You’ll Never Guess Who Can’t Touch a Million Bitcoins

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In the whimsical swirl of speculation about Bitcoin’s mysterious genesis, stirred anew by a recent New York Times exposé, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, David Schwartz, dropped a statement more sobering than a moth in a jar of formaldehyde: the legendary trove of one million Bitcoins is, in all likelihood, lost to the ages, slipping through human fingers like fine sand-or perhaps like an absent-minded poet misplacing his own quill.

Schwartz’s reasoning is deliciously simple. Over seventeen years, minds meander, priorities mutate, and the notion that anyone could blithely ignore a fortune-$70-$80 billion, mind you-without even a tiny flutter of a transaction is, he opines, a fantasy more improbable than a hedgehog riding a unicycle across the Kremlin.

No. But if it’s four people, it’s possible that it takes more than one of them to access the keys. It’s also possible that some of the keys weren’t kept.

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– David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) April 10, 2026

Thus, in Schwartz’s meticulous, almost surgical view, the genesis keys were likely obliterated or forgotten in Bitcoin’s infantile days-when the currency was worth less than a dusty penny in a beggar’s pocket-rendering Satoshi’s holdings mere ghostly ballast, exerting no pressure whatsoever on the market, except perhaps in fevered dreams of crypto enthusiasts.

“Not true, but plausible”: Why the crypto world suspected David Schwartz was Satoshi

Irony wears a fine coat here: for a long while, David Schwartz himself was whispered about as a prime Satoshi suspect. With patents stretching back to 1988 and cryptographic wizardry manifest in the XRP Ledger, the man could plausibly have conjured Bitcoin in a wink of genius-or at least in a particularly caffeinated evening.

Yet Schwartz, ever the conscientious denier, insisted-like a professor rebuffing an amorous student-that the theory was “not true, but plausible,” confessing a capability he never exercised, having first encountered Bitcoin in 2011. One imagines him smiling wryly, like a cat watching humans chase shadows, at the world’s endless speculation.

In short, as tireless digital archaeologists sift through cypherpunk mailing lists for the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, Schwartz drags the conversation from the mists of legend into the stark, fluorescent light of mathematics and key security, grimly asserting that those Bitcoins are, with a probability bordering on certainty, forever lost-or obliterated, leaving only the faint aroma of what might have been.

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2026-04-10 15:07