Bitcoin moves 600 BTC after 16 years of dormancy

Somewhere out there, a miner (or miners) who earned Bitcoin when it was essentially worthless just moved 600 BTC that had been collecting digital dust since around 2010. At current prices, that stash is worth tens of millions of dollars. Whale Alert, the blockchain tracking service, identified the movement across 12 separate mining block rewards, each containing the original 50 BTC coinbase reward from Bitcoin’s earliest days. The natural first question: is this Satoshi? The answer, according to Whale Alert’s analysis, is no. None of the 12 blocks show any connection to the patterns associated with Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. Ghost coins come back to life Each of the 12 blocks dates back to roughly 2010, when Bitcoin mining could be done on a regular laptop and the price hovered somewhere between fractions of a penny and a few dollars. The 50 BTC reward per block was standard at the time, before Bitcoin’s first halving in 2012 cut that reward in half. The blocks appear to belong to anonymous individual miners rather than any known entity. What makes this movement notable is the sheer duration of dormancy. Sixteen years of inactivity followed by a sudden transfer raises eyebrows...