Whale hunting — are the sleeping bitcoins alive?

How many of 21 million are alive?

Bitcoin stops at 21 million coins, yet many have not moved in over a decade. Analysts estimate three to four million are lost forever with their keys. The roughly 1.1 million believed mined by Satoshi Nakamoto have never moved either.

The problem is that nobody can tell. The ledger only says “this UTXO is unspent,” not whether its owner still holds the key or has died. So nobody knows exactly how scarce bitcoin really is, or how much could suddenly hit the market.

Waking them with signatures

Mobick’s final roadmap stage, whale hunting, is an experiment to find out. The official blog describes it:

Snapshot — copy Bitcoin’s UTXO ledger at some moment.
Claim — anyone with coins in that snapshot can sign with their Bitcoin private key to claim the same amount of Mobick (or a ratio to be decided).
Verdict — signed coins are “alive”; coins never signed for are deemed lost.
What happens to the rest — unclaimed amounts can be burned or turned into ecosystem resources such as developer rewards or global campaigns.

Alive (claimed by signature): —
Unknown: 2,100
Deemed lost: —

One cell = 10,000 BTC. The ~3–4M lost and ~1.1M Satoshi figures are widely quoted estimates; nobody actually knows which coins are alive. Whale hunting proposes to find out by signature.

FIG. 1Whale-hunting concept simulation. Press the buttons in turn. Proportions use widely quoted estimates.

It works because of the UTXO property from the basics track: each UTXO can move only with its private key, so signing with that key proves “this coin’s owner exists now.” The moment a long-dormant whale wallet wakes would itself be world news, the blog suggests.

The method changed

The first idea was to use the ten years of Bitcoin ledger inside Mobick’s 2019 forked chain. The 2026 New Bedford upgrade dropped that ledger. Abandoned?

On 24 December 2025 Oh answered: not abandoned — the method changes. For example, copy a dated Bitcoin ledger into a separate chain and let people sign and claim Mobick in an app, similar to how MOTE and LTM were burned for Mobick. The date was only an example, and the ratio (1:1, or a different ratio for early miners) is undecided.

Quantum computers and the whales

One reason whale hunting draws attention again is quantum computing. Many early bitcoins have their public keys exposed on the ledger, and a strong enough quantum computer might compute the private keys. In April 2026 Oh predicted that calls to deal with Satoshi’s and other dormant early coins in the name of quantum security would grow, and that Bitcoin might split in two over it. Whale hunting — sorting living coins from dead ones by signature — sits right at the centre of that debate. The quantum lesson goes further.

Summary

Three to four million bitcoins are believed lost, but nobody has verified it.
Whale hunting: snapshot → claim by Bitcoin-key signature → claimed coins alive, the rest deemed lost.
Since New Bedford, the plan is a ledger copy on a separate chain with app-based claims; date and ratio undecided.
Oh says it waits until the ecosystem is healthy.