Bitcoin: a wallet from the era of Satoshi Nakamoto has been awakened

Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain on January 3, 2009: today a wallet created at the end of January of that same year has awakened. 

This is a wallet that on January 29, 2009, received 50 BTC by mining a block. 

Bitcoin in the era of Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto not only mined the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, but at the time was actually the only person in the world mining Bitcoin. 

Although there is no certainty about which blocks were all mined by him, there is a famous 2013 study that identified many of them with a good degree of reasonableness.

The first block mined by someone else was mined by Hal Finney between January 10 and 11, that is, a week after the first one.

Therefore, on January 29, 2009, there was certainly no longer only Satoshi mining BTC. 

Nakamoto then distanced himself from the Bitcoin project at the end of 2010, and in April 2011 he sent the last known message saying that he had moved on to other things. Since then, he has never been heard from again.

The Bitcoin wallet from the Satoshi Nakamoto era awakens

It is not known who owns the wallet from the Satoshi Nakamoto era that woke up today.

However, it could plausibly not be a wallet belonging to Nakamoto himself, given that it has been more than ten years since Satoshi has done absolutely nothing. 

The hypothesis circulating is that he may have passed away several years ago, perhaps even before Bitcoin became successful. 

The address that mined block number 2,247 on January 29, 2009 is 1C4rE41Kox3jZbdJT9yatyh4H2fMxP8qmD.

At that address, there appear to be only 4 transactions. 

The first is precisely the one related to the collection of the 50 BTC prize for mining block 2,247. 

The second and third are incoming microtransactions from October and December 2020, while the fourth is yesterday’s sending of 50 BTC to a SegWit address. 

Most likely it is a simple transfer of funds from an old legacy wallet to a new SegWit address. 

Note that those 50 BTC today are worth more than 3 million dollars, while at the time they were mined they were worth zero. 

The value of Bitcoin in 2009 and the wallets besides those of Satoshi Nakamoto

When Bitcoin was created, there was no platform to exchange it for dollars. 

The first known crypto exchange began operating shortly after mid-2010, so for more than a year and a half, those who earned Bitcoin could not easily exchange them for fiat currency. 

It was necessary to find someone willing to buy them, and it was necessary to look for them directly and personally. Furthermore, in the event that someone willing to buy them was found, the selling price would have been negligible. 

For example, it is known that the first purchase ever made with payment in BTC was the two pizzas bought by Laszlo Hanyecz on May 22, 2010, when there was still no crypto exchange. 

Since he paid for two pizzas worth $41 with 10,000 BTC, the market value of Bitcoin at that moment was effectively $0.0041. 

Instead, the first known exchange transaction took place on July 14, also in 2010, at a price of 0.058$. 

Therefore, it can be said that Hanyecz paid absolutely too much for those two pizzas, but it should be remembered that at the time he was mining BTC and therefore already had many more in his wallet. 

In 2009, however, there are no known payments or exchanges in dollars, therefore it is absolutely impossible to calculate the market value of Bitcoin. 

In fact, since there was no way to change or spend them commonly, their market value was effectively zero.

Despite this, the address 1C4rE41Kox3jZbdJT9yatyh4H2fMxP8qmD has held the 50 BTC mined on January 29, 2009, until today, and perhaps today it has simply moved them to a more modern wallet. 

The impact of the news on the price of BTC

The news of the awakenings of the wallets from the Satoshi era now practically never have any real impact on the markets. 

Because they have an effect on the price of Bitcoin (negatively), it would be necessary either for one of the addresses believed to belong directly to Satoshi Nakamoto to wake up, or for many of them to wake up by transferring significant amounts to the exchanges.

It is necessary to remember that the 2013 study on the blocks mined by Satoshi revealed that Nakamoto could hold more than a million BTC in his thousands of addresses, enough to have the power to sink the market value of Bitcoin if he decided to sell many of them quickly. 

Fortunately, this has never happened, because Satoshi does not appear to have ever moved any of the BTC that have been traced back to him, and since it is believed that he is deceased, it seems that the risk of such an event is virtually nil. 

As long as Satoshi remains unknown and inactive, Bitcoin will not have problems from this point of view.