According to Whale Alert, a popular Twitter bot account that tracks on-chain transactions for multiple blockchains, some Bitcoins that were mined way back in 2019, were moved for the first time ever.
The Twitter-based blockchain monitor confirmed that the 40 BTC featured in the transaction were some of the earliest mined Bitcoin, which were mined in the first month of Bitcoin‘s existence, the time when the price of BTC was effectively zero.
The Bitcoin address that contained the coins, just moved its entire holdings to two separate Bitcoin wallets.
After that, the chain of transactions becomes more difficult to track, since the Bitcoins were again split into numerous pieces across a complex chain of outputs. This suggests that the owner wanted to conceal the destination of the funds.
After the tweet went viral, the price of BTC quickly dipped slightly.
40 #BTC (391,055 USD) transferred from possible #Satoshi owned wallet (dormant since 2009) to unknown wallet
ℹ️ The coins in this transaction were mined in the first month of Bitcoin's existence.
Tx: https://t.co/hxDJGGtfF0— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 20, 2020
This caused people to speculate that Satoshi Nakamoto has returned.
The community started to speculate that Satoshi’s “fortune” is spread between many different wallets, each containing a Coinbase transaction.
Very few people are known to have been mining using the original Bitcoin client, back in the days when Bitcoin was just an unknown term. Back then, the Bitcoin network was very small, and its pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto was just one out of a handful of active miners.
So besides Satoshi, people also speculated possible owner of these 40 Bitcoins include Hal Finney’s family, Martti Malmi, and some others.
In a less likely speculation, It is also theoretically possible that an external actor brute forced their way to obtain the private key to this wallet.
