Strategy holds 845,050 BTC as popular holder rankings fall behind

Strategy held 845,050 BTC as of 31 August. The treasury tracker bitcointreasuries.net carries that total, and The Motley Fool published the same number on 3 September. A ranking of the largest bitcoin holders now circulating puts the company at 672,497 BTC instead, and nothing in the current trackers matches that figure. The rest of the ranking has the same problem. Its numbers are real, and most of them are old.

The public company with the biggest pile

Strategy's position is the one that moved most this year. The Motley Fool reported that the company sold about 7,000 BTC between March and August, at prices between $60,000 and $65,000, to cover preferred dividends and reduce debt. Then it bought again. A ten-week pause ended in late August with 4,603 coins bought for $370 million, which works out near $80,373 a coin. Bitcointreasuries.net puts the cost basis behind the full 845,050 BTC at $63.73 billion and dates the holding to 31 August. The sale total appears in one outlet only, so it is carried here as that outlet reported it.

What the largest fund holds

The iShares Bitcoin Trust, BlackRock's spot fund, held 778,729.9 BTC as of 3 September on the tracker Bitbo, or 3.708% of the 21 million coins bitcoin will ever mint. One source carries that count, so the decimal place deserves some caution. The circulating ranking says roughly 771,000. The two are close to eight thousand coins apart, and neither is published with the other's date, so they do not reconcile. Holdings in spot bitcoin ETFs move on any day the fund creates or redeems shares, which is why a fund total ages faster than a company's.

Satoshi's share is an estimate

The largest single holder remains the one nobody can call. River's ownership page puts the coins mined by bitcoin's pseudonymous creator at 968,452 BTC, a count the page dates to December 2024. Other published tallies round the same stash to about 1.1 million coins. The two do not reconcile, and neither can be checked against a signed message, because the coins have never been spent.

"These bitcoin are spread across approximately 20,000 addresses and have remained untouched, except for a few test transactions," River's page said.

Coins that old are watched closely. Any movement from wallets dormant for a decade becomes a story on its own, precisely because these ones do not move.

Concentration, and the counts that lag

One figure in the circulating ranking survives the check. Addresses holding 10,000 BTC or more, the wallets traders call whales, control about 14% of supply. River gets there from four addresses holding 704,497 BTC between them and another 93 holding 2,287,472. That breakdown is dated December 2024 as well, so it reads as a shape rather than a snapshot of today. State holdings are counted more loosely still. River's page puts the combined figure near 307,000 BTC, while a tracker snapshot dated 6 September showed 649,132. The circulating list used the smaller one. We could not establish what produced a gap that size.

Every number here carries a date, and the dates are the story. A company total changes when a filing lands. A fund total changes daily. Concentration shifts slowly enough that a two-year-old percentage still holds. The one line likely to read the same in a year is the one about coins that have never been spent, and even that holds only until they are.