2023-06-13 16:07:51
A bitcoin whale has awoken from its 10-year slumber, moving tens of millions of dollars worth of BTC on the blockchain. The transactions immediately sparked the imagination of Twitter users, even though it was certainly necessary to move the assets a little for data protection and logistical reasons.
One of the features of blockchains is that people can follow every transaction, i.e. they can see which addresses refer to where, how they trade, which addresses are particularly active, or where unusual activity occurs. In addition to the fact that a lot of knowledge can be extracted from the so-called from on-chain data, it is sometimes possible to “movie” good ones, which sometimes prompts users to make wild guesses.
We witnessed such an unusual movement recently, when an address that had been inactive for 10 years moved its 1,400 bitcoins to another address. Maybe a retired CIA agent? An early BTC investor who got bullied by the SEC and gets out? An average internet user who found his lost BTC wallet? According to Ki Young Ju, CEO of the analytics company CryptoQuant, neither: the transaction might have served the purpose of transferring BTC to a pay-to-taproot (P2TR) address, and thus the owner would receive less attention in the future.
1.4K $BTC dormant for 10 years moved to a P2TR address, possibly for enhanced privacy. pic.twitter.com/8E93UQ295x
— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) June 9, 2023
P2TR is a transaction type made possible by the 2021 Taproot soft-fork update. Although not a particularly widespread technology to date, in theory it gives users increased privacy and flexibility, allowing them to spend their BTC in more complex output paths and scripts. In this case, this means that the owner of the wallet may have felt that he would rather make a big splash and move his BTC to a P2TR address than have his every move on the blockchain constantly monitored in the future.
In the recent period, several old bitcoin wallets have revived from apparent inactivity, although no clear trend emerges. In April the Whale Alert (the most popular whale tracking service), noticed a wallet that was last active on May 9, 2011, then suddenly sent 400 BTC (worth regarding $10.9 million) to another address following 12 years of inactivity.
A few days earlier, the BTCparser blockchain monitoring tool also recorded two Bitcoin addresses that started moving 100 BTC worth of BTC accumulated in 2009. The addresses were created in November 2009 and in both cases referred to unknown new addresses. These two most certainly related transactions can be traced back so far into BTC’s prehistory that it has even been suggested that the threads may lead directly to Satoshi.
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