A lawsuit targets long-dormant Bitcoin wallets
A lawsuit attracting major attention in New York is attempting to claim ownership over a vast pool of inactive Bitcoin. According to the complaint, a New Yorker using the alias “Noah Doe,” together with two affiliated companies, says they developed an algorithmic method to identify wallets that have shown no blockchain activity for at least five years. The filing claims the relevant wallet data was stored on USB drives, turned over to police as “lost property,” and followed by abandonment notices intended to locate the original owners.
After those notices were issued, more than 400 wallet holders reportedly responded by moving their funds, demonstrating continued control over their accounts. However, the plaintiff says no response was received for more than 39,000 wallets. Based on that silence, the lawsuit asks the court to transfer legal ownership of the Bitcoin in those wallets to the claimants. The reported scope of the case covers 39,069 Bitcoin wallets with an estimated value of roughly $293 billion.
Industry experts challenge the legal theory
The case has drawn immediate criticism from prominent figures in the crypto sector. Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz argued that the lawsuit suffers from major legal defects, especially on the question of jurisdiction. In his view, the idea that the assets were somehow “found in New York” is deeply inconsistent, since Bitcoin exists on a decentralized network rather than within a clearly bounded local jurisdiction.
Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Research, also questioned the attempt to use local lost-property law to assert rights over digital wallets in a global crypto system. He described the effort as highly unusual, particularly given the scale of the assets involved. The controversy is heightened by reports that some of the wallets in question may be associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Even a court win may be difficult to enforce
Beyond the legal debate, the case faces a serious technical problem: enforcement. Schwartz noted that even if a court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, the Bitcoin main network would not automatically implement a judicial order to reassign control of on-chain assets. That creates a fundamental gap between legal recognition and actual technical possession on the blockchain.
He added that some Bitcoin forks more open to court-driven protocol intervention might theoretically be more responsive, but that would not resolve the issue on the main Bitcoin network. For that reason, many industry observers remain skeptical that the lawsuit can succeed in any meaningful sense. Despite the headline-grabbing size of the claim, the effort to secure ownership of these wallets appears to face steep barriers across jurisdiction, legal reasoning, and blockchain execution.