Wallets belonging to early Bitcoin miners who received coins as rewards shortly after the blockchain’s launch by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, have recently been observed moving their BTC.
On Sept. 20, five miner wallets that received 50 Bitcoin (BTC) each as block rewards in 2009 started to move their funds. Blockchain data shows that one wallet received the mining reward on Jan. 29, 2009, while three received block rewards on Jan. 31, 2009. The last wallet received a block reward on Feb. 2, 2009.
One of the Bitcoin wallets seen moving mined BTC. Source: Blockchain.com
The Bitcoin blockchain went live on Jan. 3, 2009, when Nakamoto mined the genesis block and embedded a message referencing a headline published by The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom. On Jan. 9, 2009, the Bitcoin creator explained the protocol’s basics, including how to mine and send coins.
Given the BTC was mined only weeks after the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, the wallets likely belonged to people present at its inception.
Mined Bitcoin goes from $0 to $15.9 million
When the 250 BTC in the wallets was first mined, it wasn’t worth much, if anything. However, Bitcoin reached $1 in 2011 on the now-defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox, and months later, Nakamoto bid farewell to the crypto space and expressed a desire to move on to other projects.
Bitcoin’s price movements in the last seven days. Source: CoinGecko
Fast forward to 2024, the tokens are now worth about $15.9 million, with BTC trading at roughly $63,000 per token, according to CoinGecko.
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Crypto community reacts to BTC movements
As the BTC movements were flagged, community members speculated who was moving the tokens. One X user said that someone could have “found their old hard drive” and hit the lottery after seeing the Bitcoin, while another user suggested that it could be someone who was in a “coma” and woke up as a millionaire.
Source: kaymyg
Meanwhile, some users think the wallets may belong to Nakamoto or the American software developer Hal Finney. The world’s first Bitcoin transaction took place on Jan. 12, 2009, when the creator of Bitcoin sent 10 BTC to Finney, one of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin.
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