Bitcoin Miner Wallet Wakes Up After 15 Years of Sleep — Is It Satoshi Nakamoto?

Author: Ezra Reguerra Source: cointelegraph Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Early bitcoin miners received bitcoin as rewards shortly after the anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto launched the bitcoin blockchain, but recently some have found their wallets moving their bitcoins.

The bitcoin blockchain went live on January 3, 2009, when Nakamoto mined the genesis block and embedded a message quoting a headline from the British newspaper The Times. On January 9, 2009, Bitcoin’s creator explained the fundamentals of the protocol, including how to mine and send Bitcoin.

Given that BTC was mined just weeks after the Bitcoin blockchain launched, these wallets likely belonged to people who were present at the Bitcoin blockchain’s inception.

Value of Mined Bitcoins Goes from $0 to $15.9 Million

When the 250 Bitcoins in these wallets were first mined, it was virtually worthless. However, Bitcoin reached a price of $1 in 2011 through the defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox. That same year, Satoshi Nakamoto said goodbye to the crypto space and expressed a desire to move on to other projects.

On September 20, 2024, five miner wallets, each of which received 50 Bitcoins as a block reward in 2009, began to move their funds. Blockchain data shows that one of the wallets received a miner reward on January 29, 2009, three other wallets received a block reward on January 31, 2009, and the last wallet received a block reward on February 2, 2009.

Fast forward to 2024, those tokens are now worth about $15.9 million, with bitcoin trading at around $63,000 per coin, according to Coingecko.

Cryptocurrency community reacts to BTC transfer

As BTC's movements were exposed, community members began to speculate who was transferring these tokens. One user X said that someone might have "found an old hard drive" and saw these bitcoins like winning the lottery; another user speculated that it might be someone who had been "in a coma" for many years and woke up to find that he had become a millionaire.

Meanwhile, some users believe that these wallets may belong to Satoshi Nakamoto or American software developer Hal Finney. The world's first Bitcoin transaction took place on January 12, 2009, when the creator of Bitcoin sent 10 Bitcoins to Finney, one of Bitcoin's earliest adopters.