50 Bitcoins from Satoshi-Era Moved for the First Time Since 2009

May 21, 2020 – 40 BTC (worth US$391,055 at the time) transferred from a dormant wallet to an unknown wallet. These coins were some of the first bitcoins to ever get mined. The transaction marked the first time these bitcoins were moved since 2009.

As per blockchain.com, the Bitcoin address had 50 BTC received in 2009, just weeks after Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. 40BTC have been moved to a new address while 10BTC have been transferred to a multisig address.

👤👤👤 40 #BTC (391,055 USD) transferred from possible #Satoshi owned wallet (dormant since 2009) to unknown wallet

ℹ️ The coins in this transaction were mined in the first month of Bitcoin's existence.

Tx: https://t.co/hxDJGGtfF0

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 20, 2020

Naturally, Crypto Twitter got excited. Some even thought it was Satoshi himself who moved these coins. If the owner of these coins isn’t Satoshi, could it be some of the Bitcoiners who were there in the beginning? Hal Finney received the first-ever Bitcoins from Satoshi. Martti Malmi was the first developer to code alongside Satoshi.

Mr. Finney’s family denied it was his coins (He passed away in 2014).  Mr. Malmi also said it was not him:

Nope. Bitcoin was announced on the cryptography mailing list in January 2009 and many people could have tested it. I found Bitcoin around April. @Cointelegraph pic.twitter.com/2he7HhSmhT

— Martti Malmi (@marttimalmi) May 20, 2020

Adam Back, cryptographer and founder of Blockstream said if Satoshi was selling coins, he would “sell his most recently mined, and so most anonymous first”:

people need to chill. if Satoshi was selling coins, surely he would sell his most recently mined, and so most anonymous first. plus this patoshi research is pretty much guessing, probably he has less coins than people think, and you'll be doxing random early miners wrongly next.

— Adam Back (@adam3us) May 20, 2020

Maybe it’s not really Satoshi. A research in 2019 concluded that there is a pattern to the blocks mined by Satoshi himself. Using that, they concluded these 50 BTC and this dormant wallet address was not Satoshi’s.

Mr. Back, however, said that this research “is pretty much guessing” (see tweet above).

There’s also the issue of Craig Wright.

Craig Wright had publicly claimed multiple times that he’s Bitcoin’s inventor. He’s currently involved in a legal battle over the early Bitcoins he mined together with the late Ira Kleiman. In the court, he needed to prove that he is Satoshi. But he could not remember all his addresses. So Mr. Wright, through the help of another person, produced a list of Bitcoin addresses that is said to be his. This other person listed thousands of addresses, which included the address in question in this article.

Most like someone in Ira Kleiman's camp from their Satoshi blocks….meaning their side has not being exactly accurate in court. It was NOT Satoshi, I just spoke with him and Craig confirmed not him.

— Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) May 20, 2020

TLDR: 50 BTC from Satoshi-era bitcoins moved for the first time since 2009. Everyone started wondering again who is Satoshi Nakamoto.

By the way, here’s the market reaction:

To which Binance’s CZ said:

Feds print a few trillion, nothing happens.

Someone (most likely NOT Satoshi) moves 40 early BTC, market panics.

😂

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) May 20, 2020

This article is published on BitPinas: 50 Bitcoins from Satoshi-Era Moved for the First Time Since 2009