18 Years of Satoshi’s Paradox: Can Bitcoin Survive What Comes Next?

Bitcoin turned 18, 18 years after Satoshi Nakamoto released an October 31, 2008 whitepaper proposing peer-to-peer electronic cash that moved without a bank. It now trades near $77,330, with a market value around $1.55 trillion. Researchers attribute roughly 1.1 million BTC to an early miner widely believed to be Satoshi; most remain untouched and are worth about $85 billion, with no known controller of the private keys. Nakamoto stopped posting publicly in 2010. This month developer T4T5 used Anthropic's Claude to recreate 2009 Bitcoin software matching the original byte for byte, though the launch-day program is missing, and researchers raised the possibility that future AI could uncover mathematical shortcuts threatening exposed public keys while saying no practical attack exists today.