Three dormant Bitcoin whale wallets, untouched since 2017, came to life, transferring 6,500 BTC valued at nearly $230 million.
Three outdated Bitcoin whale wallets transferred 6,500 BTC the day before yesterday. When the penultimate great bullrun was at its peak, on November 5, 2017, these three locations had not been used. Since then, they have not done anything.
The BTC that was traded the day before yesterday was valued at almost $230 million.
With the Bitcoin wallets reactivated, who are the whales?
These whales‘ identities are unknown.
However, it is known that the first Bitcoins were sent in July 2011, at a time when the value of a BTC was only $13.5.
They might be miners because those Bitcoins originated from an address identified as being a part of the F2Pool mining pool.
Satoshi Nakamoto began mining bitcoins on January 3, 2009, then vanished from view in April 2011.
Therefore, these addresses shouldn’t belong to Nakamoto, in part because Satoshi, to the best of our knowledge, never moved any of the Bitcoin he mined.
It appears likely that these miners have made large profits in the past because they began in July 2011 and most likely ended in November 2017, when the price had increased to $7,800.
However, mining remained simple throughout 2011 and the premium per mined block remained at 50 BTC.
It only needed 130 blocks to earn 6,500 BTC, and since there was no competition and blocks were being mined every 10 minutes even back then (about 144 per day), mining 130 blocks in six years was not at all difficult.
The fact that they stopped in November 2017 is surprising, but at that time, they could sell the Bitcoin they had cashed in for a premium price and had accumulated a healthy nest egg. On the one hand, undermining had grown much more challenging due to intense competition.
It appears that they have a lot more in their portfolio because they transferred 6,500 the day before yesterday.
The mining pool F2Pool
One of the top Bitcoin mining pools worldwide is still F2Pool.
It ranked third in terms of blocks mined in the last seven days (13.4%), behind only Foundry USA Pool (27.3%) and the well-known AntPool (27.9%), which has traditionally dominated this list.
It cannot, however, have transmitted Bitcoin in 2011 as it looks to have been founded in 2013.
Though it is unlikely that they originated from the pool—which was established just two years ago—the three addresses that moved the 6,500 BTC the day before yesterday received their first BTC from addresses that seem to belong to F2Pool. This raises suspicions about the origins of the pool.
However, in 2011, there were no pools at all because there was little competition and it was feasible to mine alone. The competitiveness increased precisely when pools started to appear.
A group of Chinese miners banded together to create the Chinese pool F2Pool in an attempt to increase the likelihood of validating blocks.
At this point, it’s possible that the Chinese miners who started F2Pool are related to the whales who transferred 6,500 BTC the day before yesterday. However, the day before yesterday’s transfer, it was late morning in the US and evening in China.
And what about those Bitcoins?
Even the precise recipient of those Bitcoins remains unknown.
They might have simply been transferred to different, possibly more secure (SegWit) or more recent wallets, or they might have been transported to exchanges to be sold.
After that move, there aren’t any indications of significant Bitcoin sales on the cryptocurrency markets, and the price of the cryptocurrency started to rise from $34,500 to $35,600 immediately after.
It would seem strange that these bitcoins, which have been stored on private wallets for so long, would be transferred to exchanges and kept there.
It is therefore conceivable that they were not moved to exchanges because they don’t seem to have been sold.
The most likely theory is that the addresses that were inactive as of 2017 were legacy addresses, or old type addresses. This is because the addresses in question were legacy addresses.
