Mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto might have mined at least 1 million BTC in the dawn of Bitcoin era. He is still missing, but sudden moves of the two oldest Bitcoin addresses might be a hint.
Blockchain data monitoring tool BTCparser says that the two Bitcoin addresses which were previously active in 2009 have moved a combined 100 Bitcoin within minutes of each other.
Each of them sent slightly over 50 BTC to separate unknown addresses.
100 BTC is just around $4,380,000 at the time of writing.
Not that much by the standards of the modern market. Whales sometimes transfer a lot more crypto.
And Satoshi had mined over 1 million BTC before he disappeared. That means the mysterious Bitcoin creator now owns somewhat near $43 billion.
But there is another hint that makes us all think of Satoshi when reading about those two wallets.
The older of the two addresses was created on November 22nd, 2009. The other one was created on November 23rd of 2009.
Both addresses initially possessed 50 Bitcoin each.
In recent years they have received trace amounts of BTC. Those might have been so-called dusting attacks.
Sometimes hackers are trying to uncover the identity of wallet holders by sending them small amounts of BTC.
And then they kind of wait for the response. Or any kind of activity.
Well, there was no response at all with those two wallets.
They remained still for more than 12 years.
Then something changed.
Could it be Satoshi playing with his Bitcoins?
Whenever early-mined BTC becomes active, it is big news.
Everybody pays attention to it due to the chance that the crypto could belong to the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Of course, there is no direct evidence that these addresses belong to Satoshi.
The last-known activity of the two addresses occurred less than eleven months after Bitcoin was first mined in January of 2009 and a little over 12 months before Satoshi disappeared.
Satoshi was last seen – of course, digitally – in December of 2010 on one of the online forums. He talked about a Bitcoin software update designed to prevent denial-of-service attacks.
That was the good old times when Bitcoin was trading at roughly around $0.001.
The flagship cryptocurrency is trading for $43,500 at time of writing.
It is estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto mined around 1-1.1 million Bitcoin, over $43 billion at current prices. Last
November when Bitcoin climbed over $69,000 Satoshi’s net worth could reach $73 billion.
So the Bitcoin creator was the 15th richest person in the world at some point.
Satoshi Nakamoto described his vision for a peer-to-peer digital currency in a white paper in 2008, before launching bitcoin a few months later in January 2009. After collaborating with other developers on the project for nearly two years, Nakamoto withdrew and has not been active online for over a decade.
Nobody knows who he was. Maybe Satoshi was female, that’s also an option.
There are no confirmations that his or her name was actually Satoshi Nakamoto. Neither has anyone ever confirmed this was a real person, not a group of crypto activists.
Sources: The Daily Hodl, The Independent