After nearly 11 years, a bitcoin wallet that has been dormant since Satoshi Nakamoto’s time has been reactivated.
The wallet, which holds 500 bitcoins, was created around the time that Nakamoto, bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, was last active on the internet.
Thanks to the increasing price of bitcoin, the cache’s worth have climbed dramatically from $8,400 to more than $47,385.48 (as of Coingecko chart, Saturday) since it was last used in 2010.
Satoshi era Bitcoins
The transaction was detected on December 29 by the cryptocurrency tracking website Whale Alert. On Wednesday, a transfer of 165.33 BTC ($7.78 million) was sent from the wallet to an unknown address, according to online records.
While this wallet move may be deemed little in whale terms, similar transactions in the past sparked fears of a price drop.
In recent years, dormant wallets containing large amounts of bitcoin have intermittently awoken, fueling speculation that Nakamoto is cashing out.
Coins created before the enigmatic bitcoin creator vanished from the public eye on Dec. 12, 2010, are of particular interest to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Bitcoins from the Satoshi Era are now known as Satoshi Era Bitcoins.
The curiosity stems from a hypothesis, and possibly an assumption, that wallets made during this time period belong to Nakamoto or close associates.
Nakamoto owns nearly a million bitcoins?
Nakamoto is believed to own a total of 1,125,150 BTC, which is worth around $53.44 billion at today’s rates.
As per data from BitInfoCharts, hundreds of bitcoin wallet addresses have been dormant throughout the last decade.
According to the survey, the most valuable inactive wallet contains about 80,000 BTC, which is currently priced at more than $3.7 billion.
In total, $9.8 billion in bitcoin is locked up in the top five wallets that haven’t been unlocked in almost a decade.
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