During all the confusion on November 11th related to crypto companies like Blockfi and FTX, there were 3,500 bitcoins that had been ‘sleeping’ in a wallet for 11 years moved for the first time.
The wallet they were in had been created on October 7th, 2011 and the value of the bitcoins was $60 million.
Bitcoins wake up
On Friday morning, a large number of what are referred to as ‘sleeping bitcoins’ woke up, after they had been left idle for over 11 years.
On October 7th, 2011, there were seven different BTC addresses that had been created for these 3,500 bitcoins and they were worth $60 million.
There has not been such a large string of sleeping bitcoins that are a decade old to have woken up in months.
Btcparser.com caught the movement of the 3,500 bitcoins. There were also corresponding bitcoinsv (BSV) and bitcoin cash (BCH) tokens associated with the 2011 bitcoins.
However, the owner who had the 7 different addresses did not move those. ‘1roet’ was the address that contained the first 500 bitcoins of a total of 3,500.
The block height was 762,676 when it was confirmed. A 500 BTC transfer was also made from ‘1eUNd’, another BTC address at the same block height.
The other BTC addresses that were used for making transfers of 500 bitcoins were ‘14x5C’, ‘1Es8m’, ‘1JziG’, and ‘1Hfpr’, and all of them were confirmed at the block height of 762,679.
More details
The owner then moved bitcoins from another address ‘17gTy’ and this transaction involving 500 bitcoins was confirmed when the block height reached 762,684.
Every single address that kept the stash of 3,500 bitcoins had been created on October 7th, 2011, which means 4,053 days ago.
The price of a single bitcoin had been $4 on the day the addresses were created and the price had dropped to $3.27 by the end of the month i.e. on October 31st, 2011.
This means that at the time the addresses were created, a total of 3,500 bitcoins were valued at just $14,000.
Further movements
There is no clue as to why the owner of the 3,500 bitcoins decided to spend the coins after 11 years when the price of bitcoin is at its lowest in 2 years.
But, just because the owner spent the bitcoins does not mean that they were sold. As a matter of fact, they are still in single addresses and were moved from P2PKH (pay-to-pubkey hash) to P2SH (pay-to-script-hash).
Other than the 3,500 bitcoins that moved last week, there was also a movement of 50 bitcoins from another wallet for the first time in more than a decade.
The wallet in question had been created on May 21st, 2010. This marks the first block subsidy from 2010 that has been spent since August this year.
It should be noted that the owner of these 50 bitcoins also did not spend any of the BSV and BCH tokens that were associated with the coins.
