A long dormant Bitcoin wallet suddenly came online Wednesday; it is only inactive since 2011. The wallet did a quick reawakening of old Bitcoin and sent 150 BTC, or $10 million at today’s prices, which is the second major reawakening of old Bitcoin that’s happened this month.
The crypto world has been keenly watching this rare occurrence, with Bitcoin currently trading at an intraday peak of $68,388 per coin, mirroring its upward surge. It comes after another wallet moved 100 BTC, worth $6.8 million in February, following the same pattern as a similar event just two days before that.
Such old wallets rarely spring to life, and the pair of these back-to-back transfers into Bitcoin from 2011 wallets have piqued the interest of many. This has been an incredible month of October, as there were not one but two such occurrences within a short space.
Bitcoin Transfer Reveals Astonishing Gain Of 412,462.97%
The 150 BTC transfer was initiated from a wallet that was first created on June 27, 2011, on block height 865,917 on October 16. When Satoshi first set up the wallet, Bitcoin was trading at $16.45 per coin. It means the wallet had 150 BTC stored, which initially worth $2,467.50. Those same coins are currently worth a mindblowing $10.17 million, an astronomical gain of 412,462.97%.
Event data in Ethereum claims that this transaction was carried out from a legacy P2PKH (Pay to Public Key Hash) wallet, the main format of wallet address during Bitcoin’s early days. A total of 150 BTC were sent, 99.99 BTC went to another P2PKH wallet and the other 50 BTC moved to a P2SH (Pay to Script Hash) address.
Although the sums involved are large, Blockchair’s privacy tool rated the transfer very bad, giving it a privacy rating low of zero out of 100, suggesting that privacy was at risk. The Bitcoin that was transferred as of 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday is still in the destination wallets awaiting more movement.
Because the transfers have reawakened so many old Bitcoin addresses, there has been a great deal of speculation about what might have motivated the transfers and the true owners of the wallet. However, the fact that this 150 BTC transfer also doubles as one of the very few transactions in history that also took place just two days before is what makes this so attractive.
High Bitcoin Prices Activate Many Old Wallets in Circulation
On Monday, a different wallet from 2011 moved 100 BTC in a transaction similar to Wednesday’s, transferring it to a resource known in cryptocurrency circles as a ‘spigot address.’ Both times, the privacy scores were very low, and the patterns in the transfers indicate there was a deliberate strategy in place by the same person or group.
This theory was further supported by Arkham Intelligence, which found that round-value transfers from the 2011 wallets ended up at Bitstamp, a standardized cryptocurrency exchange. The same party appears to have moved both the 100 BTC on Monday and the 150 BTC on Wednesday, cumulatively sending 80 BTC equal to $5.42 million to Bitstamp.
With the high price of Bitcoin lately, many old wallets have been activated by early adopters, a rare occurrence. The gains are still huge, and some holders must be taking advantage, piquing interest in long-forgotten fortunes.
The more value that Bitcoin takes on, the more old wallets that may show up, generating intrigue for the light on and off the feds toward the volatile cryptocurrency. Speculation has already been whipped up by two such transfers in October, with more possibly on the way.
Conclusion
150 BTC were transferred from dormant Bitcoin wallets that were awake in 2011, which has caught the attention of the cryptocurrency crowd. This has earned these transactions significant profits and intriguing patterns that continue to have interest in the end of old wallets. In this month, the changing crypto landscape may have several more surprises waiting.
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