Satoshi-Era Bitcoin Whale Awakens, Moves $48M in Vintage BTC
Key Takeaways
Bitcoin saw 600 BTC from 2010 swept into 12 new wallets on Sept. 5, putting $47.84 million in rare Satoshi-era coins back in play.Arkham tagged the 12 original wallets as a miner, tying the stash to Bitcoin’s early CPU-mining days.The 600 BTC sweep clocked a 60/100 privacy score, while where the coins head next is anyone’s guess.
2010 Bitcoin Miner Suddenly Moves 600 BTC
Earlier on Saturday, Bitcoin.com News reported that September had logged 626.74 BTC so far. That figure didn’t stick around for long, though, as things took a significant turn at block height 965639. At that time, 12 legacy Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses moved a total of 600 BTC from wallets created long ago in 2010. The movement of the long-dormant bitcoin didn’t go unnoticed, with both btcparser.com and Whale Alert picking up on the transfers on their feeds.
Here’s the thing: 2010-era bitcoin spends are pretty rare when it comes to dormant coins suddenly moving. Seeing a whole string of them like this, on the other hand, is even more unusual. Out of the massive 6,427.59 vintage BTC shifted last month, only two of them were from wallets created in 2010. This specific batch was a miner as the transfers were all coinbase transactions mined between March 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Genuine Satoshi-Era: Mined Before Bitcoin Even Had a Market Price
The timeline is everything, as the 600 BTC was mined when the network’s difficulty was near 1, and people were mining with central processing units (CPUs), in contrast to today’s powerful ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) mining machines. The person was mining before bitcoin even had a market price and even before the first BTC transaction that occurred on May 22, 2010. Bitcoin started seeing a market value that summer between $0.0008 to $0.08 per coin.
These aren’t just ordinary 2010 BTC, they’re genuine Satoshi-era bitcoins. The first movement that occurred on Sept. 5 saw the bitcoin moved to an unflagged P2WPKH (Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash) wallet. This process took place across all 12 transfers to new P2WPKH addresses. Arkham Intelligence flags the original P2PK wallets as a “miner,” but the P2WPKH wallets from Sept. 5 are unknown.
After the second 50 BTC transfer at block height 965645, the next block included the following ten transfers or 500 BTC, all moved at block 965646. Blockchair’s privacy meter gives some of the transfers a decent score of 60 out of 100, or “moderate” in terms of privacy. The transfers were most definitely a sweep as the sender leveraged the “send everything” option to move the BTC to the newer P2WPKH wallet type.
A 2010 whale like this has not been seen since the last mega bitcoin whale appearance back in January of this year. Like the mega whale, this particular miner moved a solid batch of ten coinbase rewards in one block. Unlike the bigger 2010 behemoth, this person’s rewards weren’t spread across mixed dates, but came from consecutive days during the first week of March.
Still, whoever moved the 600 BTC was clearly one of Bitcoin’s earliest miners, making this stash special in its own right.
