$BTC
⚖️ A court battle over 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses just surfaced in New York — and nobody is talking about it
Attorney Ian R. Cohen filed a legal rebuttal in New York County Supreme Court defending a court-ordered stay in a case formally listed as ABC Company et al v. John Does, Index No. 153119/2026. The plaintiffs — Noah Doe and two unnamed Wyoming LLCs — are seeking legal title over 39,069 Bitcoin addresses under New York's lost-property framework. At current prices, that claim covers somewhere north of $2.4 billion in $BTC if the addresses have meaningful balances. The lost-property framework allows someone to claim ownership of assets whose original owner cannot be located or proven. Applied to Bitcoin, this creates a genuinely novel legal question: can a court assign ownership of dormant wallets to a third party, and what does that mean for the immutability and censorship-resistance that $BTC is supposed to guarantee by design?