Half a Million in Satoshi-era Bitcoin Just Moved to Bitfinex

Someone just moved 50 Satoshi-era Bitcoins, today worth $527,120, to the hot wallet of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. 

The 50 Bitcoin was mined back in May 2010, when Bitcoin was around one-and-a-half years old. The owner has held onto those coins ever since and waited until last night to move them to the cryptocurrency exchange. The move was picked up by BTCparser, a Telegram bot that trawls through Bitcoin transactions. 

If the owner of those 50 Bitcoins sold the entire stash on Bitfinex, they would have made half a million dollars of pure profit. Back in 2010, Bitcoin wasn’t worth anything and, due to its obscurity, was very cheap and easy to mine. 

The coins are known as “Satoshi-era” coins because they were mined around the time that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was still knocking around on Bitcoin forums and taking part in Bitcoin’s development. Nakamoto was last active on his regular haunt, Bitcointalk, on December 13, 2010. 

The last time someone moved Satoshi-era coins and it made waves was back in May, when someone moved 50 coins that were mined in February 2009. Much of that money went to Binance and Coinbase.

Some people think that since Bitcoin wasn’t very popular, that Bitcoins from this era were mined by Satoshi himself, or close associates. 

Others, however, disputed this, claiming that this is just old Bitcoin that gathered dust. 

Some link the transfers to price movements. This is good for Bitcoin, apparently, because it means that the crypto OG thinks that a bull run is on the move. In May, Bitcoin fell by 7% following the move. Since the coins moved last night, Bitcoin only fell by 2%, from 10,642 to 10,410. 

That slight dip, however, likely has much more to do with the market implications of the federal indictment against the Seychelles-based crypto BitMEX (and the ensuring Bitcoin dumps), or perhaps even Trump’s coronavirus confirmation.