At the time the coins were mined, the price of Bitcoin was — wait for this — $0.08.
Two dormant Bitcoin wallets have woken up today — with more than 100 BTC on the move. It’s caused a stir in the crypto world, not least because the account had previously been left untouched for over a decade.
Back in June 2010, both addresses had received a reward of 50 BTC after mining blocks. Activity remained almost non-existent for several years… except for two micro-transactions that entered the wallet for the princely sum of 0.00000547 BTC in the last six months.
It’s thought that the coins that were moved belonged to the same owner, as they combined two mining address outputs. As the price of Bitcoin is trading around the $51,000 mark today, the coins are now worth a cool $5.1 million — a stark contrast to the price of $0.08 seen when they were mined.
About half of the coins are thought to have landed in the German exchange Bitcoin.de, with the other half sitting in a newly created address.
Lost Bitcoin Could Impact the Market
Since the creation of Bitcoin back in 2008, it’s believed that roughly three to four million BTC, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is gone forever — potentially due to lost hard drives or misplacement of private keys. Combined with the fact that many investors use crypto to park their wealth, it’s unusual to see such large transactions, especially from a 2010 wallet.
When large amounts of Bitcoin are moved, a flurry of excitement occurs as suspicions get raised that it could be Satoshi Nakamoto or those connected with him since Bitcoin’s conception.
One keen crypto enthusiast, Antoine Le Calvez, spotted the move — noting in a tweet that:
“It's very rare to see pre-GPU era bitcoins move, it only happened dozens of times in the past few years.”
As the coins of early crypto adopters are now so valuable, they could make giant waves in the Bitcoin market.
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