People
Handles, labeled
This page lists public handles that appear in the puzzle record, with the label each one carries. None of them is a legal identity: a handle is a forum account, and a spend proves that someone controlled a key, not who they are. Four of the five entries rest on forum statements or community reports. Only the #135 scalar match is cryptographically verified, and even that verification attaches to the mathematical objects — key, compressed public key, address — never to the person named next to them. Source links below let you read the original posts; a link is a citation, not proof of identity.
What a label can and cannot carry
A transaction proves that its signer controlled a key at signing time. It does not prove a forum account, a search method, a country, or an owner. A forum post proves that an account posted. Cryptographic consistency proves that quoted material belongs to an address. Each handle below is therefore given one label — Forum statement, Community report, Self-attribution or Cryptographically verified — and the page stops there. Two rules follow. First, repeated attribution is not corroboration: community records often copy one another, so ten pages repeating the same claim are still one claim. Second, an unlabeled name is not promoted to a fact by appearing in a screenshot, a dump or a news post.
The five handles
Listed in the order they enter the record, not by importance or by nominal reward. No ranking, no scoreboard: no aggregate reward figure is assigned to any name.
saatoshi_rising — authorship claim (Forum statement)
BitcoinTalk account. On 27 April 2017 posted “I am the creator” and described consecutive keys from a deterministic wallet, masked with leading 000…0001 to set difficulty, as a crude measuring instrument of the community's cracking power. That is a forum statement, not a cryptographic proof of identity, and no signature or on-chain binding has been produced. The account is unknown as a legal person. The username resemblance to Satoshi Nakamoto is a coincidence of letters until someone shows evidence; the argument is treated on /theories/ as speculation. Quotation detail: the source renders the mask as 000…0001 with an ellipsis character, not as the literal string 000...0001.
Bulista — public discovery (Community report)
Named in community records of BitcoinTalk thread #1306983 (December 2015) as running a brute-force bot that found the already-spent low puzzles. Not independently verified here. Not a finder of a still-funded address in this catalog: the low puzzles were already empty by the time the thread organised. The handle is a report subject, not an identity, and the per-post wording was not extracted for this page.
amaclin — earlier note (Community report)
Named in the same thread's community chronology as having noted the 2015 transaction before the public write-up. Forum chronology, not a signed statement on this site, and not a claim to have found or funded anything. No per-post permalink was captured for this page; the thread links are the current citation of record.
RetiredCoder — kangaroo solves, #135 self-attributed (Self-attribution)
Community records credit #120 (spent 2023-02-27), #125 (2023-07-09) and #130 (2024-09-23); no primary self-attribution for those three was found, and their spend transactions carry no message. A public statement after #135 (2026-07-28) claims that solve, with a work estimate of five months on 200 GPUs and a stated intention to retire from #140. That work estimate is a statement, not a measurement: nothing in the chain records hardware, duration or method, and it was not body-verified in this atlas's spot-check — repeated on Reddit and in public dumps, it remains secondary. The private key of #135 matches the catalog compressed public key and address; the name attached to the solve is still only a public statement, and the key match is independent of the name. RCKangaroo is the published kangaroo engine associated with this handle, cited here as a public repository rather than as an endorsement of any workload claim.
Kowala — address-only solves, reported (Community report)
#67 (spent 2025-02-21) and #68 (spent 2025-04-06) are attributed to Kowala in community reports, with a private-channel and private-submission account: a private submission would explain how a key arrives without a public claim, but it also means no public evidence explains it. This atlas does not treat the attribution as cryptographic proof. The keys are in the catalog because they match the addresses, and an address-only target — no published public key — is solved by the harder exhaustive route, which the reports do not document.
Attribution limits
What would move a name from labelled statement to verified identity: a signature made with the funding key, a message whose hash is committed on-chain, or independently checkable legal documentation. None exists for any handle here. Practical consequences: do not contact a handle as if it were a person, do not read a solve count as a reputation, and do not treat a matching scalar as consent to be named. Public dumps sometimes print a single name across many solves, mixing leak dates with spend dates; where a dump and an on-chain observation disagree, the transaction wins and the dump is cited as a cross-check only.
Open gaps on this page
Bulista's and amaclin's posts were not read per-message, so their exact wording and dates stay unverified and no permalink is offered. A direct permalink to the saatoshi_rising post exists and is linked above; fetching it returned the surrounding thread page rather than an isolated post view, so the quote is anchored to the thread and the message anchor. No handle is tied to the 2015 funding keys. The work estimates and submission channels behind #66, #67, #68 and #135 remain statements. These are gaps, not omissions: filling them needs a primary read, not a longer paragraph.