Even More Satoshi-era Bitcoin Moves—What's Going on?

Another batch of 50 Bitcoin (BTC)—that has been lying dormant since 2010 and is worth around $570,000 today—was moved today, according to Blockchain.com.

The block explorer’s data shows that these 50 coins were first transferred to the address on November 9, 2010, as a coinbase transaction. This means the Bitcoin was a block reward received by a miner.

The wallet hadn’t received or sent any other transactions—until today. The only exception is 0.00000547 BTC that was sent to the address in late August as part of a spam-like transaction aimed at over 300 different wallets. Most likely, that was a so-called “dusting attack” primarily used by malicious actors to trace BTC movements.

Today, the coins have been transferred to three different addresses: two Bech32 (a SegWit format) and one P2SH, mainly used for multi-signature and non-native SegWit transactions.

The transfers were 30.16, 12.48 and 7.34 BTC, in size. Upon confirmation, the new wallets split the coins into 2–3 additional transactions each and sent them further down the line.

As Decrypt reported, increasingly more coins from the earliest days of Bitcoin are “waking up” lately. Since the start of October, two large caches—50 BTC ($570,000) and 1,000 BTC ($11.4 million)—were moved out of their deep slumber. Prior to that, another batch of 50 BTC was transferred in May.

Yet, not everyone thinks this is a big deal. Referring to today's movement of coins, Ingo Fiedler, co-founder of Blockchain Research Lab, told Decrypt, "Those coins were minted nearly two years after network launch. I would not consider them satoshi-era Bitcoin and do not see any significance in them moving."

It's not as though Satoshi is returning, right?