A series of chained Bitcoin messages claiming legal control over legacy wallets have sparked much debate in the field of encryption. Some users say that the early ERA wallets (probably linked to Nakamoto at) may have been hacked.
A message sent via Op_return data at 12:30am on July 1st included the phrase “I own this wallet and its contents.” The transaction includes the P2PKH address. This is an older format commonly used in the early days of Bitcoin.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz shared a balanced perspective on the situation in response to growing speculation. He says the incident will likely fall into one of two categories. Someone says they are washing their funds under the guise of restoring their wallets, or claiming abandoned wallets by misusing the weaknesses of older private key generations.
I think there are two possible explanations.
1) You are washing your own money by claiming that someone has found the key in some way.
2) Someone is trying to find a weak key or non-sess wallet and legally claim that they have been abandoned.
Which one is difficult to say.
– David ‘Joelkatz’ Schwartz (@Joelkatz) July 11, 2025
Although the transactional messages have attracted a lot of attention, there is no evidence that Bitcoin’s major cryptosystem has been hacked. The idea that this could include Satoshi’s own wallet (estimating to hold nearly 1 million BTC) is still in the air.
However, this event brought some old concerns about how well your wallet will protect your code. If keys from that era were inadequately generated or reused, they could be at risk of being discovered and billed by a third party. It’s a serious situation, but it’s not a new problem and does not show that Bitcoin’s current design is flawed.
So far, there has been no movement from the address linked to Satoshi, and the main wallet has not been infringed. The messages are odd, but the more dramatic stories lack technical evidence to back them up.
