A leading blockchain data monitoring website says a long-dormant Bitcoin (BTC) address is suddenly awakening after nearly 11 years of inactivity.
According to BitInfoCharts, the address, which was last active in October 2012, recently transferred 412 Bitcoin valued at over $9.5 million at time of transfer.
BTC was priced at about $12.50 when the wallet was created on October 1, 2012. Worth $22,663 at time of writing, that BTC is currently in 181,204% profit.
The long-dormant address moved the Bitcoin to five different addresses – two addresses received approximately 177 BTC each, another two received 28.84 BTC each and one received 0.12 BTC. The combined fee for the five multimillion-dollar transactions amounted to $2.84.
Prior to the recent activity, the Bitcoin address had only recorded four transactions, all deposits, spanning from September 28th of 2012 to October 1st of the same year.
Over the course of its existence, though, the address has received trace amounts of Bitcoin. The tiny amounts of Bitcoin sent to the address could indicate dusting attacks have occurred. A dusting attack involves sending insignificant amounts of crypto to an address for various purposes, including trying to unmask the owner’s identity and stealing data to carry out phishing scams.
Speculation typically arises whenever a large dormant Bitcoin wallet becomes active as it raises the possibility that it is BTC owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the flagship crypto whose identity and whereabouts remain unknown, suddenly on the move.
Satoshi Nakamoto, whose last online sighting was in December of 2010 on the Bitcoin Talk online forum, is believed to own hundreds of thousands of BTC, according to blockchain researcher Sergio Lerner.
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