$11 million of Bitcoin was transferred for the first time in the "Satoshi era", and the sleeping Bitcoin whale is waking up

More than $11 million worth of bitcoins that have been sitting idle in wallets since they were mined in 2010 were moved for the first time today.

According to a note posted on LinkedIn by professional cryptocurrency trader Kirill K, the 1,000 bitcoins from the Satoshi era (worth $11,425,000 today) were moved to another address.

The coins were mined in September 2010, less than two years after Bitcoin was created, and were worth less than 10 cents each. At the time, the cryptocurrency was virtually unknown and very cheap to mine — the coins were worth less than $100 in 2010.

If these coins were sold today, these mysterious “Satoshi-era” Bitcoin holders would undoubtedly be like lottery winners.

"Satoshi-era" Bitcoin refers to Bitcoin that was mined when Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was still communicating with the cryptocurrency world. Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since 2010, and his identity remains a mystery. Some people believe (perhaps incorrectly) that anyone moving Satoshi-era Bitcoin must be somehow connected to Satoshi.

But why would anyone want to move this Bitcoin now? Hans Hauge, head of quantitative strategy at cryptocurrency firm Ikigai Asset Management, wrote on LinkedIn that “these old miners must proceed with caution so as not to scare the market.”

But he added that with billions of bitcoins moving between wallets every day, $11 million worth of bitcoin can’t really “move the market in any direction.”

It is worth noting that this is the second time this month that a Satoshi-era bitcoin transfer has occurred. On October 3, someone transferred 50 Satoshi-era bitcoins (worth $527,120) to the hot wallet of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. The 50 bitcoins were mined in May 2010, when Bitcoin was already a year and a half old. Since then, the owner has been holding on to the coins and has waited until now to transfer them to a cryptocurrency exchange. The Telegram bot BTCparser tracked the bitcoin transaction.

Going back further, the last time someone transferred Bitcoin coins from the Satoshi era and caused a sensation was in May, when someone transferred 50 Bitcoins mined in February 2009, most of which went to Binance and Coinbase. That transfer caused a sensation in the market at the time, because these coins were mined earlier, in 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto was still active, so many people speculated that the transfer in May was made by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, but subsequent analysis denied this view.

According to Whale Alert on-chain analysis data, Bitcoin's anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto is expected to have mined a total of about 1,125,150 BTC. Researchers found that Nakamoto continued to use the same mining machine for mining until at least May 2010.