Some boxes were never closed

Updated September 2026

The closed-box story is about hashed addresses. A slice of the supply never used that design. The public key was the locking script. Those coins have been open since the block that created them.

Pay-to-pubkey

P2PK is older than the 1-addresses most people recognize. The output says, in effect: anyone who can sign for this exact public key may spend. There is no HASH160 step. There is nothing to keep shut until a spend. The key is in the UTXO set in the clear.

Modern wallets do not hand you a P2PK string on the receive screen. You will see a hashed address or Taproot. This page exists because the old outputs still hold coins, and the quantum conversation keeps pointing at them.

Early mining

A large share of 2009 and 2010 block rewards used P2PK. That includes the coins usually labelled Satoshi-era: dormant, never moved, key already public. They are not waiting for a first spend to become visible. They have been visible for the life of the chain. What happens to Satoshi's coins is the longer version of that argument, including the contested question of whether anyone should ever freeze them.

Reused legacy addresses are a different already-open pile. Those started closed and were opened by ordinary spends. Same public record, different history. See address reuse.

What the checker cannot see

The checker classifies 1, 3, bc1q, and bc1p strings. Raw P2PK outputs are not those strings. If you are looking at an early coinbase in a block explorer, do not expect this site's paste box to label it. Treat P2PK as open by construction.

None of this is a timer. Open since 2010 is still open-and-safe against every machine that exists. The fact is useful because it tells you which coins any future migration has to special-case, not because anyone should move them in a hurry.