Bitcoin turns 18 today. Its founder is still missing, his presumed fortune is worth $85 billion, and AI is beginning to reconstruct how it all started.
On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper, proposing money that could move without a bank. Today, Bitcoin trades near $77,330 and has a market value of about $1.55 trillion.
“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi wrote at the time.
The breakthrough was simple to explain. Computers across a network would verify transactions and prevent the same Bitcoin from being spent twice. Satoshi stopped posting publicly in 2010. Bitcoin continued without him.
The $85 Billion Shadow Over Bitcoin
Researchers attribute roughly 1.1 million BTC to an early miner widely believed to be Satoshi. Most of those coins remain untouched. At current prices, the estimated fortune is worth around $85 billion.
Nobody knows who controls the private keys today.
If those coins suddenly moved, traders could fear that Satoshi had returned, or that someone had gained access to the wallets. A transfer alone would prove no sale. The uncertainty could still shake the market.
AI Is Digging Into Bitcoin’s Past
This month, developer T4T5 used Anthropic’s Claude to recreate preserved Bitcoin software from 2009, matching the original file byte for byte. The actual launch-day program remains missing.
Separately, Claude traced mysterious numbers in NSA-supplied encryption standards to a timestamp-based random generator. That reduced long-standing suspicions of hidden weaknesses. Neither discovery exposed a flaw in Bitcoin.
Still, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya recently warned that Bitcoin could eventually be hacked and “go to zero.”
Researchers have also raised the possibility that future AI advances could uncover mathematical shortcuts threatening exposed public keys. No such practical attack exists today.
Eighteen years on, Bitcoin has survived its founder’s disappearance. Its next test may be whether its decentralized community can agree on security changes before a new threat becomes real.
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