Dormant Bitcoin miner wallets awaken after 15 years
Wallets belonging to early Bitcoin miners, who earned coins as rewards shortly after the blockchain was launched by its pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, have recently shown activity by moving their BTC.
On September 20, five miner wallets, each holding 50 Bitcoin (BTC) as block rewards from 2009, transferred their funds. Blockchain records reveal that one wallet earned its reward on January 29, 2009, while three others did so on January 31, 2009. The final wallet received its block reward on February 2, 2009. Bitcoin's blockchain became operational on January 3, 2009, when Nakamoto mined the genesis block, embedding a headline from the UK’s The Times newspaper. Nakamoto later provided an explanation of the protocol’s basics on January 9, 2009, detailing how to mine and send coins.
Given these BTC were mined just weeks after Bitcoin's launch, it’s likely the wallets belong to individuals involved from the very beginning.
Mined Bitcoin's Value Grows from $0 to $15.9 Million
When these 250 BTC were first mined, they held little to no value. Bitcoin first reached $1 in 2011 on the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange. Later that year, Nakamoto exited the crypto space, expressing a desire to move on to other projects. Fast forward to 2024, and the same tokens are now worth approximately $15.9 million, with Bitcoin currently trading around $63,000 per coin, according to CoinGecko.
Reactions from the Crypto Community
As these BTC transactions were noticed, members of the crypto community began speculating about the identity of the wallet owners. One user on X (formerly Twitter) joked that someone might have “found their old hard drive” and hit the jackpot, while another speculated it could be someone who had been “in a coma” and woke up as a millionaire. Others theorized the wallets could belong to Nakamoto or to Hal Finney, an early Bitcoin adopter who received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction of 10 BTC from Nakamoto on January 12, 2009.
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