640 Bitcoins Just Moved From Dormant Satoshi Era Wallet

After nearly a decade, a wallet containing 791 bitcoin (BTC) has become active. The Satoshi era wallet drew the attention of Whale Alert by making a transaction worth over US$21 million.

A transaction was recently spotted by Whale Alert, an analytics system that reports on “large and interesting” transactions across various blockchains. The activity from a dormant wallet such as this, moving over US$21 million worth of bitcoin, isn’t something we see every day.

Whale Alert’s attention was caught by the 640 BTC transaction coming from a dormant Satoshi era wallet. Further investigation found that the wallet was used to store bitcoin mined back in 2011 and 2012. At that time bitcoin was trading at around US$5 and is currently around US$31,000, making a nice little retirement fund for someone today.

Could It Be One of Satoshi’s Wallets?

Some suspect that the wallet may be one of many owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the founder of the Bitcoin network, who was estimated to have mined 1,125,150 bitcoin up to block 54,316.

According to FXStreet, it’s likely that the wallet belongs to Satoshi since it was created around the same time as many others that belong to the mysterious creator. Some have tried to claim this title, among them Australian programmer Dr Craig Wright, who was recently part of a lawsuit regarding the Bitcoin whitepaper.

It’s nearly impossible to know who the real owner of the wallet is, especially if they don’t want to be known, and there’s a good chance we never will. Some Twitter users made jokes about the wallet owner who finally remembered the passwords after nine years.