A transaction of BTC that was mined only a month after the cryptocurrency’s creation has many wondering about whether the founder has returned.
A portion of Bitcoin that was mined way back in 2009 has just been moved, triggering speculations that the elusive founder may have returned.
The original wallet was holding coins that were mined from block #3654, which was just one month after Bitcoin was created.
A Twitter-based blockchain monitor @whale_alert detected the shift. Out of the 50 BTC that was mined from the block, 40 that were featured in the transaction were mined in the first month of Bitcoin’s existence.
“40 BTC (391,055 USD) transferred from possible Satoshi owned wallet (dormant since 2009) to unknown wallet.” the tweet read.
The remaining 10 BTC was transferred to a separate digital wallet.
A tweet by crypto-user Antoine Le Calvez pointed out that this is the first time since August of 2017 that someone spent coins from early 2009.
Not much is known about Satoshi Nakamoto, the name behind the development of Bitcoin. It was Nakamoto who authored the Bitcoin white paper, and who created and deployed the cryptocurrency’s original reference implementation. Additionally, he also developed the first blockchain database in line with Bitcoin’s implementation and recorded the first-ever Bitcoin transaction.
It is not known if this is the real name or a pseudonym of a person, or whether Nakamoto is a even a single individual. Some believe that the name could have been shared by a group of people who were working on Bitcoin at the time.
While speculations are running high, it may be impossible to prove that Nakamoto was really behind this transaction. There is no direct proof linking the transfer of funds to the mysterious founder.
The best guess is that one of the earliest users of Bitcoin has decided to move and use the funds they kept dormant for so long. Assuming this user had not accessed Bitcoin since then, he could be sitting on $500,000 worth of BTC.
However, it is also worth noting that the Bitcoin community was small at the time, with only three individuals handling the cryptocurrency: Hal Finney, Martti Malmi and Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
Other speculations revolve around whether the movement of these funds were forced.