A previously inactive Bitcoin address that had 1,037.42 BTC—worth $30 million—came to life for the first time since 2012 under the cover of darkness early on Saturday, July 22, 2023, at precisely 12:51 a.m. UTC.
An old Bitcoin address resurfaces, moving a $30 million hoard
Eight so-called “sleeping” Bitcoin wallets that had lain dormant since 2012 started conducting transactions in July, breaking their almost 11-year slumber. This month, a total of about 1,216.92 BTC, which had been dormant for the previous ten years, was moved. Before the slumbering whale address moved a staggering 1,037.42 bitcoins on Saturday, the previous seven occurrences of the 2012 bitcoin movement involving inactive wallets totaled 179.50 BTC.
Coins worth 1,037.42 BTC were originally received by the recipient address on April 11, 2012, and have remained unaltered since. The whole wealth was only worth $5,021 at the time of purchase, when a single BTC was only worth $4.84. On July 22, at block height 799,701, the bundle of 1,037 BTC was sent, using this particular address as its destination. The owner then transferred the balance, which was a little decreased by 1,037.4189247 BTC, after injecting a tiny 0.00000546 BTC into the wallet.
The original transaction was detected by btcparser.com and carried out with little secrecy. The transaction received a poor score of 0 out of 100 from the privacy tool at Blockchair.com. When the transfer receives a privacy grade this low, it is deemed “critical,” which means there were three severe privacy problems. One of these issues is the finding of “matched addresses.” The “critical” rating suggests that the “identified issues are seriously compromising the parties’ right to privacy.”
Three transactions (1,2,3) from 2011 were sent together with the 1,216.92 BTC sent from inactive Bitcoin addresses going back to this month’s 2012. The first two of these 2011 transfers were carried out on July 20, and the third one on July 21. However, the three payments taken together only totaled a meager 25 BTC ($745K). Although July isn’t through yet, there haven’t been any indications of Bitcoin activity coming from addresses that haven’t been used since 2010. A total of 150 BTC ($4.4M) from three dormant Bitcoin addresses (1, 2, and 3) from 2010 were reawakened in June.