Ancient Bitcoin whale moves more early BTC mined in 2009

Ancient Bitcoin whale transfers 2009 BTC to Kraken: Arkham

An early Bitcoin whale, who mined Bitcoin during the network’s first two months back in 2009, has recently moved a large amount of BTC to the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Arkham Intelligence revealed that this Bitcoin was mined just one month after Bitcoin’s launch in February/March 2009. The mysterious whale transferred 10 Bitcoin, worth approximately $610,000, to Kraken in the most recent transfer on October 3rd.

Since September 24th, this whale has moved a total of $3.58 million in Bitcoin to Kraken. The wallet had been inactive for almost a decade before this recent activity. According to a previous post by Arkham, the wallet, identified as “3JZsd…QerUW,” was last active between 2011 and 2014, during which time the Bitcoin price surged from $474,000 to over $80 million. After that, the wallet remained untouched for nearly ten years.

Speculation Surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto

The timing of these transactions has sparked renewed speculation about the identity of Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. HBO is set to release a documentary titled “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” on October 8th, claiming to reveal Nakamoto’s identity.

The documentary suggests that Len Sassaman, a prominent cypherpunk and American computer scientist who passed away in 2011, may be the man behind Bitcoin. Sassaman was a well-known figure in the cryptography community and tragically took his own life just a couple of months after Nakamoto announced their departure from Bitcoin-related work. A tribute to Sassaman was even encoded into Bitcoin’s blockchain in Block 138,725.

However, some remain skeptical. Although Sassaman was critical of Bitcoin’s lack of privacy and fraud protection features in old social media posts, his late wife, Meredith Patterson, said in 2021 that, to her knowledge, Sassaman was not Satoshi Nakamoto.

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