were mined in March 2010 — after the puzzle was public, before the first exchanges, while CPU mining was still something a determined hobbyist could do.
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02 Not the Patoshi cluster
Whale Alert and independent parsers compared extraNonce, timestamp behaviour, and the well-studied Patoshi mining fingerprint. None of the twelve matched. Arkham tagged the cluster as a miner, not as Satoshi. The coins also moved to SegWit, which Satoshi-era software cannot construct without a modern wallet.
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03 Why now
Sixteen years is long enough for an heir, a recovered hard drive, a court order, or a miner who finally decided the experiment had gone on long enough. The chain shows a coordinated sweep by one operator who still has the original keys and a 2026 wallet. It does not show a sale.
Reconstruction
Almost certainly an early CPU miner, not Satoshi, consolidating 12 block rewards into SegWit. The 'Satoshi is back' reading fails the Patoshi test and the script-type test. Why they chose this week remains their business. Watch the destination addresses: if the coins fragment toward exchanges, it was a cash-out. If they sit, it was a migration.
Still open: Identity of the miner, and whether the coins will be sold or only modernised.