A pseudonymous plaintiff used a 1958 lost property law, a USB drive, and blockchain dust transactions to claim 3.79 million BTC – the legal argument is creative, the technical reality is not.
- Noah Doe filed suit May 1, 2026 claiming 39,069 dormant Bitcoin wallets.
- Wallets include addresses linked to Satoshi, early miners, and the Mt. Gox hacker.
- Plaintiff submitted wallet addresses to NYPD as lost property to establish finders rights.
- Even if he wins in court he has no private keys – the Bitcoin physically cannot move.
- Dust notices went to wrong address format – actual Satoshi-era BTC sits elsewhere.
Someone calling himself Noah Doe walked into the NYPD’s 17th precinct in late 2024 with a USB drive. On it: a list of 39,069 Bitcoin wallet addresses he claimed were abandoned. He filed the drive as lost property under New York law, got a receipt, waited for nobody to come forward, and then sued in the New York Supreme Court to be declared the legal owner of everything inside those wallets.
The wallets collectively hold approximately 3.79 million BTC, somewhere between $285 and $293 billion at current prices. More than the GDP of several European countries sitting in addresses that haven’t moved in years. The list includes addresses associated with Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, early miners from Bitcoin’s first years, and the address that received the 80,000 BTC stolen in the 2011 Mt. Gox hack, one of the most watched addresses in crypto, tracked by on-chain analysts every single day.
Nobody is home at any of these addresses. That’s the whole point.
How he built the claim
The strategy is genuinely creative. Noah Doe, filing alongside two anonymous Wyoming LLCs whose real names are also hidden from the court, built his case in layers over more than a year.
It started in October 2024 with an algorithm designed to identify self-custodied wallets that hadn’t moved in at least five years, hadn’t taken any profit despite Bitcoin’s enormous price appreciation, and showed signs of access problems rather than deliberate holding. Exchange wallets and third-party custodians were excluded. He was looking for wallets where the private key is almost certainly gone, not wallets where someone is just patient.
Then came the police station. Between December 2024 and April 2025, he submitted three separate USB drives containing the wallet addresses to the NYPD’s 17th precinct, filing them as found property. The police held them, nobody came to claim them, and the drives were returned months later with a receipt. That receipt mattered. Under New York’s lost property statute he was now formally a finder who had followed the proper legal process, which gave him standing to do what came next.
In mid-2025, he sent tiny dust transactions to each of the listed addresses, embedding legal notices using the OP_RETURN field, a mechanism built into Bitcoin that lets anyone write a short permanent message directly onto the blockchain. Think of it as leaving a registered letter on someone’s doorstep that can never be removed. The messages directed wallet owners to a webpage run by his firm, Salomon Brothers, and gave them until October 10, 2025 to prove ownership by either moving funds or providing documentation.
Nobody responded. He took that silence to a New York judge and asked for legal title.
The legal hook is New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, a 1958 statute written to handle physical found property. A wallet dropped on the street. A piece of jewelry left in a taxi. A coat forgotten at a restaurant. Noah Doe is arguing that the same logic applies to a cryptographic address on a decentralized network that no government controls.
The problems nobody is really disputing
Noah Doe has no private keys. Not one. A Bitcoin wallet is only accessible through its private key, a cryptographic string that proves ownership and authorizes any transaction. Without it, the coins don’t move. A court order declaring him the legal owner changes nothing about the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin doesn’t check New York court rulings before processing transactions. The protocol doesn’t care what a judge in Manhattan says. The coins sit behind mathematics that no legal document can override. If he wins this lawsuit he gets a certificate. He does not get access to a single satoshi.
The second problem was identified by on-chain analysts examining the dust transactions. The notices went to P2PKH address formats, a modern Bitcoin address type. But the wallets holding the enormous early-Bitcoin balances, the Satoshi-era coins and early miner rewards that make up the bulk of the claimed value, are stored in the older P2PK format. These are different. Sending a legal notice to a P2PKH address doesn’t reach the P2PK address where the actual Bitcoin sits. Many of the notifications went to empty versions of addresses rather than the ones holding the real coins. Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz and other industry figures dismissed the lawsuit on this basis, not as a legal threat to Bitcoin but as something with zero practical consequence regardless of how any court rules.
But technically worthless and legally irrelevant aren’t the same thing.
What the court still has to actually decide
The court hasn’t seen questions like these before and they matter beyond this case. Can an algorithm identifying blockchain addresses constitute legally discovering lost property, the way physically finding a dropped item does? Can on-chain silence, the inability of a deceased person or someone who permanently lost their private key to respond to a blockchain message, legally constitute abandonment under a statute written for tangible physical goods? And can a 1958 law about coats and wallets be applied to billions of dollars in cryptographic assets on a decentralized global network?
Nobody knows. That’s why the case is in court.
The 39,069 addresses listed across 889 pages of court attachments are still silent. No transfers, no counter-claims, no owners stepping forward. They’ve been silent for years. Most will keep being silent because the people behind them either no longer exist or no longer have the keys. That’s not a legal determination, it’s just the reality of what happens when private keys are lost and Bitcoin’s immutability means nothing moves without them.
The plaintiff has written his name on the door and is waiting for a judge’s stamp. Whether a 1958 law about physical lost property can hand someone legal claim over $285 billion in cryptographically secured digital assets is a question that has never been tested in court before. Whatever the judge decides, it won’t move a single coin. The math doesn’t care about the paperwork.
Human’s law meets Bitcoin’s protocol. One of them doesn’t negotiate.
The information provided in this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice. Coindoo.com does not endorse or recommend any specific investment strategy or cryptocurrency. Always conduct your own research and consult with a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
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