Bitcoin marked its 18th anniversary on October 31, with the network trading near $77,330 and holding a market value of approximately $1.55 trillion. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper on that date in 2008, proposing "money that could move without a bank." He stopped posting publicly in 2010.
Researchers estimate that roughly 1.1 million BTC, worth around $85 billion at current prices, belongs to an early miner widely believed to be Satoshi. Most of those coins remain untouched, and nobody knows who controls the private keys. Any movement of those coins could trigger market uncertainty, even without a sale occurring.
This month, developer T4T5 used Anthropic's Claude to recreate preserved Bitcoin software from 2009, matching the original file byte for byte. Claude also traced mysterious numbers in NSA-supplied encryption standards to a timestamp-based random generator, reducing long-standing suspicions of hidden weaknesses. Neither discovery exposed a flaw in Bitcoin.
Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya recently warned that Bitcoin could eventually be hacked and "go to zero." Researchers have raised the possibility that future AI advances could uncover mathematical shortcuts threatening exposed public keys, though no such practical attack exists today.