Going for Satoshi’s Wallet? Programmer Claims Math Breakthrough Could Unlock Bitcoin’s Billion-Dollar Fort Knox

A programmer on X has announced a project to “go for Satoshi’s wallet,” claiming new math and low-level code tricks can dramatically speed up elliptic-curve computations used to protect Bitcoin private keys.

The post and a linked Substack chapter outlining the approach have stirred curiosity in a small section of CT, and raised familiar questions about feasibility, and ethics.

On X, user @murage_kibicho posted a short caption alongside an image: “My sideproject is going for Satoshi's wallet. I wrote about using group theory to speed up a C library.”

The link added under the initial post directed readers to a Substack essay titled “If you’re smart why are you poor? Elliptic Curve Edition.”

There, the author lays out a programmer’s attempt to tackle one of Bitcoin’s most uncrackable challenges: accelerating the elliptic-curve arithmetic behind key search to target dormant wallets, including the one attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The crux

The Substack chapter frames the work as an engineering exercise, revisiting an in-house elliptic-curve library called MySecp and benchmarking it against the widely used libsecp256k1.

The author lists a range of optimizations he claims to have applied, from rewriting scalar multiplication routines and precalculating generators to finding integer primitive roots and refining collision-finding strategies.

He also sketches hybrid approaches that draw on classical algorithms like Pollard Rho, Pollard Kangaroo, and Pohlig–Hellman, suggesting that compiler-level and algorithmic improvements could drastically shrink the time estimates.

By his numbers, using the baseline library would require around 352 million CPU years to brute-force a 67-bit subspace of the Bitcoin keyspace.

After optimizations, he claims this figure drops to roughly 12 million CPU years, still vast, but several orders of magnitude less. He concludes by noting that further work in assembly and CUDA might push performance even further in later chapters.

Community reacts

The bold claim naturally drew attention. Some in the crypto community speculated about the implications if the approach actually worked at scale.

One user, @CupOJoseph, wrote: “That's just 40,000 x 64 core CPUs going at it for 5 years. Basically if this is true, we are in the final days of Satoshi still having his coins.”

Others were more skeptical. @Mugglemaniwarned that even if the technique were feasible it would likely cost billions and, by driving down the value of the target holdings, erase the very prize an attacker would hope to capture, leaving the attacker to spend vast resources for little or no net gain

The experiment, as presented, remains theoretical. But by explicitly tying the math to Satoshi’s wallet, the post has reignited debate on whether the legendary stash could ever be cracked, and whether trying is more a thought experiment than a real threat.

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