A legal filing in New York that seeks to seize 3.8 million Bitcoin from allegedly dormant wallets has drawn a blistering rebuke from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, who called the lawsuit an assault on the fundamental principle of self‑custody. The plaintiff, using the pseudonym Noah Doe, filed the case in the Supreme Court of the State of New York on May 1, 2026, asking the court to declare ownership of 39,069 wallet addresses that have shown no activity for at least five or six years.
According to the complaint, Doe developed an algorithm to identify inactive wallets, then reported them to the NYPD as found property under New York Personal Property Law Article 7‑B. Notices were sent via OP_RETURN messages embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain, a public webpage, and press releases. Wallets that later exhibited on‑chain activity were removed, leaving the 39,069 addresses that now form the basis of the claim. The hoard is estimated at roughly 3.8 million BTC—worth about $285 billion at current prices—and reportedly includes wallets linked to Satoshi Nakamoto and the Mt. Gox hacker.
Hoskinson reacted on social media with characteristic bluntness. “Hey, you left that cash in your safe too long. I want it! give me give give me. Lawyers continue to be the scum of the earth,” he wrote, encapsulating a wider crypto‑industry fear that inactivity alone could be mistaken for abandonment. He later summarized the case as: “If you keep money in your safe for too long, we are coming after it.”
The core legal question is whether a self‑custodied Bitcoin wallet can be treated like a forgotten bank account. Traditional dormant accounts have custodians, account statements, and statutory processes. Bitcoin wallets, by contrast, are controlled exclusively by private keys; the plaintiff does not claim to possess them. Even if a court awarded ownership, the coins cannot be moved without cryptographic signatures, making enforcement highly uncertain. This gap between legal declarations and on‑chain reality threatens to set a precedent in which long‑term cold storage—one of Bitcoin’s most trusted security measures—could be vulnerable to aggressive legal theories.
The lawsuit arrives as U.S. lawmakers continue to debate digital asset custody and property rights. Recent proposals have emphasized the right to self‑custody, and critics of the Doe case warn that a favorable ruling would undermine the very notion that Bitcoin exists outside conventional property systems. For now, the court has not granted ownership, and the filing remains a provocative legal experiment rather than a practical route to unlocking billions in Bitcoin.
