A few days ago an old dormant bitcoin wallet from the Satoshi Nakamoto era has been awakened.
A dormant address containing 791 #BTC (26,147,621 USD) has just been activated after 9.1 years!https://t.co/Zc5D647ZMx
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 12, 2021
It is the address 157XG8DEk6FhcoHfNpZW6v6fuBd9184DsT, which received its first BTC on March 1, 2012.
Satoshi Nakamoto has been gone since 2011, but the first era of Bitcoin is commonly concluded with the first halving, which took place in November 2012. So this address belongs to the first era of Bitcoin.
On 12 July 2021, it was awakened by sending 740 BTC to a Segwit address. The previous sending had taken place on 28 May 2012.
In fact, over the past nine years, this address has continued to receive bitcoin, totalling more than 793 BTC (about $25 million at today’s prices), but in total it has made only three outgoing transactions, i.e. it has only used its private key three times.
Two of these were made in May 2012 and one in July 2021.
The awakening of the Bitcoin wallets of the “Satoshi-Era”
However, it is not the only address from Bitcoin’s early era that has gone live this year after a long time of inactivity.
In fact, already in February and March 2021 large amounts of bitcoin, which had been idle since the Nakamoto era, were moved by their owners, for a combined total of around 7,000 BTC, or over $200 million at current prices.
In the specific case of the July transaction, this was probably a technical move, i.e. from a traditional address to a Segwit address, perhaps in order to take advantage of the new features made possible by the new Segwit address specifications. However, only 740 of the 793 bitcoin stored at this address were moved in this way, as nearly 52 bitcoin are still stored there today.
Incidentally, the Segwit address to which the bitcoin were sent, the next day sent all the BTC received to two other addresses, which in turn sent them to other addresses.
It is worth noting that the 740 BTC sent a few days ago were received at this address on 31 May 2012, when they were worth around $3,800. When they were sent on 12 July 2021, they were worth over $25 million, or more than 6,500 times as much. In other words, in the time between when they were received and when they were sent, they were worth more than 650,000% of their initial dollar value.
The post Bitcoin: a wallet from the Satoshi Nakamoto era reawakened appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
