An ancient BTC address that hasn't traded in over a decade was brought back to life on Wednesday and the profits are worth a look.
Address 1MMXRA held 412.12 BTC in four transactions since October 1, 2012, with a total value of just $8 at the time. No coins were moved in or out of the wallet until Feb. 8, when only one $23,000 coin was emptied.
At today's prices, the transferred coins are worth $9.6 million, a 120,000,000% profit.
While a large number of Bitcoin transactions occur every day, it is not common for old coins to see the light of day. As noted by on-chain analytics provider Glassnode, dormant coins become “increasingly less likely to be spendable” after the 155-day holding period and are therefore considered a less liquid part of the supply.
When older coins are used more frequently, it "may indicate a change in belief in holding an asset" often triggered by periods of market volatility. However, Glassnode’s newsletter last month revealed that while short-term holders have seized the opportunity to profit from the asset’s recent rise, the number of tokens held in the long-term is growing at a rate of 100,000 per month.
In March 2022, an older wallet holding 489 bitcoins dumped assets dating back to October 2010, when the bitcoin price was just $0.19. That was months before Bitcoin's anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, left the project. Satoshi Nakamoto is suspected of holding 5% of Bitcoin’s entire supply due to mining in the early days of the network, but many don’t believe the coins will ever move again.
Bitcoin developer @LukeDashJr stated that technically no one knows if Satoshi Nakamoto ever had access to these coins, or if he still interacts with them today. However, if he had to guess, there was no obvious movement, which probably meant that the creator was dead. "If he's not dead, why would he allow crooks to pretend he's unchallenged (signatures with PGP or Bitcoin to prove they're crooks is trivial to him)?" he said via Twitter Decrypt. "Would he really be hoarding his collection when development lacked funding?"
"If not dead, at least he must have lost the key," he concluded.
