A Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallet dating back to 2010 woke up from dormancy after 14 years and sent 50 Bitcoin to the Binance crypto exchange.
The Satoshi era refers to the period between 2009 and 2011, during which Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was active on online forums.
Bitcoin miner turns $25 BTC to $3 million
According to data from onchain analytics firm Lookonchain, the Bitcoin (BTC) wallet is linked to a BTC miner who earned 50 BTC as mining rewards in July 2010. These are some of the earliest mined Bitcoin when the mining reward per block was 50 BTC. The current block reward is just 3.125 BTC.
The Bitcoin miner earned the 50 BTC block reward when BTC was trading at a price of around $0.05 and was barely a year old. At the time, the value of the BTC holdings was a mere $25.
The transaction history of the Bitcoin wallet indicates that the miner managed to mine a single block, a rare feat in today’s world where Bitcoin network hashrates are touching new all-time highs.
The movement of crypto to centralized exchanges is often seen as a bearish sign, as most of the time, the use of centralized exchanges is linked with selling assets.
Bitcoin is trading just above $61,000 at the time of writing, but it has seen several dips below the support level over the past few days. BTC is currently down 17% from its all-time high above $73,750.
Related: PayPal proposes ‘cryptoeconomic’ rewards for sustainable Bitcoin miners
Over the past year, several dormant Bitcoin wallets — many of which were from the Satoshi era — have awoken to either transfer their BTC to a new wallet or cash in and sell it on exchanges.
Bitcoin hashrate war
Nakamoto, the pseudo-anonymous creator behind Bitcoin, intended to allow the public to mine Bitcoin on their local home computers. However, as BTC prices reached new highs and provided significant returns with each halving cycle, Bitcoin mining expanded to include profitable, industrial-scale operations.
Numerous companies have established hundreds of state-of-the-art mining machines to maximize their Bitcoin mining operations in recent years. Several have also gone public.
The competition to mine Bitcoin has significantly increased the mining difficulty, so even mining machines worth thousands of dollars cannot independently guarantee the successful mining of a single block.
Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto