An ancient Bitcoin address moved 64.59 BTC over the weekend after sitting on it for more than 13.5 years.
The unknown wallet first received the Bitcoin in February 2011, when the top crypto asset was priced at $0.998 per BTC – meaning the entire trove was worth only $64.46 at the time.
The crypto tracker BitInfoCharts, which clocked the transaction, notes that the same trove of Bitcoin was worth $4.142 million when the wallet moved it on Saturday – an increase of more than 6,426,000%.
The long-dormant wallet has received trace amounts of Bitcoin a handful of times over the last 13 years, though those transactions appear to be the result of dusting attacks.
Dusting attacks involve hackers and scammers sending minuscule amounts of cryptocurrency (dust) to a large number of personal wallets in an attempt to break the wallet holders’ privacy.
The scammers then try to trace the transactional activity of targeted wallets in order to identify the people or companies behind them.
The ancient wallet wasn’t the only long-dormant address to emerge from slumber recently: The crypto tracker Whale Alert notes a wallet moved 25 BTC worth $1.597 million on Sunday after lying low for 11 years. That same amount of Bitcoin was worth only $3,098.68 when the wallet acquired it in 2013.
A third wallet moved another 25 BTC on Monday after remaining completely dormant for 11.5 years. That 25 BTC was worth only $664 in February 2013.
Transactions from long-dormant wallets typically drum up media interest because they generate chatter speculating that the BTC could be owned by Bitcoin’s secretive and pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Blockchain analysts estimate Nakamoto mined one million BTC, starting with the first 50 BTC reward for the genesis block on January 3rd, 2009. Nakamoto’s involvement with the Bitcoin project ended in mid-2011.
The last known publicly-verifiable digital sighting of Satoshi was in December 2010 on the BitcoinTalk online forum when the pseudonymous creator talked about a Bitcoin software update designed to prevent denial-of-service attacks.
Generated Image: Midjourney