NY lawsuit claims ownership of 3.8M Bitcoin, including Satoshi’s addresses

Someone going by “Noah Doe” has filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court claiming ownership of approximately 3.8 million Bitcoin. That’s roughly 18% of Bitcoin’s entire supply, worth an estimated $293.5 billion at current prices.

The claim covers 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses, including wallets tied to the Patoshi pattern, widely believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, and at least one address linked to the Mt. Gox hack. The plaintiff is arguing these wallets qualify as abandoned property under New York law.

The legal theory, such as it is

The lawsuit, indexed as case No. 153119/2026, was originally filed on March 11, 2026, and later amended on May 1, 2026. Noah Doe and two Wyoming LLCs, creatively named ABC Company and XYZ Company, are the listed plaintiffs.

Their legal argument hinges on New York’s Personal Property Law Section 257, a statute that governs abandoned property. The law dates back to 1958, roughly half a century before Bitcoin existed. The plaintiffs argue that wallets inactive for five to six years meet the threshold for abandonment under this framework.

The plaintiffs reportedly submitted address data to the NYPD between December 2024 and April 2025, ostensibly to comply with finder procedures.

Galaxy Research pegs the average holding at roughly 97 BTC per address across the 39,069 wallets in question. That $293.5 billion figure makes this, by a considerable margin, one of the largest property claims ever filed in a US court.

Why the industry thinks this is absurd

Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn and Ripple’s David Schwartz are among the industry figures who have publicly criticized the claim as fundamentally flawed.

The objections are layered. First, there’s the jurisdictional question. Bitcoin exists on a decentralized, global network. No single jurisdiction “holds” these assets. Applying a New York state property law to digital assets that exist simultaneously on thousands of nodes worldwide is, to put it diplomatically, a stretch.

Second, dormant does not mean abandoned. A Bitcoin address with no outgoing transactions for six years could belong to someone exercising extreme patience, someone who lost their keys, or someone who is deceased. The entire value proposition of Bitcoin is that holdings are secured by cryptographic keys, not by continuous activity.

Third, the plaintiffs don’t actually have access to any of these wallets. They don’t hold the private keys. They can’t move the Bitcoin. They’re essentially asking a court to grant them legal title to assets they have no technical ability to control. Galaxy Research apparently values the plaintiff’s actual position at roughly $10 per wallet, a stark contrast to the headline-grabbing $293.5 billion figure.

The Satoshi problem

Perhaps the most audacious element of the lawsuit is that the targeted addresses include those associated with the Patoshi pattern. These are wallets holding approximately 1.096 million BTC that blockchain researchers have long attributed to Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi disappeared from public communication in 2011. The coins have never moved.

The inclusion of an Mt. Gox-linked address adds another wrinkle. Mt. Gox creditors have been navigating one of the longest bankruptcy proceedings in crypto history, with distributions still being processed.

What this means for investors

Legal experts have highlighted the enormous hurdles involved, from jurisdiction over decentralized assets to the novel application of mid-century property law to digital bearer instruments. A potential default judgment timeline sits around late June 2026, meaning if no opposing party shows up to contest the claim, the court could theoretically rule.

About 18% of Bitcoin’s total supply sitting in dormant wallets has long been considered effectively lost, which functions as a deflationary force that supports Bitcoin’s scarcity narrative. If legal frameworks begin treating those coins as claimable, even unsuccessfully, it could complicate how institutional investors model Bitcoin’s effective supply.

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