Direct answer · Data release 1.0.0-draft.2 · chain through block 960,000 · built 2026-08-08

Is this Bitcoin address Satoshi’s?

Answered from checked-in data · published 2026-09-23 · substantively modified 2026-10-02 · Markdown · All answers as JSON

An address’s transaction history does not establish that Satoshi controlled it. This release identifies 28,583 early-mining addresses in its working anchor set (degree 0) and measures eligible directed transaction paths from that set. Neither membership nor a short path is proof of identity.

Check it yourself. Open https://degreesofsatoshi.com/degree/<address>/ for any address. Degree 0 means the address is in the anchor set. Any other degree is a hop count, not a relationship.

Evidence

1. The anchor set is defined by mining pattern, not by attribution: “The early-mining anchor set. An address record's degree is the fewest eligible directed transaction-graph hops to any member of this set.” Source
2. Its size is frozen and hashed: SHA-256 of the frozen anchors_full.txt bytes (28,583 newline-delimited normalized addresses). Source
3. The Patoshi dossier’s own boundary: This is a pattern, not an identity. Lerner's own framing is that the pattern shows a single dominant early miner; equating that entity with Satoshi Nakamoto is an inference, not a proven fact, and the exact block-membership counts differ between Lerner's 2013, 2019 and 2020 posts and between later independent replications. No canonical, authoritative list of Patoshi coinbase addresses has been published by Lerner — each block paid to a freshly generated key, so the set is thousands of addresses wide and is reconstructed by re-deriving it from the nonce/ExtraNonce criteria rather than by consulting a published list. The two addresses above are ordinary coinbase outputs of blocks 1 and 9 that fall in the early-mining window and are widely cited as representative; their inclusion in any specific published Patoshi block set was NOT verified against a primary Patoshi block list this session, so treat them as illustrative early-2009 coinbase addresses rather than as certified members of the set. Block 1's coinbase address has received additional third-party tribute payments beyond its 50 BTC reward. Source
4. The genesis dossier’s own boundary: The genesis coinbase output is a protocol-level fact, not an attribution to a named person. Ownership of the private key behind the address has never been demonstrated by anyone. Amounts sent to the address after 2009 are unrelated tribute payments from third parties and say nothing about who controls the key. Do not treat this entity as a confirmed Satoshi identity claim. Source
5. The methodology’s copy rule forbids any claim of literal coin descent and displaying balances anywhere; the permitted framing is “traced to / connected”. Source

What this answer does not claim

The anchor set is a research construction. Inclusion does not prove that Satoshi controlled an address; exclusion does not prove that Satoshi did not. The result also does not identify an owner today.

Related

• How the anchor set is built
• Patoshi pattern dossier
• Genesis block coinbase dossier
• What is known about Satoshi
• How the Patoshi inference works

These explanations were revised with AI assistance. Figures are computed from the stated data release; substantive content and SEO changes go through a separate source review. No named human or external expert review is implied.