A total of 1,050 bitcoin, worth an estimates $28.3 million, have moved after being dormant for a decade. The coins came from previously unspent block rewards from a miner that was active in the so-called Satoshi era.
The Satoshi era refers to the period in which the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was active in the cryptocurrency community up until the end of 2010, when he or she mysteriously disappeared.
The miner that moved these Satoshi era coins moved funds earned through 21 block rewards. At the time, whenever a miner found a block the coinbase reward was 50 BTC, while nowadays after numerous bitcoin halvings the reward is 6.25 BTC. While back then BTC was essentially worthless, one coin is now trading at $27,000.
The Satoshi era coin movements were first spotted by Bitcoin.com with the help of on-chain parser Btcparser. The funds were initially consolidated into an address, before being split across different addresses holding 10 BTC each, and subsequently spread across the blockchain.
The mysterious miner also spent the 1,50 BCH airdropped to the addresses at the time of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, but did not spend the corresponding Bitcoin SV from the time of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork that created BSV.
It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time Satoshi era coins move this year. As CryptoGlobe reported, $30 million worth of BTC dormant for a decade moved last month, after an additional 1,050 BTC from that era moved in October.
While it’s unclear where most of the funds were moved to, 9.99 BTC, were donated to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), while another 9.,99 went to the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
It’s often estimated that coins that have been inactive for so long may have been lost forever, as users may have lost the private keys to addresses controlling them. These movements appear to show that some are just holding onto their coins.
It’s unclear how many coins are being held and how many were lost. Earlier this month on-chain analytics firm Glassnode revealed that 1.78 million BTC never left their miner address and that 94% of those funds have been dormant for a decade.
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