Whale Wallet Holding $2,142,474 in Bitcoin Abruptly Comes to Life After Lying Low for More Than 13 Years

An ancient Bitcoin wallet just moved more than $2.1 million worth of BTC after 13 years of dormancy.

The crypto tracker Whale Alert notes that the address moved 33.99 BTC to two separate wallets.

The move was the whale’s first legitimate transaction since June 18th, 2011, when that same trove of Bitcoin was worth only $584.

Transactions from long-dormant wallets typically drum up media interest because they generate chatter speculating that the BTC could be owned by Bitcoin’s secretive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Blockchain analysts estimate Nakamoto mined one million BTC, starting with the first 50 BTC reward for the genesis block on January 3rd, 2009. Nakamoto’s involvement with the Bitcoin project ended in mid-2011.

The last known publicly-verifiable digital sighting of Satoshi was in December 2010 on the BitcoinTalk online forum when the pseudonymous creator talked about a Bitcoin software update designed to prevent denial-of-service attacks.

The long-dormant wallet spotted by Whale Alert has received trace amounts of Bitcoin a handful of times over the last 13 years, though those transactions appear to be the result of dusting attacks.

Dusting attacks involve hackers and scammers sending minuscule amounts of a cryptocurrency (dust) to a large number of personal wallets in an attempt to break the wallet holders’ privacy.

The scammers then try to trace the transactional activity of targeted wallets in order to identify the people or companies behind them.

Generated Image: Midjourney