A large lawsuit seeking transfer of ownership of long-dormant bitcoin wallets, including addresses tied to Satoshi Nakamoto and a Mt. Gox hacker, has been filed in a New York court in the United States. The industry, however, says the prospects of enforcement are low because bitcoin cannot be forcibly transferred without private keys.

Cryptopolitan, a blockchain media outlet, reported on May 25 local time that the plaintiff, using the pseudonym Noah Doe, filed suit arguing that bitcoin that has not moved for a long time effectively qualifies as abandoned property under New York state lost property law.

The lawsuit targets a total of 39,069 bitcoin wallets. The plaintiff’s estimate put about 3.7 million BTC in those wallets. At current prices, that is worth about $290 billion. The lawsuit was submitted to a New York court on May 1 through two Wyoming-incorporated shell companies, ABC Company and XYZ Company. The complaint alone is said to run 901 pages.

The plaintiff said bitcoin wallets that have not moved for a long period are effectively left unattended. The plaintiff also said it reported the relevant wallet addresses to New York police, posted an on-chain notice and distributed press releases before entering the lawsuit process. Market attention focused in particular after it was reported that the case includes an address believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto and addresses linked to the Mt. Gox hack.

The industry is raising strong doubts about real-world enforceability, separate from the legal theory. Sani, founder of on-chain analytics platform Timechain Index, pointed to the possibility of errors in the notification addresses as the biggest problem. Many early-era bitcoin were stored in a public-key-based P2PK (pay-to-public-key) format, but the plaintiff sent legal notices to corresponding P2PKH (pay-to-public-key-hash) addresses, Sani said. Because of that difference, the notice may have been delivered to entirely different addresses, Sani argued.

Even if a court rules for the plaintiff, actual bitcoin transfers would be another problem, the industry says. On the bitcoin network, funds cannot be moved without the private keys to the wallets. David Schwartz (데이비드 슈워츠), Ripple’s chief technology officer, also agreed that even with a court ruling, the decision would have limited practical effect on the bitcoin network itself. He added, citing BitcoinSV (BSV), that "BSV may accept this."

The case is also drawing attention for bringing the issue of handling long-dormant bitcoin back to the surface. Concerns have long been raised that early P2PK addresses, whose public keys are already exposed on-chain, could become more vulnerable if quantum computers emerge.

A proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-361 floated in April includes a plan to gradually freeze older P2PK addresses that could be vulnerable to quantum computers and phase out the existing signature system over several years. The proposal is said to target 6.7 million BTC, about 34 percent of total bitcoin supply. That includes about 1.1 million BTC believed to be owned by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Separately, Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson introduced a new concept called "PACT" on May 1. The idea is to enable holders to prove control of private keys without moving actual coins and without revealing their identities.

Ultimately, the central issue in the lawsuit is focusing less on legal ownership claims than on whether it can be enforced. Even if the plaintiff claims rights to long-dormant bitcoin by applying the concept of ownerless property, forced transfers without private keys are effectively impossible in bitcoin’s decentralised network structure. With the possibility also raised that the notification addresses themselves were wrong, the industry says it is uncertain whether the lawsuit can advance to a meaningful stage of judgment.