- A man hiding under the pseudonym Noah Doe has filed a 901-page lawsuit in a New York court – he wants legal title to 39,069 dormant wallets with 3.8 million BTC valued at approximately USD 285 billion
- He didn’t break into any wallet, he doesn’t have private keys – he relies on New York’s 1958 found property law and collecting his USB drives from the police station
- The real goal: position yourself as the legal owner before quantum computers crack the cryptography of the first Bitcoin wallets and allow them to be emptied
- There is one fundamental legal error that could blow up the entire structure
It’s hard to imagine a more absurd sentence: someone deposited several flash drives at an NYPD station – and claims that this gives him the right to almost one fifth of all Bitcoins ever mined. But when you go a level deeper, this story stops being absurd. It’s starting to get disturbing.
What Noah Doe did and how it works
A man hiding under the pseudonym Noah Doe wrote an algorithm that scanned the entire blockchain for wallets with no activity for at least six years – with so many booms and ATH after ATH, any rational owner would have a reason to move anything. The algorithm found 42,082 such addresses. Noah Doe sent a message to each owner: You have time to prove you are still in control of your funds. 424 reacted. The remaining 39,069 remained silent.
Then he did something no one had ever tried before. He copied all the addresses onto USB drives and turned them in to the NYPD 17th Precinct as found property. The police accepted it, issued confirmations and kept it for months. Nobody came to pick it up. The flash drives were returned to Doe.
On this basis, on May 1, 2026, he filed a 901-page lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Legal basis: New York’s Lost Property Act of 1958. Argument: since the owners did not react, the property is abandoned and belongs to the finder.
He valued each wallet at less than $10 in court documents – because without private keys, Bitcoin is technically inaccessible and worth nothing today. This is a deliberate move.
Why it’s still worth having the title without keys
This is where it gets really interesting. Noah Doe doesn’t buy Bitcoin. He buys an option on a quantum computer.
The oldest Bitcoin wallets – including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto with an estimated balance of approximately 1.1 million BTC – use the P2PK, or Pay-to-Public-Key, format. This is an archaic format in which the public key has been visible directly on the blockchain since the first coins were mined in 2009. Modern wallets hide the public key until the first transaction. Satoshi didn’t do that.
Why is it important? Because a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, running Shor’s algorithm, could derive the private key from the publicly visible public key. It wouldn’t be a burglary in the classic sense. It’s like mathematically reproducing a password based on its public hash – a classic PC can’t handle it, but (in the near future) a quantum computer can.
Estimates say that such a computer could be available within a decade. Perhaps earlier. If Noah Doe has legal title to these wallets at this point, he will not be a hacker. He will be the owner who recovers his property.
That’s a $285 billion bet.
A hole that could sink the entire lawsuit
There is one problem that analysts picked up on very quickly. Noah Doe sent legal notices to wallet owners using the P2PKH format, a newer address standard. Meanwhile, Satoshi wallets and other most valuable addresses from the first block era exist in the older P2PK format.
These are two different formats. P2PKH derived from P2PK is like giving the address of your neighbor’s apartment in a letter instead of the correct one – technically close, but formally wrong. This means that the most important targets on Doe’s list may never have been effectively notified. If the court catches this, the entire legal mechanism falls apart: property cannot be declared abandoned if the owner has never been given a chance to respond.
Sani, the founder of the Timechain Index analytical platform, who was the first to publicize the matter, directly pointed out this error. Galaxy Research confirmed in a separate report that as many as 98.82% of notified addresses were in the P2PKH format – potentially a miss for key balances.
What does this mean for you
If you keep Bitcoin in a wallet that hasn’t moved in six years – you are legally safe, because Noah Doe would have to find your wallet first and notify you. But this case opens up something broader.
I believe that the real threat is not Doe himself and his lawsuit. Even if it wins, the court cannot order the Bitcoin network to transfer coins without private keys – blockchain ignores court decisions.
The real threat is the quantum computer that this case brought to light. About 6.9 million BTC, or one-third of the total supply, lies in wallets with publicly visible public keys. This is a potential target for someone with sufficiently powerful equipment – and without having to go to the police station.
It is no coincidence that in April 2026, Jameson Lopp and five co-authors submitted BIP-361 – a proposal for protocol changes that would freeze quantum-vulnerable addresses and gradually phase out old signature formats. This is not a response to Doe’s lawsuit. That’s the answer to a question Doe just asked out loud.
Is Bitcoin ready for quantum computers? The answer is: not yet. And someone just filed a 901-page document for us to find out about it.
