Bitcoin Miner Wallet Wakes Up After 15 Years of Sleep — Is It Satoshi Nakamoto?

Early bitcoin miners received bitcoin as a reward shortly after anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto launched the bitcoin blockchain, but recently some have been spotted moving their coins from their wallets.

The Bitcoin blockchain went live on January 3, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block and embedded a message quoting a headline from the British newspaper The Times. On January 9, 2009, Bitcoin's creator explained the basic principles of the protocol, including how to mine and send Bitcoins.

Given that BTC was only mined a few weeks after the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, these wallets likely belonged to people who were present at the inception of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Value of mined Bitcoins rises from $0 to $15.9 million

When the 250 bitcoins in these wallets were first mined, they were worth almost nothing. However, in 2011, Bitcoin reached a price of $1 through the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox. That same year, Satoshi Nakamoto said goodbye to the crypto space and expressed his desire to move on to other projects.

On September 20, 2024, five miner wallets began to transfer their funds, each of which received 50 bitcoins as a block reward in 2009. Blockchain data shows that one of the wallets received the miner reward on January 29, 2009, the other three wallets received the block reward on January 31, 2009, and the last wallet received the block reward on February 2, 2009.

Fast forward to 2024, and those tokens are now worth about $15.9 million, with bitcoin trading at around $63,000 per coin, according to data from Coingecko.

Crypto community reacts to BTC transfer

As the movement of BTC was exposed, community members began to speculate who was moving these tokens. One user X said that someone might have "found an old hard drive" and saw these bitcoins like winning the lottery; another user speculated that someone might have been "in a coma" for many years and woke up to find that he had become a millionaire.

Meanwhile, some users believe that the wallets could belong to Satoshi Nakamoto or American software developer Hal Finney. The world's first Bitcoin transaction took place on January 12, 2009, when the creator of Bitcoin sent 10 Bitcoins to Finney, one of the earliest adopters of Bitcoin.